Reporter's Phone Trick

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/obituaries/obituary-ted-kidd-journalist-1-3050327

The Scotsman

17 August 2013

Obituary: Ted Kidd, journalist

by GORDON CASELY

Born: 21 January, 1936, in Arnage, Aberdeenshire. Died: 12 August, 2013, in Aberdeen, aged 77.

Ted Kidd, the doyen of the press corps in Aberdeen, was a journalist of the old school; he described his job as giving him “a ringside view of life”. […]

Those were days before mobile phones, when releases from Peterhead [Prison] caused the hacks to race south towards Aberdeen to secure use of the first telephone box near the village of Stirlinghill to phone the story over.

An apocryphal tale is that Kidd had a contact who worked for Post Office Telephones, and who quietly gave him a special key, explaining that behind each phone kiosk was a lock with which the phone could be turned off.

So prior to the next Peterhead incident, Kidd stopped at the box, and switched it off with his master key. He arrived back at the box to find it surrounded by angry hacks, about to press south to find the next working phone kiosk.

Kidd quietly waited until they departed, slipped round the back, and turned on the phone line again. […]

Child Rings Doorbell, Home Invasion Follows

https://www.facebook.com/harlingenpolice

Harlingen [TX] Police Department

August 22 via mobile

Don’t be fooled by Internet rumors. Harlingen Police has no known reports of a little girl ringing doorbells for robbers. This is a HOAX!

http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=938340#.UhpSkD80_kA

KGBT-TV [Harlingen, TX]

25 August 2013

Facebook kidnapping hoaxes popping up across theValley

by Sergio Chapa

[…] Earlier this week, Harlingen police took a stand on Facebook about a social media hoax in their area.

Reports of a child being used a decoy in local home invasions.

It’s not clear who’s starting these false Facebook rumors or why, but Harlingen police said they could possibly face criminal charges.

"Anything that causes any type of reaction by law enforcement or a public entity, or places fears in others, which something like this could do, it's criminal," Sgt. John Parrish told Action 4 News just earlier this week.

School Pool Covered Over After Drowning

http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20130824/NEWS01/308240013/Urban-legends-alive-well-Shreveport?nclick_check=1

Shreveport Times [LA]

23 August 2013

Urban legends alive and well in Shreveport

Written by John Andrew Prime

[Instructor] Lisa Levermann stomps on the wooden floor of the dance studio at the rear of C.E. Byrd High School and the echo is like that of a big bass drum, deep and hollow, like a mournful moan from the beyond.

In a way, it is. The studio floor was built on top of an ornate pool in 1937, some say after a drowning there. […]

As for the girl said to have drowned, and the pool, most who have looked into it think it had to do with money. Some accounts say the Olympic-sized pool, shown on the original plans for the school now on file at LSUS, was salt-water, which due to the corrosive nature of the water are much more expensive to maintain. That, and no pool was planned for Fair Park High School, so fairness issues came up as well.

According to the official school publication “Glimpses of the City of Byrd,” in spite of the Great Depression, “a modest building and renovation program occurred at Byrd in the 1930s. The Caddo Parish School Board agreed to the construction of tennis courts, lighting of the football field, adding a music room, and in 1937 flooring the swimming pool so a gym could be installed.”

Principal Jerry Badgely […] thinks an additional concern influenced closing the pool.

“Polio was a big concern and that may have weighed in,” he said. “It’s not a concern any more. It was probably as much a maintenance issue as anything. You have to look at the trade off. What we got out of it was a gymnasium that wasn't part of the school when it was built.” […]