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Pranks and Personal Narratives

Folklore is sometimes viewed as a synomym for falsehood. That is not the case. One type of folklore is the personal narrative. These can be serious or fun but reflect events in a person’s life. Parents have long liked to tell stories about the scrapes their children get into as children or teens. The following narrative focuses on a prank that a teen played.

“That was right at the time Davis High School had been divided. It had been the only high school in Davis County, and then they had bought a new high school down in Bountiful, and this year they had gotten a new high school up in Clearfield. And they were so competitive, and it was such an exciting time. Clearfield had their firsts: they had their band, it was the first big football game in their brand new stadium, they had all of their girls (the pep-squad), and everything, and their flad. Everything was so new! And the green falcon (was their mascot), they were the green falcons. And they were ready. They were going to beat Davis. They were going to show’em. Some of their boys had gone to Davis, and now they were over there (the new high school). It was a big day for them.

“Well, I came home from work, and my dishpan was right outside on the lawn and it was all green inside. I said ‘what’s that doing out there, what happened to it?’ Well I didn’t know till later. What happened was that Rand, and I guess a friend of his, they got a chicken and they took it home and they dyed it green. And they made a little collar around it’s neck with a thing standing up on it that read ‘I’m the green falcon!’ And then, they took it over to the Clearfield Stadium and they gave that chicken a little whiskey. They’d found some empty whiskey bottles, and they had just a little bit left in the bottles and they emptied them all into one, and then they poured it down that chicken’s throat.

“And then when the half started, and Clearfield’s big new band came out and their girls marching, Rand went out and turned the chicken loose on the 50-yard line. And that chicken acted like it had been trained! They said it was hilarious! It marched back and forth and it would fall over, and it would get up, it’d go around and it’d ‘cluck! cluck! cluck!’ And everyone was just dying laughing! And Rand let it loose, of course he had a Hawaiian shirt on, an Aloha shirt, so you couldn’t miss him. Those kids were so mad. It broke up everything! And he started to run, and boys out of the Clearfield student body raced after him to catch him–they didn’t, thank goodness, they would’ve killed him.” (FA 1 1621)

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