No Tale Too Tall for Telling

Did you hear that the Department of Transportation is planning to put a $3 toll on the Purdy Bridge? You hadn’t heard?

Must be because it’s not true.

Happy April Fool’s Day.

Sharing Puget Sound with seagulls, maybe we are more gullible than people farther from salt water.

Confirmation bias makes stories like the Purdy Bridge toll hoax work. If you believe the state government is a greedy cabal of social engineers trying to manipulate us and confiscate our hard-earned money, you’re likely to take the fake toll story as plausible, even typical.

Old-fashioned wish fulfillment accounts for how we are such easy marks for Ponzi schemes, Mega Millions lotteries, speculation in cryptocurrency, multi-level-marketing, patent medicines, 30-day diets, and the conviction that horny goat weed delivers its name’s rejuvenating promise — not to mention those awesome $100,000 bank transfers from a Nigerian prince.

Money growing on trees is a notion harder to get rid of than ivy in a gulch. As Shakespeare’s Cleopatra put it, “Wishers were ever fools.”

Google, back when “do no evil” was its motto, ran a series of annual April Fool’s pranks.

Being an incorrigible mañana guy, I had unhappy experiences at work when I turned in assignments after deadline via email. So, on April 1, 2008, when “Gmail Custom Time” was rolled out, with its new technology that let me backdate my messages, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Deadline dodging had come true for the glorious five minutes it took me to realize I’d been had.

Let’s not leave stupidity out of our gullibility analysis.

Survivors of the 1960s will recall the viral “Paul is dead” rumor that swept among us in the fall of ’69, when reefer madness wasn’t making anyone any smarter, and the lyrics of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” were thought to be intelligible.

That same year, Rolling Stone published what should have been an obvious hoax heralding the formation of a new supergroup to be called The Masked Marauders. Its absurdly unlikely members were said to be Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Grace Slick, and Mick Jagger. If you remember this antique trivia, you may even know a fool who bought a copy of the Masked Marauders’ album, the musical disaster that was recorded by an opportunistic Berkeley garage band. Nevertheless, the awful exploitation record reached No. 114 on Billboard’s 1969 album chart. There may have been a Summer of Love, but there was also a Winter of Dumber.

In 1582, when the Gregorian calendar replaced the 1500-year-old Julian calendar and fixed the spring equinox date problem, Rip Van Winkles went to bed on Thursday, Oct. 4 and woke up Oct. 15. Poor souls, they wept over the 11 days stolen from their lives, just as I cry over the hour lost to daylight saving time every March.

A trivial year number caused the Y2K panic, and in 2012, lots of folks were convinced that the world would come to an end because that Mayan calendar ended in, you guessed it, 2012.

And everyone knows that the videos of the astronauts’ first moon landing were fakes filmed in a secret NASA studio moonscape.

The 19th-century con man Oscar Hartzell’s criminal career reads like a 100-year-old April Fool’s prank.

Hartzell was a mountebank who traveled around the rural Midwest between 1905 and 1930 selling desperate farmers and widows shares of rights to Sir Francis Drake’s estate, which he claimed to have inherited. Hartzell wasn’t a nickel-and-dimer: he dazzled the patsies with the 300 years of compound interest on the treasure so that its current value was over $100 billion.

For an investment of a mere $10, the payout would supposedly be $500.

In 25 years, Hartzell bilked what has been estimated at close to $1 million from his gullible investors.

The nonexistence of any Drake estate was well known, but no amount of debunking made any difference to the fools waiting for their big payout.

Even during the trial that ended in his conviction for mail fraud, Hartzell’s followers never lost faith, nor would they tolerate any criticism of the heir to the fortune that he never stopped promising to share with them.

Exonerating him turned into a crusade, complete with meetings and mass marches. One church fired its minister because he dared call Hartzell a charlatan. With the flim-flam man out on bail pending appeal, the swindle kept going. Thousands of dollars for his legal expenses were raised in days.

One of the Hartzell cultists complained that “The whole Drake deal would have been fixed up by now if it weren’t for that bunch of racketeers they sent over from Washington.”

This oddly familiar story isn’t a straight April Fool’s Day example, at least not in the didn’t-really-happen sense. You can look it up.

If you like tall tales, next time you run into me at Not-Walt’s IGA, ask me to tell the story of the secret Grateful Dead concert at the Longbranch Improvement Club in 1982. I can tell you about the afternoon Ken Griffey Jr. played softball with Peninsula High alumni at a Volunteer Park picnic or the time a flying saucer abducted a couple of geoduckers off Wycoff Shoal.

And, hey, you knew they found gold in Minter Creek when they were replacing the bridge a couple of years ago, didn’t you? Now, that was quite a cover-up. Even Ricky (the flagger) was in on it.

“Oh, the stories you’ll hear.” Sounds like Dr. Seuss but isn’t.

Which ones will you believe?

Dan Clouse lives in Lakebay. Or does he?