We were in his office discussing some business when the phone rang. He answered it.
"I wouldn’t pay fifty dollars to spend the whole night with her," he said just before he slammed the phone down!
I asked him what just happened.
"Oh, Loren called me pretending to be a fund raiser, and asked me if I would give fifty dollars to spend the evening with Dixie Lee Ray," he told me. He was smiling as he waited for the phone to ring so he and Loren could laugh at him getting the better end of that prank - but the phone didn’t ring.
After several minutes, Dad called Loren to see how he liked his response. Loren claimed he didn’t make the call despite Dad pressing him for a while to admit it.
Dad then called his brother Rudy, who also denied it, and his other brother Garth who, too, said he didn’t make the call.
"I don’t know who made the call, but I know May must have put him up to it," he exclaimed! However, she also denied any part in the fund raiser prank.
Dad was certain that it was, indeed, Loren who made the call, and for the next couple of weeks he tried goading him into admitting it. Finally, Loren told him to just face it: he had said that to someone who was trying to raise money for the governor’s campaign.
"Maybe so," he figured. "Well, it’s not like I was going to vote for her."
Though he seemed to reconcile that it was not a prank call, he would, for several years, bring it up to various friends with the hope that they would finally admit to it. No one ever did.
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More about Dad:
