It’s April fools, newspaper style

We were doing some house cleaning and moving things around in The Examiner press room the other night. Something we have to do occasionally, because if we don’t, things get pretty grimy around the edges.

Mailroom manager, Jack Wessel, pulled an old Examiner out from behind an electrical circuit panel that had long been tucked back in there for some odd reason. Jack immediately commented that it’s been awhile since this corner has been cleaned. “This paper is dated Monday, April 1, 1996.” A few people took a moment to glance at it, but me, I smelled a story, so the paper was handed my way as everyone else went on about the task at hand.

 To us old hands at life, 1996 seems like yesterday, but to a junior high school student, 13 years is a half a lifetime ago. Do you remember what you were doing on April Fool’s Day, 1996? You can bet Emily O’Dell remembers, because her picture was on the front page of The Examiner along with her friend Brook Carter, and sitting behind them was Emily’s father, Jerry O’Dell.

Jerry O’Dell and I were best of friends and grew up next door to each other when we were kids. The caption under the picture explained that the girls, who were students of Palmer Junior High, were taking a second look at Saturday’s Spelling Bee. Also in an adjoining picture was the winner of that bee, Center Middle School student Clifford Juan.

Other front page stories dealt with tax cuts, the concealed weapons bill, and how to deal with the nasty little bird problem uptown, the Starlings were flocking to the Bradford Pear trees around the Square at night and making quite a mess.

The inside pages of the paper showed the weather map and said temperatures tomorrow would be above normal with a windy 73 degrees. The normal high for April 1 is 59 degrees.

On the opinion page, former city manager and longtime Examiner columnist Keith Wilson, was dealing with how times have changed when it came to lead paint and asbestos siding on the outside of our homes.

Bill Clinton was president of the United States in 1996, so naturally Berry’s World ran a political cartoon about Clinton and another cartoon dealt with Mad Cow Disease.

Election Day was on the horizon and the present mayor of Independence, Don Reimel, was running for re-election as 2nd District Councilman along with Susan Block, Dale Pearce, and my friend Bill Baker.

Dear Abby was still alive with motherly advice and Alley Oop was on the comic page. A few other comics that have withstood the test of time that we still offer in the Examiner today were Dilbert, Arlo and Janis, Mother Goose and Grimm, the Born Loser, Frank and Ernest, and Baby Blues.

The news article that most caught my attention though was a story of a courageous mother cat named Scarlet that raced into a burning building to rescue her five kittens one by one. After getting them all to safety with her singed fur, her eyes blistered shut, and her paws burned she made a head count and nuzzled each one with her nose to make sure they were safe and to let them know she was OK. Afterwards, the firemen picked up the cats and took them to the shelter. The once-homeless feline and her brood became the most coveted and sought after kitties in the animal shelter as they recovered from their wounds. More than 700 people called seeking to adopt them after the story ran in the paper.

Ted Stillwell will be on hand with the Blue & Grey Book Shoppe booth at the Heritage Festival Saturday in McCoy Park, U.S. 24 and Spring Street, across from the Truman Library.