Apr 4, 2014 6 min read

…Well, as I predicted, last week’s “Progress” edition — which featured the sixth annual installment of “Who’s Who in Greene County” — certainly generated quite a bit of community buzz.

I want to thank the many folks who offered kind words and positive opinions about our 2014 “Progress” edition and the much talked about “Who’s Who” section, which provided profiles on 20 people (as well as a statue and a police dog!) who were influential and positively impacted our communities over the past year.

As I said before, we take great pride in this edition because it serves as a spotlight for the many businesses and individuals who help make Greene County special. We’ve had quite a few readers comment on the list; some expressed their opinion that a certain person should not have been mentioned, while others questioned why they were not on the list. But most of the reaction we received was positive, as people loved the idea of having “Who’s Who” in our paper each year.

I also want to thank the many folks who provided information about the people whose names were placed on our 2014 “Who’s Who” list. This project was truly a community effort, and we could not have put together such a nice section without their cooperation.

Organizing, writing, and designing the “Who’s Who” section took our staff a great deal of work and effort, but we are proud of the final result, and we salute those who were selected to the 2014 list because of their dedication to making a positive impact to their communities.

Something tells me that the annual “Who’s Who” list will continue to be an exciting Messenger tradition for many years to come…

…Speaking of Messenger traditions: It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing this year we will not be presenting an “April Fools” edition, a one-time long-running tradition for the paper and one of my favorite Messenger pastimes.

To be honest, in the past I always looked forward to the April Fool’s issues because the staff always wanted to have a little lighthearted fun with our readers, in the hopes of achieving that time-honored April Fool’s tradition of being able to say “Gotcha!” We also wanted to poke a little fun at our public officials and local residents, sometimes even at ourselves.

No doubt about it, credit deserves to be given to the Messenger’s original founders, Jim Moore and Dan Morris Sr., for having the guts – as well as a wicked sense of humor – to try to pull a few fast ones on their unsuspecting readers when they first began publishing the annual April Fool’s issues. And the stories that we’ve heard about the readers who called in to complain after they were fooled are almost as legendary as the April Fool’s gags themselves.

Even though I was not working here when the paper first began its annual tradition of silliness in the early 1990’s, it has been an honor for me to have been involved in some rather amusing bogus stories during my many years here at the Messenger. Over the years, we have published a number of silly stories that range from Bigfoot and “dreep” sightings to the Steel Phantom coming to the fairgrounds, from bogus million dollar contests to shocking reports about tollbooths on our county roads, Wal-Mart superstores coming to rural areas such as Graysville and even Ryerson Park becoming a minimum security prison.

We know there are readers who have enjoyed this silly special issue in the past, and we know there are people who have absolutely hated it. But it always certainly had a “buzz” about it, and that’s what made the issue so much fun in the past.

However, a few years back we decided to stop publishing any silly stories, mostly due to timing. During a four-year span, the Messenger decided to publish its annual “Get To Know You” issue (now known as “Progress”) at the end of March, which is the same issue that we had previously published our April Fool’s stories.

The “GTKY/Progress” issue is one of our biggest issues of the year and is one that our staff takes great pride in putting together. Ultimately, we felt that trying to shoehorn some fake April Fool’s stories into this very special issue would be inappropriate and it would take away from the many stories about our businesses and personality profiles – not to mention the important “Who’s Who” section – that we so proudly presented.

But after many years of laying low with the tomfoolery, we proudly brought back the April Fools shenanigans in 2011 because our publication date happened to fall on April 1. And it’s true what they say, absence does make the heart grow fonder. Because we really did fool quite a few of our readers, and we loved every second of it. And, we were surprised that many of our readers had missed the tradition as much as we did.

This year, however, the decision was made to scrap April Fools, and again it had to do with timing. We felt that March 28 was too early to pull any fast ones and our next publication on April 4 would be far too late for any April 1 silliness. So, we decided that the best thing to do was to lay low this year once again on the goofy stories. And it was apparently a good decision too, since it is enabling us to devote more time on covering the serious news stories and human interest features that we feel are of interest to Greene County readers.

Yes, we will admittedly miss the April Fools’ issue once again this year. But don’t be surprised if the edition rears its ugly grinning head again down the road. We consider it to be a special part of the Messenger’s history, and we hope to one day bring it back…