In 1978 while I was a teaching assistant in the English Department at California State University, Sacramento, a group of us decided to condition our seminar instructor. We used rapt attention as a reward when he stood in the most remote and darkest corner of the classroom to lecture. It wasn’t long before he headed to that spot to begin each class…. I know that our idea was not original, but I’ve forgotten where it came from or who first suggested it.
The first report is from Jeffrey Swain of San Diego, California, writing in 1988. The second came from James C. Thompson, librarian at the University of California, Riverside, in 1989. The third came from Meredith A. Wilson of Solano Community College in Suisun, California, in 1990. Although I quote these examples of “The Trained Professor” from California sources, the story—and the prank itself—are well known all across the United States and in Great Britain, if not beyond. A report on an actual experiment of this kind published in Teaching of Psychology, vol. 15, no. 3 (October 1988), commented “Anecdotes about groups of students conditioning their professors as a practical joke are legion.” The induced behavior, according to the stories, may include lecturing while standing on a desk or on an overturned wastebasket. The legend is based on a technique that B. F. Skinner, the father of behavioralism, called “operant behavior.” The underlying principle, often demonstrated in animal experiments (particularly using pigeons), is that any behavior followed by reinforcing stimuli, such as food or praise, is more likely to occur again. Skinner, who died in 1990, not only developed techniques for animal behavior modification, he also claimed to have applied the system to a human subject, specifically to a rival psychologist who was conducting a seminar. Skinner’s story, often repeated or paraphrased in lectures and in published sources, is the likely basis of the campus pranks and legends. Two reviews of “Trained Professor” legends and the psychology underlying them appeared in FOAFtale News (Nos. 21 and 24; March and December 1991, respectively). In her 1975 book on animal behavior, Lads Before the Wind, Karen Pryor recounts Skinner’s version of the rival-training episode and quotes the following story about Skinner, as told in 1966 by his daughter Deborah: “Two of his students decided to shape a piece of behavior in their roommate by giving or withholding smiling and approval. They succeeded so well that they could elicit the behavior of standing on a chair and doing a little dance, at will. Excited by success, they invited Skinner to coffee in their room one night and showed him the poor roommate, climbing in all innocence onto a chair and shuffling about. ‘Very interesting,’ says Skinner, ‘but what does it tell us about pigeons?’”
“Cussing and Clowns”
I grew up near Chicago and always watched Bozo, who was based in Chicago. I vividly recall talking with my friends in the late 1950s or 1960s about that cussing incident on TV. It was always a “friend” who had seen it. In our version, the kid was playing a game that involved tossing a ping pong ball into six buckets. The first was closest to him, and the 6th was farthest out. Each day, before the game started, the host of the show would place a silver dollar in Bucket Number 6, and each kid who was able to toss the ball into that bucket won all the silver dollars that had accumulated. Of course, for each other bucket he made, he won a prize too, and the prizes grew in value the farther he went down the line of buckets.
Supposedly, this kid had made five buckets, and was on the all-important Bucket Number Six. He blew it and said, “Shit!” So Bozo admonished him, saying “That was a Bozo no-no.” And the kid replied, “Ram it, clown!” or something even worse.
The ringmaster of Bozo’s Circus was called “Mr. Ned” on the show, and I heard too that he had once said something about “keeping the little bastards quiet” on the show.
Narrator: One lesson an announcer learns is to make sure he is off the air before he makes any private comments. But even the greatest sometimes slip. A legend is Uncle Don’s remark after he had closed his famous children’s program. Let’s turn back the clock
Uncle Don: [Sung] “Good night little friends good night.”
[Spoken] “Tune in again tomorrow at this same time and I’ll be back with all my little friends. We’re off? I guess that’ll hold the little bastards for tonight.”
The Bozo report came in a 1986 letter from Jack Bales, reference librarian at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The Uncle Don report is from the LP record Pardon My Blooper (Jubilee PMB-1, undated), one of a series issued by Kermit Schafer. There are countless variations of the Bozo story with the offending child saying, “Cram it!” “Shove it!” “Climb it!” and the like to the clown, or to “Bozo,” “Clownie,” etc. Sometimes the child is said to have made obscene gestures, asked a sexual riddle, or played a game involving carrying an egg in a spoon. Although many people claim to have been eyewitnesses to this incident, every Bozo the Clown spokesperson and every published source on the program and its offshoots denies the story, and nobody has ever produced a recording of any such incident. The “little bastards” story, although long associated with “Uncle Don,” actually circulated among broadcasters concerning various other radio characters before Howard Rice (who changed his name to Don Carney) had assumed the “Uncle Don” persona for his popular radio show that ran from the mid-1920s until the late 1940s. Carney consistently denied the story, as do all serious histories of American broadcasting. In an essay included in my book The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story of alleged actual recorded or transcribed reports of the Uncle Don incident issued by the “Blooper” industry. These reports differ in several details, and none can be accepted as original or authentic. The sound quality of the recordings is superior to that of early radio broadcasts, very few of which were recorded anyway. The phrase “A legend is…” used in introducing these blooper reports suggests that the producers regarded the story as doubtful. Some have claimed that Schafer was merely “re-creating” an actual incident, but it is hard to see how one may re-create something that most likely never happened. Nevertheless, the story in all its variations does nicely illustrate how human nature will presumably cause someone to respond in frustration with an inappropriate off-color remark.
“Take My Tickets, Please!”
We’ve had a lousy football team here at…for the last few years. How bad? This story has been circulating:
This guy had tickets to the next game, but the team had been so terrible that he didn’t really want to go. So on a Saturday he went over to the mall to go shopping instead.
Then he got to thinking that he didn’t want the tickets to go to waste, so he came up with the clever idea to just put the tickets on the dashboard and leave the window down, inviting someone to steal them.
When he came back to his car he discovered that someone had put four more tickets to the game on his dash.
Sent to me in 1989 by a reader in the Midwest; I withhold further information to protect the feelings of the inept athletes alluded to. After I mentioned this story in a newspaper column, I heard from readers in other parts of the country who said that the same story was told there.
“The Dishonest Note”
I heard this story in Pittsburgh around 1983, and I believed it was true until last February when my father-in-law told me the same story, swearing it had been witnessed by a buddy of his in Buffalo a few months ago.
There were a lot of cars in a small parking lot in Shadyside, a Pittsburgh suburb. A college-age guy came out of a store and jumped into his car, and as he backed out of the parking space, the bumper of his car caught the passenger side of the next car. He scraped the entire length of the other car.
He got out of his car to survey the damage. His car seemed fine, but the other one was a mess. Several passers-by witnessed the whole scene, as the college student pulled a piece of paper and a pencil from his car. They watched him write a note, stick it under the windshield wiper of the damaged car, and drive away.
When the owner of the damaged car arrived, he freaked out at the state of his new car. Then he grabbed the no
te on the windshield, and found that it read, “Everyone watching me thinks I’m leaving you my name and insurance information—but I’m not. Ha ha!”
Sent to me in April 1990 by Aurlie McCrea of Redondo Beach, California. Herb Caen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, published a version of this legend in 1963, mentioning another from the London Daily Mirror; Caen published it once again in a 1971 column. A variation appears in an “Andy Capp” cartoon from 1973. “The Dishonest Note” is not only a story that reveals human nature, but the prank has actually been enacted by guilty motorists. A number of people have written to me confessing that they themselves wrote such a note, or knew someone personally who did. Others wrote to say that they found such a note on their damaged car.
“Pass It On”
In a high school class back in the ’60s, a narcotics officer from the local police department was brought in to lecture the students on the dangers of drugs. As part of his presentation, the officer brought along two joints from the evidence room which he placed on a tray to show the students.
“These,” he said, “are marijuana cigarettes, and I’m going to pass them around the room so you can see and smell them and know what they are like. When this tray comes back, there better still be two joints on it!”
The officer started the tray passing around the room, and when it came back to him there were three joints on it.
A widely told story that some tellers claim to have witnessed firsthand. Certainly any officer who tried such a ploy would be asking for it, considering the wit and nerve of some students and the ready availability of marijuana in many schools. Other versions describe a teacher discussing birth control and passing around a couple of condoms. This legend, like several others in this category, deals with a minor infraction; it depicts more of a prank than a crime. The next story is an obvious variation of “Pass It On,” but it involves higher stakes.
“The Lottery Ticket”
So this guy is a Colorado lottery winner—several thousand dollars—and he’s bragging about it to a bunch of people crowded around a table in a bar and grill. Someone doubts his windfall and says “Let’s see the ticket.” He pulls it out, and it is passed from hand to hand, finally returning to him. Except that the ticket he gets back has a different number than the one he handed out.
© 1998 Hilary Barta
From Jack Kisling’s column “Urban Legends Never Die” in the Denver Post, May 31, 1988. Kisling commented, “Whether an urban legend is literally true isn’t as important as whether it is true to life.” This update of the “Pass It On” legend quoted above has emerged in just about every state that has established its own lottery in the past few years, although both are probably just variations of an even older legend about a winning racetrack ticket being passed around a bar. Another lottery legend reported from diverse places describes a winner rushing out to his car (or to buy a new sports car) in which he will race to the state capital to collect his winnings; but he is killed in a car crash en route. In a recent popular story a man is fooled by his friends into thinking he has won a huge lottery payoff; after the man has kicked out his wife, moved in with his girlfriend, and charged expensive gifts on his credit cards, he learns of the hoax. Typically for urban legends, this last story has no follow-up saying what the man did next. A local lottery legend from Utah concerns the Mormon bishop who warned his flock not to participate in any form of gambling, including the lotteries run by surrounding states. Then the bishop has the good (or bad?) luck to win big on a lottery ticket he had impulsively bought in Idaho. When the Idaho lottery officials announced the winners, his name and picture were shown by all the newspapers and newscasts in the area.
“Dial 911 for Help”
People also talk about the time that Mitchell expressed doubt about the 911 emergency phone system. Why? Because there is no 11 on the phone.
“It was a joke,” Mitchell says. But many delight in the notion that he wasn’t joking. Such is Mitchell’s reputation.
Dear Heloise:
Thank you, thank you, thank you for telling parents that the emergency number is 911 and not 9-eleven. You wouldn’t believe how many people have said, “There is no 11 on my phone.”
Jokes by and about the short-term acting mayor of San Diego, California, Bill Mitchell, were included in a Los Angeles Times story sent to me about 1985 but without a specific date attached. The second example, from the “Hints from Heloise” column, was published on June 15, 1993; Abigail Van Buren had a longer version of the story in her “Dear Abby” column of March 3, 1990, and I have collected many other such accounts, the oldest in 1982. Some versions of the legend form of the story describe in detail horrible tragedies caused by people unable to find 11 on their telephones, but the worst such problem that any actual emergency service that I know of has been able to document was a momentary delay until the caller realized that the numbers to use were “one one” not “eleven.” Still, several local telephone emergency services have circulated memos reminding people to think of the series as nine-one-one, not nine-eleven. The ancestor of this story is a “Little Moron” joke from the 1940s, as summarized in a folktale index: “Fool answers phone late at night; caller asks, ‘Is this one-one-one-one?’—‘No this is eleven-eleven.’ Caller: ‘Sorry I got you up.’ ‘That’s all right; I had to get up to answer the phone anyway.’” I’ve also heard this legend transformed into an ethnic riddle-joke: “Did you hear why they had to get rid of 911 in Warsaw (Stockholm, Oslo, etc.)?”
17
Strays from the Wild Kingdom
Most urbanites seldom see wildlife except in zoos or, occasionally, when traveling through the boondocks. Thus, the possibility of an occasional contact with a wild creature anywhere deserves commemoration with a legend; for examples, see “The Elephant That Sat on the VW” in Chapter 4, “Alligators in the Sewers” in Chapter 8, and “The Stunned Deer—or Deer Stunt” in Chapter 19. In each of these legends, as well as in others, an animal has somehow wandered to a site or into a situation where it does not belong, and the result for human beings is a certain amount of discomfort and a whole lot of storytelling. Whenever wildlife strays from its home turf, or whenever people invade the wilds, the legends tell us that some contact is possible, often with bizarre results.
Of course you don’t need real contacts with the Wild Kingdom to have legends. To the contrary, the more mythical the beast the better, legend-wise. What are the chances of someone spotting an actual alien black panther, or even a native cougar, roaming free anywhere in the United States? Realistically, about nil, except for the very remote possibility of an escaped zoo animal or exotic pet. Despite the odds, local newspapers regularly report sightings like the following, quoted from the Flint (Michigan) Journal of February 3, 1995:
Something’s on the prowl in the township and it’s got folks scared.
A mysterious animal that some say is a cougar has been seen twice this week in the same neighborhood after first being spotted about two weeks ago near the busy Corunna and Linden roads intersection.
But four witnesses, three sightings, and dozens of paw-prints still have township police no closer to solving the mystery.
The Department of Natural Resources thinks cougar theorists are barking up the wrong tree.
“As far as the DNR is concerned, it is, has been, and always was a dog. It never was a cougar,” said Jon Royer, a DNR habitat biologist.
It turns out that reported sightings of big cats are not so unusual in eastern Michigan. As I wrote in The Baby Train, “Phantom panthers were reported in Manchester, Michigan, in 1984, in Milford in 1986, and in Imlay City in 1989.” All of these communities are just 30 or 40 miles outside of Detroit, home of teams named the Tigers and the Lions. Could there be a connection?
The Motown-area panthers, like all these legendary stray monster felines, are hard to track and impossible to verify. As the Michigan DNR official was quoted saying in the Flint Township case, “I’ve been out on these things over the year
s and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where an exotic animal was found.” (If only he had omitted “I don’t think” from his statement; surely if he had found an exotic animal he would have remembered it!)
What accounts for the repeated claims of cougar-sightings in the same general area? Some people have suggested that there must be something out there or such reports would not recur. Another popular theory holds that since several people always say they’ve seen the big cats, these witnesses couldn’t all be lying. Wildlife officials generally agree that people have indeed seen something—movements, shadows, unidentified animals, paw prints—and sometimes have heard strange cries in the night. But the authorities interpret these incidents to be mistaken identifications of large dogs, house cats, or possibly smaller local wildcats, bobcats, or the like. Not cougars, and certainly not black panthers. My own folkloric insight would add that such reports are not confined to one region, but occur widely in the United States and also in Europe, notably in England and Italy in recent years. Also, similar motifs recur in all of these stories, suggesting the transmission of folk rumors, hoaxes, and legends rather than the straying of actual panthers or cougars. People are not lying, but they are circulating unverified folklore.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 33