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THE BACKSTORY
We’re picturing the slippery slope between truth and fakery
By Clay Eals and Jean Sherrard
You might remember the clever TV commercial that ended with a voice shattering a wineglass: “Is it live or is it Memorex?”
Photos, too, can deceive as they delight. So given today’s A.I. and deep fakes, we have to ask: Can we really tell the difference between truth and fiction?
In that spirit, consider these descriptions of peculiar photos from our past:
- An undated quintet of smiling men with flashlights standing around a pallet of 200 dead rats.
- A 1925 “men’s comfort station” at 5th & Lenora consisting simply of a long, wooden rail topped by suspended rolls of toilet paper.
- A 1938 City Light parade float carrying two men dressed like women while performing household chores beneath a sign: “Mothers on a Sitdown Strike: She’s Holding Out for a New Electric Range.”
- A 20-foot-tall, 12-ton fruitcake at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
Those are among the images that didn’t make it into today’s cover-story compendium, “Oddities in Our Midst.” Just wait’ll you see the ones that did.
It’s our way of celebrating April Fool’s Day. This year we were given the chance to spin our “Now & Then” wheels on the slippery roads of history. In our resulting sideshow, we seek to astonish, daze, mislead and amuse by showcasing 10 outlandish, hard-to-believe vignettes.
Our “Then” images came from 80 historians, archivists and history buffs whom we asked to play along. Some of their 100-plus submissions defied reason and research. Others inspired the imagination.
We’re grateful for them all, and we applaud our many co-conspirators, notably Nancy Guppy, Peter Steinbrueck, Ben Laigo, Peggy Sturdivant, Elke Hautala, Ruth Pickering, Pete Blecha and, from King County Archives, Danielle Coyle.
Danielle has worked from her Fir Street office in the Central Area since 2017. She and her coworkers served us up some doozies, which is no surprise. They know their stuff.
“It’s fun when you get a question that is something of a treasure hunt,” Danielle says, “but the real goal is to guide people where they need to go. If you can point them in the right direction, they might stumble over something they didn’t even know they were looking for.”
We stumbled over a fool’s bounty. And today, with our 10 photo stories, you get to test your regional truth meter. Is it Sound or just a Wild-Western whopper?