Turns out that Sal Walker and his band April Shortcake, currently rising in the country music charts, will not perform this summer in Bluffton – or for that matter, will never perform here. 

Sad to say, but the Derek Dukes story (click here to read it) about helping a stranded group of musicians on exit 140 was simply a figment of our imagination that occurred hours before the clock passed midnight from March 31 to April 1. 

Republicans might call it fake news. We have no idea if any Democrat even read the story.

But, by all accounts, it was, however, a popular story. Here’s proof.

The story helped propel the Icon to 4,413 Facebook reaches within 2 hours from 10 p.m. to midnight, March 31. Then on April 1, the Icon registered over 2,500 reaches.

These two days compare to our typical 1,500 daily Facebook reaches.

More background
Our thinking about this year’s April Fool’s story started around 6 p.m. on April Fool's eve. It involved heavy brainstorm while drying the supper dishes.

Given this year’s virus situation we didn’t want to cause mass hysteria – as if these stories ever reach that level.

Rather, we simply hope to achieve 5 seconds or so of, "what's this!?"

We jotted down some ideas that were, honestly pretty lame. For example:
• Photo of horned squirrel identified in Bluffton
• Pre-historic cave drawings discovered on bank of Riley Creek
• Gold coins discovered in a cave on bank of Riley Creek
• One-day open season on Canada Geese at the Buckeye
   (suggested last summer by Tim Schumacher) 

In another year, we might play with the geese story. It would make lots of people very angry, however. We'd write it so it as was Tim's idea, just to defuse the finger-pointing at us.

Somehow the idea of a vehicle breakdown on the interstate appeared, somewhere between drying the plates and the forks.

First idea was that a nationally-known rap artist had the vehicle breakdown and the Icon was going to post the Bluffton lyrics he wrote.

Then, a phone call to daughter, Anne, in Cincinnati for advice, redirected us to make it a country singer instead.

She suggested the name Sal Walker and shortbread (lower case “s”). We planned to make Sal’s girlfriend’s name April Loof, but that was edited to making the band’s name April Shortbread (with a capital “S”).

By 9 p.m. the story began to fall into place with one element missing: a local hero.

We  perused the list of regular suspects. This list includes Roger Edwards, Neil Reichenbach, Ray Raeburn, Brendon Matthews, Greg Denecker, Phil Zimmerly, Steve Stratton, Luke Young, Father John McLaughlin, Everett Collier, Greg Probst and others. Suddenly we realized this story was all about Derek Dukes.

After a brief phone call to Mr. Dukes, who thought the idea was “absolutely crazy,” meaning he liked it, the rest is history.

There’s an Ada version of this story that involves the village administrator Jamie Hall. Click here for that version.

See you next year.