One holiday many years ago, one of the reporters brought a plate of cupcakes to the newsroom of the Waco paper and put them on a shelf near the receptionist’s window.
These were some nice-looking cupcakes with an offwhite frosting that looked like it might have been cappuccino flavor or something.
People did that sort of thing on occasion with doughnuts or brownies or whatever, and the implied message was “help yourself.”
In this case, the reporter, whose name was Witherspoon, slid the plate on the shelf and sat down at his desk, which was right by the shelf and convenient for him to keep an eye on the cupcakes.
I recall thinking he looked a lot like a fisherman watching his line.
Minutes passed before anyone noticed the cupcakes, and the person who did was a healthconscious lady who rarely ate such things as cupcakes.
But this time she did, biting into the cappuccino-looking frosting...
...and immediately harking it into a nearby trash can.
Turns out the cupcake was a cold cornbread muffin and the frosting was cream gravy.
Now that I think of it, the holiday may have been April Fool’s, which should have had people on a heightened prank alert, but the cupcakes looked so good. And who would ever think of cupcakes being part of a prank?
Those who took the cork under, so to speak, took the prank in good humor and usually hung around to see who would eat the next one.
Such good humor did not extend to another prank I witnessed, this one coming when I was a college student working part-time at The Ada Evening News.
We had several highschool students who came in after school to deliver papers and insert the pre-printed ads.
One was a boy named Jones, who may have been 16, perhaps 17.
When he focused on his job, he was a good and productive worker. But that wasn’t a high percentage of the time.
One day, I noticed an odd bulge in his shirt just above his jeans pocket and wondered what it was.
Well, it was a small spray bottle filled with water, I soon found out.
Jones waited until a couple of other young people were in a conversation and not paying him any attention.
He eased behind one them, fake-sneezed loudly and then misted the back of the guy’s neck with the spray bottle. The quick-handed Jones was able to stuff the bottle back in his pocket before his soon-to-be former friend turned around.
He did that two or three times until he was made to understand that pranks are seldom as funny to the recipient as they are the prankster.