Back in the days when the world took print media seriously, some newspaper and magazine editors couIdn’t resist putting that at risk by perpetrating the occasional hoax. Usually they did it under the cover of April 1, but some seem to have gone ahead whenever an idea occurred to them. Typically these pranks were all in good fun and did no damage to people, animals, or editors’ careers. Today, in honor of April 1, we begin a series about the great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes.
In its first April issue for 1971, the Saturday Review published a letter from one K. Jason Sitewell, calling attention to a bill in Congress that ostensibly proposed to limit the size of private parks but was really intended to abolish golf courses and ultimately destroy the sport itself. The congressman sponsoring the bill, the letter writer contended, had a burning hatred of golf, which he blamed for the death of both his grandfather (who died of exasperation in a sand trap) and his father (dead after driving 19 balls into a water hazard on a par-3 hole).
The letter drew concern and outrage in the halls of Congress as well as the golfing community before the Wall Street Journal revealed the hoax and Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins confessed to being Sitewell.
"The reason for the letter is that it is part of the Saturday Review's editorial philosophy to place the highest value on laughter," Cousins wrote after the incident. “SR is a serious magazine and it deals with serious issues in a serious way, but it tries to make a distinction between being serious and being solemn. In the catalog of human assets, few things provide people with greater strength than the love of life, of which the ability to laugh is a prime manifestation."
Cousins went on to become a leading proponent of laughter as a medical cure, particularly in his popular 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness.
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