Let the children play

Imagine a couple of high school sophomores reading James Joyce’s 1922 novel, “Ulysses” and having the bright idea to prank their local newspaper with fake letters.

That was the case for Marc Fisher, associate editor and columnist at The Washington Post, along with his childhood friend, Charlie Varon, playwright and performer.

It was about 50 years ago when the now grown men were teenagers writing for the Horace Mann Record at the illustrious Riverdale school on West 246^th Street. The young journalists got their kicks reading the letters to the editor in The Riverdale Press where issues varied from petty topics like people’s behavior on the bus to more serious ones like housing.

Inspired by the impassioned words of residents in their community, Fisher and Varon thought it hilarious to mail in fictitious letters of their own. Their stories consisted of entirely made-up scenarios, each penned by a character from the book “Ulysses.”  

And for the first time in decades, Fisher publicly confessed to the prank in a Washington Post op-ed published on Christmas Day – “Let’s make fake news fun again.”

“One week, “Arnold Lubetsch” advocated combating homicides by wearing dazzlingly colorful clothing. “Garb yourself brightly!” he suggested. “Mrs. Edna Purefoy” railed against a new public hazard, a metal banister installed in the center of the aisle on city buses,” reads an excerpt from the editorial.

“We made fun of it because there were a lot of cranky old people who were writing letters,” Fisher said. “[Just] a couple of teenagers looking for something to push up against or make fun of.”

The devilish duo wrote roughly 30 letters from 1974 to 1976, Fisher estimated. The two went to great lengths to hide their tracks -- some letters -- were typed, others were handwritten and return addresses were made up. They were never caught.

The editor of The Riverdale Press at the time was the paper’s founder and publisher, David Stein. He died in 1981. His son Richard Stein, who ran the paper along with this brother Bernard for about 30 years before selling to Richner Communications, contended his father was not well in his last years and these letters might have slipped him by. A bit heartbreaking in hindsight.

The Washington Post editorial galvanized a sort of confessional and garnered 530 comments.

William A. Miller, Jr. wrote in about his own prank he conducted along with his brother in the 1960s. There was a new Mustang car on their street and the shifty siblings began adding gas to a car. They did this for six months. The prank was to get the owner of the car thinking he had the best mileage of any car in history. It worked!   

“He was getting an unheard of and impossible 70 miles per gallon in a V8 engine, according to his calculations. The whole neighborhood heard about it,” read the comment.

 The two then began to siphon gas out of the man’s car, causing the unsuspecting victim to scratch his head at the disparity. Unlike Fisher and Varon, the young boys were caught, but not punished. Instead, their father was amused and laughed at their childhood antics.

It was a different time. Seemingly much more different than now.

“The fears and anxieties and mental health issues of a lot of young people is that they’re always worried about being judged and seen and there’s just far less room for doing stupid things,” said Fisher. “It means that we're being too strict. With young people, with people of all ages, there's just so little room for mistakes, so little room for pranks.”

“6 Signs You’re Being Too Hard On Your Kid,” reads a headline from a 2024 article in the HuffPost. “Are We Pushing Our Kids Too Hard, Too Young, And Too Soon?” reads an October 2023 headline from Forbes and in 2003, Psychology Today published a similar opinion piece titled, “Our We Pushing Our Kids Too Hard?

Between 2002 and 2009, nine N.Y.U students committed suicide and in May 2021, the school-run paper at Annandale High School in Northern Virginia published, “Student suicide rates increase at Ivy Leagues and prestigious universities.”

“Between 1990 to 2010, 29 people attempted suicide by jumping off the bridge in Ithica City. Out of those deaths, 27 out of the 29 attempts were successful and 15 out of the 27 were Cornell University students,” reads a paragraph.

The consensus seems to be that we are too hard on our youth and they should be afforded the room to break the rules with the opportunity to learn from their own mistakes.

Millennials had the freedom to be rambunctious in an age where they were not afraid of their every move being captured on video and immortalized on social media in perpetuity. Gen Z and Gen Alpha, on the other hand, live in a surveillance state.

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric problems and according to a 30-year study published by General Psychology Journal in April 2024, approximately one in 12 children and one in four adolescents suffer from the neurosis.

“It's important to give kids the feeling that they can play a fool from time to time and they don't have to be super serious,” added Fisher. “I found that so many young students . . . are so fearful of making a mistake. They're such perfectionists that they end up washing the creative juices out of what they do and that's not good for anyone.”

Youth is fleeting. By 18 years old, individuals are considered adults and burdened with the reality of work, bills, school, relationships, car troubles, etc. The future holds more than enough time to stress. Let us bring back a time of whimsy where we don’t take everything so seriously and let the children play.