Article Hugh Troy
Hugh Troy posing in front of one of his murals. New York City, Rockefeller Center, 1940. By trade Hugh Troy (1906-1964) was an illustrator. By nature he was a practical joker. A true master of the art. Numerous different pranks and practical jokes are attributed to him. However, it’s not always clear (to me, at least) if all the pranks attributed to him actually occurred (and when exactly he perpetrated them). Some of the tales, and especially details within them, may simply be part of the legend that’s grown up around him.
One of the more frequently repeated ‘Legends of Troy’ was that while he was a student at Cornell University he used a rhino-foot wastepaper basket to leave tracks in the snow leading to the edge of Beebee lake. When the tracks were found and identified by one of the university’s biologists, half the campus thought a rhino must have escaped from a nearby zoo and fallen into the lake. Because the lake was the source of the campus’s drinking water, many students refused to drink what they believed was rhino-tainted tap water once the lake thawed in the spring.
Another of his campus pranks involved a professor who used to leave his black rubber boots out to dry by the classroom door while he was lecturing. One day Troy secretly spirited the boots away, painted them to look like feet, hid his artwork with black soot, then placed them back by the door. When the professor put the boots back on and walked outside, the soot washed away. It looked like he was walking around barefoot.
Finally, while working as the student sports reporter at Cornell, Troy invented a character named “Johnny Tsal”. Tsal was a poor wretch of a character who would inevitably finish last in whatever race that Troy was assigned to cover. ‘Tsal,’ of course, was ‘last’ spelt backwards. Troy said he invented this perpetual loser so that he wouldn’t have to feel bad about reporting someone’s defeat.
When Troy graduated from Cornell he got a job working as an artist in New York City. One day he reportedly went down to Central Park and brazenly began to carry away a public bench. He didn’t get very far before a policeman stopped him, hauled him into the police station, and charged him with stealing public property. At which point, much to the confusion of the police officers, Troy whipped out his sales receipt. It turned out that he owned the bench. He had purchased the bench at a store earlier in the day and left it in the park, just so that he could ‘steal’ it later.
Then there was the hole-in-the-road prank. According to this story Troy and a friend dressed up as city workers, placed ‘men at work’ signs on a busy street, and started to dig a hole in a city street. The police eventually arrived and, believing that they were real city workers, obligingly began to divert traffic around them. Once they had dug a good-sized hole, Troy and his friend simply gathered up their tools and left. The puzzled police officers continued to stand there diverting traffic.
Troy’s most famous prank involves a 1935 exhibit of Van Gogh’s art at the Museum of Modern Art. Troy was convinced that most of the people attending the exhibit didn’t really care that much about Van Gogh’s art. Instead, they were drawn by the sensational nature of the artist’s life. To prove his point, Troy slipped into the exhibit and surreptitiously left a fake ear molded out of beef perched on a table. Beside the ear he put a sign declaring that, “This is the ear which Vincent Van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress, a French prostitute, Dec. 24, 1888.” Sure enough, soon more people were crowded around the table with the ear than were looking at the paintings.
There are many more ‘Legends of Troy,’ but I’ll end with this prank from his days in the military during World War II. Instead of seeing combat, Troy was given a desk job, which he found excruciatingly boring. To amuse himself he began submitting ‘flypaper reports’ to headquarters. These were counts, printed up on official-looking paper, of all the flies trapped by flypaper during the last twenty-four hours. Much to his amusement he learned that headquarters took these fly counts very seriously. Other officers even began being reprimanded for not submitting their own flypaper reports.
References
- Con Troy. Laugh With Hugh Troy. Trojan Books. 1983.