Stuck by the Tale

The story from the St. Paul Dispatch had everyone in the Minneapolis Associated Press bureau guffawing as it went clacking out to 1,500 A.P. clients, much as it had been written by Dispatch Society Reporter Dorothy Lewis:

ST. PAUL, MINN. (AP)--This is the story of a baby sitter who really stuck to her job--and sat, and sat, and sat--far beyond the actual call of duty.

She was hired by a young couple in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina to watch their children while they attended a party.

In giving instructions to the 16-year-old sitter, the lady of the house forgot one thing --that she had sprayed some of the bathroom equipment with a white plastic "miracle" paint, the kind that "won't rub off, peel, chip or blister. It stays on."

Early in the evening the baby sitter visited the bathroom. And when the young couple returned at 3 a.m., they found the perplexed, red-eyed sitter still sitting there.

First the mother tried turpentine in an effort to unseat the unhappy girl, but she became convinced the paint was 100% as advertised.

Then she had her husband call the family doctor, who came to the house at 4 a.m. He applied alcohol, with no results.

"But," he assured the sitter cheerfully, "we'll find a way."

As the doctor was trying to figure one out, he tripped over the sitter's foot, fell headlong against the bathtub and knocked himself cold.

The young husband hastily called the emergency station at the hospital, and within minutes an ambulance was on the way. The driver and attendant scooped up the doctor, who suffered a concussion.

Then, with a hearty "ally-oop" the ambulance crew tore the sitter from her sitting place and trundled her and the doctor to the hospital.

Both have recovered.

Attorneys later drew up two lawsuits against the young couple--one for the sitter and one for the doctor. But the suits will never be filed, an insurance company executive said today. They'll be settled out of court.

"We'd love the advertising we could get," the insurance man said. "But our concern for the parties involved is stronger. It's just too embarrassing all around."

Laughing just as loud as the A.P.men, editors all over the U.S. (New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer) slapped a feature head on the story and ran it. But other editors with better memories remembered the baby sitter's tale for what it was: a gnarled hoax that has been knocking around city rooms for 25 years* When the more knowing editors began to protest to A.P., Twin Cities reporters, backtracking truth to its lair, found that the trail ended with a 35-year-old suburban Minneapolis insurance agent named Fred R. Keller, who said only that he had heard the story from someone else.

The St. Paul Dispatch and the A.P. still hoped the story was legitimate, but they found it hard to answer the Portland Oregonian's Assistant Managing Editor Edward M. Miller, who had exposed the same old yarn as a fraud in 1935. He wired A.P.: THAT GAL MUST BE GETTING

AS TIRED AS SOME OF THE REST OF US. SHE MUST BE EMBARRASSED BY HAVING HER END EXPOSED TO THE PUBLIC FOR AN ENTIRE QUARTER CENTURY. SHE HAS BEEN CRUELLY FRAMED.

*Together with scores of other recurrent journalistic hoaxes. Examples:

A woman driver is flagged by a stalled motorist, who asks for a push. "You'll have to get up to 35 miles an hour to get me started," he says. The lady driver backs off, guns, rams his car at 35 m.p.h.

A rich wayfarer stays the night at the cottage of poor folk somewhere in rural Europe. The greedy farmer and his wife kill their guest, rob him--and find papers identifying him as their long-lost son.

A farmer, shotgun in hand, approaches his chicken house to rout a suspected thief. He stumbles, the gun goes off--killing all the hens.

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