THIS MAY SEEM PREMATURE, but I think it is time we started getting ready for April Fools’. April Fools’ rolls around on Monday, and most of us may think oh, well.
But those of us who have had occasion lately to read the Atlanta Journal for April 9, 1906, will not feel so casual.
“TRIED TO KILL HIMSELF,” reads the headline on page one, “WHEN WIFE APRIL-FOOLED HIM.”
“W. O. Roberts Slashed His Throat in Effort to End Life,” a smaller headline goes on, “Because Wife Said There Was a Cow in the Front Yard.”
The story begins: “As a result of brooding over an April Fool joke perpetrated upon him by his wife last Sunday, W. O. Roberts, a carpenter, residing on the Greensferry Road, Tuesday night attempted to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.”
Fortunately, it is explained, Mrs. Roberts restrained her husband, and with the help of some friends brought him by streetcar to Grady Hospital.
“Mrs. Roberts,” the story continues,
who spent the night in the women’s department at police headquarters, told Matron Bohnefeld that several months ago her husband suffered a lick on the head that affected his mind.
Sunday, while in a playful mood, Mrs. Roberts told her husband there was a cow in the yard. After learning that he had been fooled Roberts is said to have become morose and sullen and up until he cut his throat refused to speak to his wife.
Well. We are not told how Mr. Roberts suffered the lick on the head. Perhaps it was during one of his wife’s playful moods. Perhaps it was during some involvement with a cow. That would give Mrs. Roberts’s April Fool joke a little more point. “Here comes that cow again” is what Mrs. Roberts may have said in fact, or in effect, and Mr. Roberts may have been humiliated when Mrs. Roberts came to get him out of the closet, telling him she was only fooling.
We used to play a family joke on my old dog Chipper, I must admit, along very similar lines. Chipper used to hang out the window of the car when we drove up to Lake Burton, and she would bark at the cows along the side of the road.
Occasionally when things were slow at home we would yell, “Chipper, there are cows in the yard,” and she would run to the front door and bark and cry. It would always get a good rise out of her, even though there were never any cows when we let her out. But she enjoyed it.
She enjoyed striking attitudes, and she believed cows were as small as they looked from the car window. In fact my father once stopped the car near some cows she had been barking at. “All right, Chipper, go on and get ’em,” he said, and she jumped out and tore after them. She ran barking all the way up to the nearest cow, saw how big it was, turned around without breaking stride and ran barking back to the car, from which she continued to bark as we drove away. She never admitted anything.
Chipper has not only stayed away from suicide, she has defied veterinarians who gave her not much longer to live. She lives now in Avondale with my parents, and I expect she will still bark if cows are mentioned provocatively.
But there are those who, like Mr. Roberts, are less satisfied with illusions. If the reader is such a person, or is married to one, I hope he or she will think about the potential headlines before doing anything foolish Monday.