WE DON’T recommend kicking someone, but otherwise … (Shutterstock).

It just so happens that in three weeks it will be April 1, also known as April Fool’s Day. This day creates an itch in me for mischief, preying both on my own appetite for practical jokes and the gullibility of some people.

While I consider my April Fool’s prank for 2026, let me review some of my Greatest Hits
In high school, we forged a “While You Were Out” pink telephone note for the student activities director and placed it on his desk while he was out. It was a fake – but urgent-appearing – message to call the Internal Revenue Service regarding his income tax return.

A look came over his face like he’d just seen a TV broadcast stating that he was a Pickleball partner with Jeffrey Epstein. We watched him sweat for a long moment, then revealed the prank. He was so relieved he didn’t even get mad at us.

One of the most popular cars in my era was the Volkswagen Beetle. It was so light that four motivated high school lads – I was one of them – could literally pick one up and carry it as far as we cared to.
Absent a plan, we simply moved it from its spot at the curb at the front of the high school and deposited it about 20 yards away on the school lawn.

We failed to match the feat – or maybe it was simply a legend – of the lads who hoisted a Beetle and somehow left it in a classroom (the room had sliding glass doors) in the middle of campus.
Years later in college, our student newspaper published a front page article declaring that it had won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

It seemed like the most outrageously, obviously false story possible, but in the months and years later, when I told people I had been on the staff of (what was then called) The Forty-Niner, they often said (totally seriously), “Hey, didn’t you guys win a Pulitzer a while back?”

Pulling a “fast one” has such a thrill that even dead-serious people practiced it. When I covered Westminster for the old Orange County Evening News, the public information guy for the police was a fella – we’ll call him Lt. John – who clearly hated reporters, and never offered any of us any tidbits of news unless we pestered him like a black flat-coated retriever eying a pastrami sandwich.

But one day he cheerfully handed me a press release about a remarkable policy chance in the PD. This was news – or would have been – if I hadn’t noticed that the memo was signed by Capt. Abe Rifule.

Darn … the smile should have tipped me off. Almost pranked.