How I found out about "truthiness"

When my stepfather was at the peak of his popularity as a small-time television personality in Detroit, some folks from a weekly magazine covering the movements and minutiae of local celebrities showed up at our home to ferret some facts and snap some snapshots for a spread about "Cowboy Colt."

Even at seven or eight I could feel what I then did not know was moral outrage welling within my childish breast as the photographer started staging the first of many phony-baloney shots. For instance ...

~ My mother, younger brother, and I huddling next to the Cowboy on the couch, pretending to listen to the Cowboy reading aloud, our faces fixin' to explode from smilin' so hard, our necks about to snap from gazing upwards at him adoringly. (Never happened and could not have happened in a million years.)

~ My brother and I racing down the front walk, pretending to greet the Cowboy with squeals of potentially lethal glee, as the Cowboy pretended to emerge from the car in triumphant return from yet another butt-busting two-hour workday. (See "million years" above.)

And if the phony-baloney photos weren't egregious enough, there were the putative facts in the story itself.

I learned, for example, that performing rope tricks topped my personal inventory of fun things to do, buckaroo. I queried my mom about this reeking blob of bull pucky using the 1950s equivalent of "Yo! What's up with this?" In those days, the only good use I could think of for rope was binding my brat brother's hands and feet.

She explained, matter-of-factly, that juicing the truth was a common and innocuous practice in the world of magazine journalism. I registered the explanation, but it did not satisfy. As far as my little-kid mind was concerned, the truth, juiced, was just a stinkin' lie.

(How did you find out about "truthiness"? Please comment here or drop me a line.)

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