Turns out that Sal Walker and his band April Shortcake, currently rising in the country music charts, will not perform this summer in Ada – or for that matter, will never perform here.
Sad to say, but the Jamie Hall story (click here to read it) about helping a stranded group of musicians on State Route 235 north of Ada was simply a figment of our imagination that occurred hours before the clock passed midnight from March 31 to April 1.
Republicans might call it fake news. We have no idea if any Democrat even read the story.
But, by all accounts, it was, however, a popular story. Here’s proof.
The story helped propel the Icon to 4,413 Facebook reaches within 2 hours from 10 p.m. to midnight, March 31. Then on April 1, the Icon registered over 2,500 reaches.
These two days compare to our typical 1,500 daily Facebook reaches.
More background
Our thinking about this year’s April Fool’s story started around 6 p.m. on April Fool's eve. It involved heavy brainstorm while drying the supper dishes.
Given this year’s virus situation we didn’t want to cause mass hysteria – as if these stories ever reach that level.
Rather, we simply hope to achieve 5 seconds or so of, "what's this!?"
We jotted down some ideas that were, honestly pretty lame. For example:
• Photo of horned squirrel identified in Ada
• Pre-historic cave drawings discovered in crawl space under the municipal building
• Gold coins discovered in crawl space under the municipal building
• One-day open season on Canada Geese at the ONU pond
In another year, we might play with the geese story. It would make lots of people very angry, however. So, we'd have to word it very carefully.
Somehow the idea of a vehicle breakdown on State Route 235 appeared, somewhere between drying the plates and the forks.
First idea was that a nationally-known rap artist had the vehicle breakdown and the Icon was going to post the Ada lyrics he wrote.
Then, a phone call to daughter, Anne, in Cincinnati for advice, redirected us to make it a country singer instead.
She suggested the name Sal Walker and shortbread (lower case “s”). We planned to make Sal’s girlfriend’s name April Loof, but that was edited to making the band’s name April Shortbread (with a capital “S”).
By 9 p.m. the story began to fall into place with one element missing: a local hero.
We perused the list of regular suspects. This list includes Deb Curlis, Monty Siekerman, Jon Umphress, David Retterer, Jill Simons, Arlene Allison, Rhett Grant, David Dellifield, the entire staff at COSI, the entire staff at Carol Slane Florist, Kevin Ernst, Leland Crouse, Jack Jefferies and the telegraph operator at the Pennsylvania Railroad depot.
Suddenly we realized this story was all about Jamie Hall.
After a brief phone call to Mr. Hall, who responded something like, "I'm already the biggest fool in Ada. Go ahead and use my name."
The rest is history.
There’s a Bluffton version of this story that involves Derek Dukes of Southgate Lanes bowling alley. Click here for that version.
See you next year.
