My dear Bride got one of my old magazines out of the closet and she's sitting over there looking through it right now. She came across an old Adams catalog. There were always so many practical jokes in those and I always got a real kick out of getting them. The same goes for Johnson Smith. Their catalogs have changed over the years and I can't say that it's for the best. One the other hand, I haven't heard anything about The Adams Company in years. I had a whoopee cushion and a joy buzzer. I even checked out those Xray Specs! What a rip-off! I can remember wire racks sitting on the counters of little stores in the sixties and seventies and all of those things hung prominently on the pegs. They were cheap enough too. There was the soap that would turn your hands black and the chewing gum which tasted horrible. There was the cigarette which looked real and it even looked like it was lit. I discovered that if you put a little bit of talcum powder in it and blew, you could make it look like you were smoking. Imagine how shocked my friend's mother was when I pulled that stunt on her. You just never expected that sort of thing out of a ten year old in those days! We had a good laugh over it. There was the Dribble Glass which had tiny little holes imbedded in the leaves and flowers which were etched into it. There were the little pills which made cola taste awful and the ones you lit and it would make a big ash snake which would fall apart if you tried to pick it up. There were Rattlesnake Eggs! It was one of the best gags ever! It was something like a little envelope with a rubber band and a paper clip. It was that simple but it was a thing of beauty! You just had to wind that band up and close the envelope. You handed it to your unsuspecting victim and they already knew that it supposedly contained rattlesnake eggs. When they opened it, the paper clip would flip around and around and sound like rattling. You could feel it too! Imagine their shock when they discovered that the eggs seem to have hatched! There was a little metal device which could be placed in someone's tail pipe and there would be a loud whistling sound every time they gave their car some gas. There was the fountain pen which would shoot ink all over you, invisible ink which you would accidentally get on your clothes and then it would vanish. There was sneezing powder, itching powder and the little rubber thing you could conceal in a handkerchief or tissue. It would never fail to get reactions when you pretended to blow your nose. Fake ice cubes with flies in them, rubber dog feces and napkins that you could actually eat while complaining that the restaurant's plates were too sparse...it was all there! There were fake nickels which were really just modified nails and it was funny to see folks trying to figure out why they couldn't pick them up when they couldn't pry them off of the floor. Surely I'm not the only one with this sort of memories. Lay it on me! Tell me your memories. What has stuck with you in the world of practical jokes! (They actually have whoopee cushions which are self-inflating these days. They had some at our favorite grocery store not long ago. Every time we would walk past them, I would make sure to squeeze one and give my Bride a serious look. "Honey!" I would say. Yeah, that was pretty funny!)
You can join Unsolved Mysteries and post your own mysteries or
interesting stories for the world to read and respond to Click hereScroll all the way down to read replies.Show all stories by Author:  47699 ( Click here )
Spring is coming |
