The professional prankster who fooled America

Alan Abel found himself stuck in a traffic jam on a Texas highway in 1959, the road blocked by a cow and a bull mating on the blacktop. Amused by the aghast faces of his fellow drivers, Abel dreamed up the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, a national campaign group whose mission was the clothing of any animal “that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches.” SINA activists—Abel and his friends—drew shorts over the canine logos of Greyhound buses, airdropped clothes onto a cow pasture, and picketed the White House, demanding that Jacqueline Kennedy cover up her horse. Journalists, even Walter Cronkite, dutifully reported the group’s slogan: “A nude horse is a rude horse.” It was all a hoax, Abel revealed in 1964, the first of many outrageously elaborate pranks. His goal was to provide “an adventure in absurdity,” he said. “A few hundred years ago, I would have been a court jester.” Born in Zanesville, Ohio, Abel got an early lesson in the art of deception at his family’s general store, said The Times (U.K.). His father would put a sign reading “Limit—two to a customer” in front of goods that wouldn’t sell, “and they’d be gone in a minute.” After working as a concert drummer and percussionist, Abel found his calling as a professional hoaxer, said The Washington Post. He ran the 1964 and 1968 presidential campaigns of Yetta Bronstein—a fictitious Jewish homemaker from the Bronx voiced by his wife, Jeanne—whose slogan promised, “Vote for Yetta and things will get betta.” He launched the First Topless String Quartet, which Life magazine reported flatly as “Bach with breasts,” and Omar’s School for Beggars, a New York City institution where the newly poor could learn the art of panhandling. Abel gave “a harried news media” exactly what it wanted, “irresistibly gift-wrapped,” said The New York Times. His press conferences over the years came with free food and liquor, and often featured “comely women.” Among Abel’s most elaborate hoaxes was the 1980 faking of his own death, which involved a grieving “widow” appearing in the Times newsroom and a fake undertaker in Utah answering fact-checking calls from the newspaper. After an obituary appeared in the Times, Abel rose from the grave. “Now, when I really die,” he said, “I’m afraid no one will believe it.”