April Fool’s pranks

We don’t do April Fool’s pranks much anymore, but when I was a kid, there was always some kind of prank happening—everything from colored eggs to remarks that make one wonder.

We always had a good breakfast before leaving for school, like bacon or sausage, eggs, pancakes or toast, cereal and fruit, but on April 1, some of those things might look a little strange.

One morning our pancakes were blue, one year they were red and one year they were green. The eggs also were susceptible to change. Those were the things that Mom would do. 

My brothers were a little more mischievous. They would do things like tell Mom the stock was out, or that we had new babies when we didn’t, or we forgot to drain the water out of a tractor. Mom knew all of these things probably hadn’t happened, but she’d always get a little rattled for a bit. We would laugh and wonder what color the eggs were going to be.

To me, my brothers bordered on being downright mean. I was gullible, so would do things I was told without question. One year, they learned how to load a condenser in welding class. It involves taking a part out of the distributor of a vehicle (they are only found in old cars now) and using the welder to put an electrical charge into it. It could be handled as long as one didn’t touch the main body and the clip at the end of the wire at the same time. If a person did, they’d get a pretty good shock. It was easy for one of them to holler, “Hey, Steva! Catch!” and toss it to me. I would automatically reach out to catch it and get the jolt. That made me dance around, scream and cry, and they would all laugh. To my credit, I only got caught once. At least on a condenser.

The other thing they liked to do didn’t normally happen on April Fool’s day, but later in the year after the water came into the ditch. We had a fish that everyone called a black bullhead. It is a type of catfish, and if one knows about catfish, they have spines on the sides of their faces that are quite sharp and inflict a painful poke. So the boys would catch one out of the ditch and do the same thing: “Catch!” I would try and get poked by those spines. There again, it only took once.

I tried an April Fool’s Day prank on Rick and the kids when Marla and Ray were staying with us. I put paper towels in the pancakes. I poured the batter into the pan, then put a round of paper towel on there and put some more batter on top. Those darn guys though, they noticed the pancakes were a little tough but ate them anyway. So that was a flop.

Probably the greatest prank I pulled, and it wasn’t even planned as a prank, happened when we had been busy all day and I decided on hamburger gravy and biscuits for supper. I was trying my hand at adding different flavors and grabbed some turmeric. I figured it made pickles taste good, so it should make gravy taste good. And it didn’t taste at all bad, but it turned green. Yup, absolutely green. And not a pretty green either. Everyone was a good sport and ate it. They even liked the taste, just not the color.

Cooling salad

1 small box orange Jello

1 can mandarin oranges

1 banana

1 cup orange sherbet

Drain juice from oranges and add water to make one cup. Heat and pour over Jello. Stir until dissolved. Add sherbet and continue stirring until sherbet is melted. Add orange sections and sliced banana. Chill until firm.