KIDS THESE DAYS: April Fools needed

I have had the impression for many years that serious April Fool’s jokes have gone the way of pay telephones. Today’s kids just don’t seem to be wired to work up a serious prank on this day.

“Back in my day,” April Fool’s pranks were not just the rage, they were an art. Many times, the pranksters didn’t need April 1 as an excuse to execute them. Ground zero for pranks and stunts was Cal Tech out in Pasadena.

To see whether April 1 pranks were still a fixture, I checked in at Costa Mesa High School.

I asked sophomore Justin Rogers, 15, whether he and his friends had any plans for April Fool’s jokes.

“Not really,” he said.

Justin further confirmed my suspicions about the demise of April Fool’s pranks when I asked him what it means to him.

“It’s just a day when people have an excuse to do little things, little jokes,” Justin said.

Just as I thought. Maybe it’s more sport for the alleged grown-ups among us.

About 20 years ago, my old boss, Nils-Eric Svensson, a Corona del Mar resident, got me good.

I came into the office and found a note he’d written that had a sales lead. I was supposed to call a fellow at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena to talk to him about buying some of the commercial storage products we were selling.

Nils-Eric said he couldn’t quite make out the name due to the fellow’s heavy German accent but said it sounded something like “Warren van Buren” or something like that.

So I called JPL and started asking for this guy Warren van Buren. The receptionist was very helpful and was checking the last names of all the Warrens in her directory to see if any had a last name close to Van Buren.

Then she checked to see if they had an employee with the last name of Van Buren whose first name might be close to Warren.

Nothing was even close on the first or last name.

So I marched into Nils-Eric’s office, a bit miffed because he’d bungled this sales lead. As we were sitting there, he struggled to remember the name and I was feeling bad for pushing him. But, business is business.

Then it came to him. “Wait!” he said, “It wasn’t Van Buren, it was Van Braun. That’s it!”

So I called JPL again and asked them to look up a new name: Warren Van Braun.

The receptionist was about a minute into checking the entire company roster when I realized I’d been had.

The name wasn’t Warren van Buren or Warren Van Braun, it was Wernher von Braun, one of the most important rocket developers in history. And he didn’t work at JPL, he’d been dead for 10 years.

In 1993, my wife, Cay, called the office of my new business to tell me that my beat-up delivery van she’d been forced to drive because her car needed work had gotten her a ticket from the Irvine Police Department. Worse, she argued vehemently with the officer, who arrested her for her belligerent behavior.

“Can you come and get me?” she asked.

“Don’t move — I’ll be right there,” I said, not realizing that in an 8-by-10 cell, there aren’t many options for going anywhere.

I was packing up and had one foot out the door when the phone rang again. It was Cay.

“April Fool’s!” she yelled.

A year later, Cay called to tell me that my mother would be coming to live with us for two weeks, a thought that caused my chest to tighten and my lungs to shrink.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll get her a nice room somewhere.”

“Gotcha!” she said.

As Bugs Bunny would have said of me after all these years, “What a maroon.”

It’s time to show our kids what a really good April Fool’s joke is like, from both the giving and receiving ends.

So today, pull a fast one on someone you know. And if someone pulls a fast one on you, laugh at it. Just remember that whatever you are told, you’re mother is not coming to live with you, your spouse is not in jail and you’re not calling a guy who has been dead for 10 years.

Maroon, indeed.

STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Send story ideas to dailypilot@latimes.com.