Laura answered the phone in front of Lerner’s. It took 10 minutes of coaxing from Valter before Jim reluctantly agreed to make one prank call. On this particular day, however, Jim wasn’t in the mood. Jim and his buddy Valter knew the number of every pay phone in the mall and, for random fun, would dial from home using three-way calling. “So we did what other immature teenagers would do, and I picked it up,” she said. It was 1987 and she was an 11th grader shopping with friends at Parmatown Mall when she heard a pay phone ringing. You’ll never guess how Laura Denny met her husband, Jim. “Then we would say to them, ‘There’s no walls there? If there’s no walls there, then what the hell is holding your house up?’ ” Geewax said. Growing frustrated, the resident would reply: “There’s no Walls here.” “When the person would say we had the wrong number, we would again ask to speak to Mr. “We would call a number out of the phone book and ask to speak to Mr. Twinsburg resident Ron Geewax, who grew up in Youngstown, remembers this knee-slapper from the early 1970s. Me: No, he is not. He is outside fornicating with his blue ox, Babe. Scene: Middle of the night, late 1970s. Phone in bedroom rings. I get out of bed to answer. The Akron woman, 74, didn’t think our editors would approve this story for publication in a family newspaper. Mmm mmm good.’ We would die laughing.” Babe in the woods “It would be hysterical to hear a bunch of drunk guys singing, ‘Mmm mmm good. “We told them they would get a case of their favorite soup if they could sing the Campbell Soup jingle,” she said. On weekends, they inevitably dialed some inebriated fellows. Stow resident Gale Tirpak recalls making prank calls, posing as marketers and offering fake prizes. There is nothing more contagious than the giggling of girls at a sleepover. Other residents would yell “Stupid kids!” and hang up. “We would then call back with about five minutes left in the time amount we told the person, and when they answered and said ‘Hello?’ whoever was making the call would just start screaming at the top of their lungs.”Ī lot of times, the boys would hear the sound of the phone hitting the floor, followed by running footsteps, he said. “Usually they would say, ‘OK, thank you’ and hang up,” Fickle said. He and his buddies would warn people not to use their telephones for a certain amount of time, say 30 minutes, because a lineman was working in the neighborhood and might suffer a high-voltage jolt. When Keith Fickle lived in Texas in the mid-1970s, a favorite prank was to call random numbers and identify themselves as working for the electric company. “My college roommate was not a fan of being woken up in the wee hours of the night from the ringing of the ‘Bat phone,’ but she stuck with me all four years.” How shocking “Coincidentally at around the time the bars let out, Commissioner Gordon would call to let me know the Joker or the Riddler or the Penguin … was on the loose!” Bates recalled. College students found her among the 50,000 listings in the school directory. Her maiden name didn’t draw much attention in childhood, she said, because she had known most of her Woodridge classmates since kindergarten.īut that changed when she went to Ohio State in the 1980s. Unlike his brother, Edward Batman had an unlisted number for “the obvious reason,” daughter Lisa Batman Bates said. “My aunt, if she answered, would just tell them he was out saving the world.” “If he could, he kept the kids on the line and joked with them,” she said. Sue Reynolds said her uncle never minded the calls. If Akron had a Prank Call Hall of Fame, its first inductee would be Kenneth Batman on Robin Lane.Ĭhildren delighted in calling him in the 1970s after finding his name in the phone book. Here are the confessions of former pranksters as well as the recollections of those on the receiving end. In the era before caller ID, it was a rite of passage for mischievous youths to dial random people for juvenile laughs. We asked Beacon Journal readers to share memories of their favorite prank calls from yesteryear.
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