The following editorial is an edited and updated version of a column that first appeared in the April 1, 2005 print edition of The Citizen:
Newspaper jokes on April Fool's Day seem to have fallen out of fashion, which is a little sad.
There have been some priceless gags pulled over the years but it's a dangerous thing for a business that prides itself on sober accuracy to mess with the minds of its customers, even if it's only one story on one day each year.
My favourite April Fool's prank of all time ran on the front page of the Penticton Herald back in 1981. A front-page story dated April 1 proclaimed that Penticton had been chosen as one of the test sites in Canada for the proposed switch to metric time.
In the early 1980s, most Canadians were still grumbling about the change from miles and gallons to kilometres and litres. Well, when this story broke about moving to metric time, that was the last straw.
Naturally, the story played it straight, stressing how the city would receive $100,000 in seed funding to convert clocks in public buildings. In a few weeks, everyone in Penticton would receive their free metric-time watch. Several paragraphs were devoted to explaining how metric time worked, with 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per minute. Pamphlets would be handed out at the airport and the tourism information centre. The MP was in on the joke, praising the Liberal government for picking Penticton for such an important initiative.
Turned out the joke was on him.
Irate residents flooded his office and the newspaper with hundreds of calls. It was bad enough the Liberals were messing with measuring distance and quantity but time itself?
The uproar was so loud the newspaper had to run a story the next day saying it was an April Fool's joke. Of course it was entirely unnecessary because suddenly no one would admit to having believed the story in the first place.
The Kelowna Daily Courier once convinced local sports fans that the Kelowna secondary school's senior boys basketball team would be challenging for a provincial championship, thanks to the dominant play of their seven-foot Croation centre, Lirpa Loof (that's April Fool spelled backwards, if you made it to the end of the story).
The Kelowna Capital News informed its readers on April 1, 1998, that the discovery of the breeding grounds of a rare gopher species on the Kelowna waterfront was delaying construction of the new arena.
My former colleague Kyle told me a great April Fool's yarn from his days at the now-defunct Kamloops Sentinel. The daily tabloid featured a Page 3 Girl, much like the Sun newspapers in Edmonton and Calgary. On one memorable April 1, a front-page headline proclaimed Our Girl goes topless, see page 37!
It was a 36-page newspaper.
Here's a few April Fool's headlines I would like to see in The Citizen some day:
Gretzky to receive honourary doctorate at UNBC convocation in May.
City council approves tearing down Coliseum to build $50-million performing arts centre; Spruce Kings to share Multiplex with Cougars.
Spielberg picks Prince George to film next installment of Indiana Jones series.
Unfortunately, that day will have to wait until April Fool's is back in vogue to spring from the front page onto unsuspecting readers.
Consider yourself warned.
