Friends know how nostalgic I am about newspapers and how sorry I am about what has become of them. I am a proud heir of the Fourth Estate, an ink-stained wretch who had a hand in writing the first draft of history in my corner of South Carolina.
There are good reasons I subscribe to newspapers.com rather than a contemporary paper. Newspapers.com is not cheap, but it is less expensive than an online subscription to my old paper, the Greenville News, which charges $10 per month. There's no local news in the paper anymore—there's barely even any paper in it—so either way, I'm missing last night's scores, the obituaries, and any news I can use.
Newspapers.com is an electronic archive of newspapers going back more than a century. It's way deeper than Google. Newspapers.com was a fountain of information when I was publishing The Stoneman Gazette, and it also is serving as a rich resource on Mount Le Conte, which will be the focus of my next publication.
And it occasionally turns up stories of when newspapers were fun. Such as this "Prize Lie of the Year" recently posted by my friend Terry Harmon.
Sounds like a tale our beloved Ray Hicks might have told.
As much as I enjoy a good old mountain yarn, what caught my eye was the reference to the Mendacity Medal. Mendacity is one of my favorite words. Call someone mendacious, and there's a chance they might feel flattered. So what if they don't know that mendacity means they are lying?
I had never heard of the Mendacity Medal, so I looked it up on newspapers.com. The award was given tongue-in-cheek by the North Carolina Press Association to recognize creative fiction that was published as news. Evidently, it was intended to be presented over 10 years, but the only references I could find were in 1910 and 1911.
The Boone story was evidently written in response to the original Mendacity Medal winner:
Here's another nominee from the Oxford (N.C.) Banner, July 29, 1911:
I was glad to see the name Grit. When I was a kid, I remember ads for a national newspaper called Grit, "America's Greatest Family Newspaper," which thrived on far-fetched stories. I have to presume the Siler City Grit was born of the same spirit. Though that paper died a century ago, it was ahead of its time in terms of reporting fake news.
The Siler City Grit won the 1911 medal for this story, which somehow defeated the Boone windpipes story. Evidently, the Grit editor, Isaac London, was the son of the Chatham Record editor.
The Grit editor deserves bonus points for the clever line about pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6), though he missed an opportunity to invoke honey-glazed ham:
Here's a 1910 clipping from The Greensboro Record. Who knows if the second item about the Wilkesboro man is mendacious? I think it is healthy to encourage readers to be skeptical.
These dubious stories appeared on the same page. The first of these might even have been a wink at the competing paper, the Greensboro Sun:
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