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. Does anyone still getting random kids calling up trying to be funny?Ī webcomic called Wizzywig reminds me a bit of those days.We asked Beacon Journal readers to share memories of their favorite prank calls from yesteryear. It’s been years since I got a prank call I assume because of caller ID. I’m glad, because by then you’re heading into antisocial freakdom. We never got to the point of what (if I recall) was later called cactusing, that is, ordering strip-o-grams and two dozen pizzas for delivery to an unpopular teacher’s house or getting their mail forwarded to Belgium. I greatly admired the kid who came up with the idea of arranging fake children’s parties at McDonald’s. See who could keep it going the longest without running out of BS or cracking up, see who could thing of the next one that didn’t suck. My friend would record the calls so even if I wasn’t around that day I got to listen. People in the neighborhood were surprisingly open to donating to Queers Have Rights. My friend’s sister was older than us and would call people up soliciting money for made up charities. Yes, and they were sometimes fairly involved. We were bored kids in a small town.ĭo kids still make prank phone calls? If you did, what were your favorites? Often, we’d give the victim the phone number of another person that we’d had previously terrorized that day. Then, we’d ask the victim if she could call our “mom” for us and tell her to come pick her child up. Then, we’d say that we were at a payphone and fake a crying spell because we’d just spent our last quarter on the payphone. We would call people and say, “mom, i’m at the theater and the movie is over, can you come pick me up?” Then, the victim would say, “sweetie, you’ve got the wrong number”. And when they did, we’d scream as if we’d been electrocuted. Most of the time, they’d eventually answer. We’d let it ring a long time, then hang up and immediately call back and let it ring and ring forever. Then, we’d call back and they wouldn’t answer. I will be making some test calls to your line… please don’t answer the phone, it could cause an electric shock on my end”. I think we saw that on a movie, American Graffiti or something.īut my favorite one was when my friend (who sounded very old on the phone) would call unsuspecting people and say, “this is the telephone repair man and I’m working in your area. So, they would page him, “Mike Hunt” Again, we thought it was hilarious. So, we would call the fast food place and say, "I’m looking for my friend Michael Hunt, we have a family emergency, can you page him on your intercom…and he goes by Mike. There was also a local fast food place that would give you a number when you placed your order, and they’d call it on their intercom when the food was ready. It’s not funny now, but in our pre-pubescent fervor, we thought we’d struck comedic gold. Me and my friends used to call up people and the converstation went something like this: I was just remembering some of the ones I made. I’m assuming that most people have made at least one prank phone call in their childhood (or as an adult).
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