Tag Archives: legend

Crickets

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Portland, Oregon
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

Crickets

Senior Prank/Practical Joke/Story

 

During a conversation about Senior pranks in high school, my informant recounted a Senior prank he heard happened at a neighboring school. The following is a transcript of our interview:

 

“Informant: There were two highschools, lakeridge was across the lake and we were rivals with them, but I had heard for Their Senior prank they got a thousand crickets and released them into the ventilation system and for the next month there were still cleaning up piles of crickets. Apparently it was horrible. Teachers were getting really pissed because they would chirp away in the back of the Class room, so during awkward lectures and speeches there would be crickets going in the back.”

 

My informant said that Senior pranks were often a topic of conversation in school.  Though he did not do any pranks, he said that he and his friends would often talk about them, trading stories they had heard from other schools.

 

This is an act of rebellion, using animals to desecrate the school.  This empowers the students, who are subjected to the authority of administrative bodies. Breaking down the seriousness of the school setting, the crickets chirp in the back of Classes. Often associated with awkward silence or the silence of an unentertained crowd, cricket chirping disrupts the Classroom and criticizes teachers by comparing them to boring things.  The act of a prank of a school illustrates the students’ empowerment through disobeying rules established by the administration and express students’ annoyance.

Bob’s Frieghter Jump

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student (Screenwriting)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/24/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant is a student at USC who hails from Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in the suburbs around Detroit, attended a private Catholic school there, and has great pride in his city. He has a large family with whom he is very close.

Bob

In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, my informant’s family has a lake house that they use for family gatherings in the summer. His family is rather large, so these gatherings involve three or four sets of grandparents, anywhere from four to six sets of aunts and uncles, plus my informant’s parents, and up to ten of my informant’s cousins along with him and his two siblings.

At these family gatherings one year, someone brought up a story that they’d heard about a man who leapt off a freighter into Lake Michigan and had never been found. No one knew who that man was, or why he jumped. The family together tried to research the incident online, but couldn’t find a single news story that sounded similar.

Over time the story has been brought up at the gatherings and has become a joke for my informant’s family. Someone in the family decided that the man’s name was Bob, and that somehow Bob was still hanging around the Upper Peninsula. My informant’s sister along with some other young kids from a nearby lake house once came across a large slab of broken rock that they declared “Bob’s Tomb.”

The story has circulated around the lakeside community, and has become a popular legend of the Upper Peninsula. But to my informant, it remains a family joke.

Brady’s Leap

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 48
Occupation: Database Manager
Residence: Monterey, CA
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant grew up in Kent, Ohio in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time the area was not rural, but it wasn’t urban in the modern sense. Neighborhoods were spread out with forests, lakes, and rivers dividing them. My informant spent much of her time walking and biking along trails to her friends’ homes, and in the summer they would spend much of their time swimming in the lakes. She lived most of her life in Ohio, attending college at Bowling Green State University and living for over ten years in Lakewood, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She considers herself every bit a midwesterner, though she currently resides in California.

My informant told me this story while discussing her plans to visit her family in Ohio this summer.

Legend of Brady’s Leap

My informant remembers first hearing this story in the 7th grade because that was, “around when we studied the Revolutionary War.”

Brady’s Leap is the name for a particular spot on the Cuyahoga River. My informant’s story told of a Captain Brady, who was sent by the American army to scout for the British camp in the Sandusky territory, which today is a large swath of Northeast Ohio. Brady and his men were captured by the British, but Brady escaped and tried to make his way back to the army camp near Pittsburgh. My informant’s story goes that Brady was discovered by Indians (Native Americans), and he was forced to run. When he reached the banks of the Cuyahoga River he was stuck, but to go back meant either re-capture by the British or death at the hands of the Indians. So instead, he took a flying leap across the river and miraculously made it to the other side.

My informant points out that between Brady’s flying leap and today, the river has been widened at that point. She says it was widened to let large supply ships through when the Erie canals were being built. To look at the spot now the leap would be impossible, but back then my informant believes the gap must have been no more than 20 feet for him to have made it across.

Learning the story in school, my informant said it was a way to relate the nation’s history to the area – to give the students a sense of connection to their home and to their country. The story does seem to have a patriotic message about the abilities of the early Americans, and though the legend does not specifically say that Brady was born in or lived in the Ohio territory, by claiming him as a local hero through the naming of a place on the river, it can give the locals a sense of pride in their history.

Jimmy Hoffa and Giant’s Stadium

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 50
Occupation: Professor of Creative Writing
Residence: Monterey, CA
Performance Date: 4/7/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant grew up in Hudson County, New Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s, spending most of his childhood in Secaucus. He remembers having friends whose family members had ties to the Italian mob, and in fact his own father worked as a Teamster (a cement mixer driver, specifically) for the Teamsters local 560. This was the chapter of the Teamsters union run by notorious Italian mob boss Tony Provenzano. My informant does not recall that living in such a mob run area ever caused him or his family any anxiety, it was simply a fact of life in Hudson County.

My informant now lives in Monterey, California, and will occasionally tell stories about New Jersey when his family is around, or when he is feeling nostalgic. I was able to take notes on this story while some of my informant’s family was visiting from the East Coast.

Jimmy Hoffa and Giant’s Stadium

My informant told me that because gangster and Detroit Teamster Jimmy Hoffa mysteriously disappeared during the construction of Giant’s Stadium (now officially named the Meadowlands Sports Complex) in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a popular theory was circulated that Hoffa was killed by the mob and dropped into the newly poured concrete in the stadium’s end zone.

“People liked that theory (where I lived). Most people thought it was possible. They knew how mobbed up the companies building the stadium were.”

However, my informant doesn’t quite believe this theory about Hoffa’s final resting place, because my informant’s father was one of the men pouring the cement at Giant’s Stadium. My informant’s father pointed out at the time that planting a body in the cement at the stadium would require a large number of people knowing about the hit (on Hoffa). It simply takes too many men with cement trucks to plausibly plant that body – and even if they did it at night after the construction day had ended, it would require hands to dig up the cement that had been laid during the day and Teamsters to pour new cement in order to prevent the construction crew from knowing that the cement had been tampered with.

“They’re (the mob) not bright bears as a rule, but they’re not that dumb,” my informant said. So though my informant has a personal connection to the story, he believes that it would have been easier for the mob to carve up Hoffa’s body into pieces and dump him in the Meadowlands, “or Snake Hill landfill, which is home to, a lotta guys apparently.” No reason to give Hoffa any special treatment.

The various theories about Hoffa’s disappearance that have come out of Hudson County, New Jersey seem to be an exhibition of the denizens of their knowledge of the way the mob works. Living with the acceptance of mob activity makes their actions something that can be enjoyable to speculate about, especially when people feel they have some understanding of their dealings. It’s a source of, in a way, town pride and personal connection between those people who lived in the mob’s shadow, but were not directly connected to them.

The Piano Box Burial: Family Legend

Nationality: Italian American and "mix of other ethnicities"
Age: 58
Occupation: General Surgeon
Residence: San Diego, California
Performance Date: 3.23.12
Primary Language: English

Family legend of the piano box burial as told verbatim by informant (C. stands for a name to be kept confidential):

“My Great Grandpa C., who before people were really morbidly obese, Grandpa C. was morbidly obese. It’s like nowadays you see people that are three and four-hundred pounds all the time. But supposedly Grandpa C. was about 300 pounds, 350 pounds. (wife interjects and he answers) Yeah he was only about 5 foot tall. And uh he also, I’m pretty sure, also had congestive heart failure which means his body retained water. So not only was he obese but he retained a lot of water and you know at the end of his life he really could only sit in a chair and he could hardly walk and his legs would get massively swollen because of his bad heart. And uh the legend is that you know when he finally died, of course, he died sitting in a chair cause he couldn’t walk and he couldn’t lie down because he would get too short of breath when he would try to lie flat, um and so they had to lift him up, you know a bunch of guys lifted him up and he was way too big for any kind of casket so they had to bury him in a piano box.

My father told me that story. Usually when he took us out to dinner, to an Italian Restaurant of course. (chuckles) It’s it’s a family legend, you know. ‘We’re gonna eat a lot of food tonight but you know don’t make it a habit to eat or you’re gonna end up like Grandpa C.’ (laughs)”

Despite the fact that this family legend has an element of humor, the warning is very real. Since the informant’s family is Italian, a culture known for its obsession with food, by telling the story of the family member so sick and so fat that he had to be buried in a box meant for a piano, the pleasure of eating becomes an affliction—something to be wary of. Of course, that the informants father told this to his 8 children before dinner-out is a clever way of controlling their intake, and thus the bill. However, coming from the informant, who is a surgeon, the story took on a slow, somber note as his understanding of the poor health his great grandfather was in likely made it much more vivid. So, his telling had a naturally health-conscious air to it.