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Mayor Wants to Outlaw Lying -- Yeah, That’s the Ticket

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Times Staff Writer

The mayor of this tumbledown town of liars wants his neighbors to stop fibbing -- and he’s proposed a law to keep them honest.

A big, blustery man fond of blue-and-white-striped overalls, Mayor Jo Hamlett says he wants to start fining anyone who dares stretch the truth. There are only 53 folks in town -- make that 52, since a jilted boyfriend took to the road -- but if his ordinance passes, Hamlett figures the violations will mount quickly.

Just the other day, he watched as a local by the name of Bob strode into the tavern, boasting he’d just shot a mighty big turkey, 27 pounds if it was an ounce.

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Hamlett hauled the bird out of Bob’s pickup and plopped it on a kitchen food scale. It registered 24 1/2 pounds. “You see,” the mayor said, with a hint of glee, “he added 2 1/2 pounds to that bird.” He figured it would be up to 29 pounds the next time Bob told the story.

That’s how it’s always been in Mount Sterling. Turkeys gain a few pounds with each telling of the hunt. Fish stretch a few inches in the recounting. And don’t even ask about the size of the morel mushrooms gathered around here this time of year.

The way some in town tell it, Hamlett, 69, is the biggest prankster of them all. He insists he’s simply an honest man. In any case, he sprang his startling proposal on Mount Sterling during the annual budget meeting last month.

The town was debating whether to fill a vacant council seat (an election would cost $230, not to mention the salary of $6 a month). Quite off subject, the mayor stood up and declared it was time to turn his beloved home into a beacon of honesty.

“It would make Mount Sterling a more reputable town, refined and respected worldwide,” Hamlett said.

His proposal made the local paper. Soon, Hamlett was talking to reporters from all over -- even Australia.

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Along Mount Sterling’s six dirt and gravel roads, folks began to wonder whether they could live on the level.

“The town will dry up. That’s what it lives on: Bull,” said Linda Kennedy, 45, a part-time bartender cleaning the counter at A.J.’s Bar and Grill. She bit into a piece of red licorice, scowling. “The ordinance is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard.”

She was warming to a lecture, but Harry Hoffinger interrupted: “How can you tell if someone in Mount Sterling is lying?”

Hoffinger, 60, didn’t wait for an answer. “Their mouth is open,” he said, chortling. And shut his tight.

Hamlett listens to such exchanges with a spot of unease.

He relishes the thought of prowling Mount Sterling on bull patrol. But in the last weeks he has started to realize that insisting folks stick to the facts just might kill Mount Sterling.

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Stories to Tell

Life in a town this small and this remote is all about people -- and the stories that connect them.

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This is a place without cell phones, without pagers or Palm Pilots. Many folks don’t have answering machines. Days are not scheduled minute by minute. Coffee dates are not set up weeks in advance. Even the hours at A.J.’s are loose: “7 a.m. to 11 p.m.???” the sign reads.

In the summer, Mount Sterling sponsors “Mud Run” competitions on Mosquito Field; before a whooping crowd, local guys rev their pickups through a goopy, chest-deep ditch.

Many homes have satellite TV. And from October through April, the town of Memphis, Mo., 22 miles away, shows movies twice a week at an old-time theater; the current feature is Disney’s “Jungle Book II.”

Other than that, the main entertainment is conversation.

People tend to drop in on one another unannounced just to talk. Over fence posts, as their children chase cats through the grass, they swap gossip. Over iced tea on the porch, they reminisce.

“The miles get longer and the snow gets deeper every year,” said June Manary, 57, who spends her time renovating a farmhouse built in 1865.

Some of the old-timers spend days cooking up the perfect yarn to stretch out over coffee at A.J.’s.

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As junkyard owner Charlie Brewer, 59, put it: “You add a little bit here, you subtract a little there, and you come up with something great.”

“Hey,” Paul Morris, 51, called out to a friend at A.J.’s one recent afternoon. “How many mice did you discover in your [hunting] cabin this year? I only got three.”

“Yeah, but you got that one that must have weighed 2 pounds,” the bartender, Kennedy, goaded him.

“Oh yeah, that one,” Morris said. “The tail alone was 3 pounds! I had three guys pulling at it and they couldn’t get the mouse out of its hole. It’s still there, behind the wall. Cats won’t even stop by my place anymore.”

Down the bar a bit, George Hoffinger, 57, was dishing out his favorite recipe for morel mushrooms, fried up in butter with some eggs and cracker crumbs. “You know,” he said, “I have these amplifier earphones, and when you put them on you can hear those mushrooms growing.”

His older brother Harry popped open his second can of Miller Lite. Or perhaps it was his third. “Ask me about my sex life,” he muttered, “but don’t ask me where I find my mushrooms. Now, I was going to tell you about that 16-point buck I shot last year.... “

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His brother snorted. “I thought it was a kangaroo,” he said.

Founded in 1848 along the Fox River in southeast Iowa, Mount Sterling once had a few hundred residents. Then the railroad stopped coming. The pickle factory closed. And the town began to wither.

The houses that remain are scattered helter-skelter on broad lawns, with horses or swing sets or old car parts out front. A few are more than a century old, and look it. The newest homes are double-wide trailers, trim and tidy. Blue jeans and towels snap on clotheslines. Dogs run yipping down the roads.

A century-old church with rich, blue stained-glass windows is half-painted, awaiting renovation. An equally old schoolhouse is long past saving, roof buckled, rotting walls near collapse.

The gravel roads of Mount Sterling have no names. Or rather, they do have names, but few know them. The council has never bothered to hang up street signs.

There is a community center (it doubles as City Hall), but there is no money to install a bathroom. Council members who drink too much coffee before a meeting have to dash across the street to A.J.’s.

Log-cabin rustic, decorated with antlers and mounted fish, the tavern is the only business in town other than a hunting lodge called the Southern Comfort Motel. Both pull double duty: The tavern serves as the polling place, the motel’s porch as Mount Sterling’s post office.

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“If you’re used to California, well, it’s a different deal out here,” said Hamlett, who is fond of sayings like “Hold the mule!”

Some residents raise cattle, soybeans or alfalfa. Others work at a refrigeration plant nine miles down the road.

Unlike many fading prairie towns, Mount Sterling has a fair share of young families, including half a dozen school-age kids -- some of them a bit nervous about the prospect of banning fibs.

“If someone asks you if their hair looks nice, you’d have to tell them no!” said 10-year-old Martie Slocum, a fourth-grader. (She’d also like an opinion on whether it’s lying to feed your oatmeal to the dog, then tell your mom you cleaned your plate.)

As Martie and her little sister Rhonda whispered about the benefits of stretching the truth, neighbor Judy Ash, sitting on her front porch, grinned. “I admire that old man [Hamlett] for what he’s doing,” said Ash, 58, a council member. “This is getting people to laugh.”

But could it really work?

Several states, including Iowa, have attempted to ban political lies -- variously defined as “baseless charges against opponents” or “untrue, deceptive or misleading” campaign statements.

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Such laws have proved almost impossible to enforce.

As for outlawing everyday fibs, “you might as well ban breathing,” said Dr. Charles Ford, a psychiatry professor at the University of Alabama and author of a book on the psychology of deceit.

One-third of all conversations that last at least five minutes involve at least one lie, Ford said. “It’s just a fact of human communication.”

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Selling Permits to Fib

“If they passed this thing, everyone in town would have a ticket within 15 or 20 minutes,” said Kelly Kennedy, 27, a welder.

Hamlett agrees. In fact, it’s given him a new idea. Instead of skulking around town to catch his neighbors telling tall tales, he’s thinking maybe he ought to sell permits to fib. Hunters could buy a seasonal pass granting them the right to turn a 25-pound turkey into a 30-pounder, or better.

That ought to raise a few dollars to put a bathroom in City Hall.

In the end, the fate of fibbing may come down to political calculation. Hamlett got 18 out of 19 votes last time he ran for council. (The 19th vote was disqualified; a “spoiled ballot,” he said.)

If he pushes the ban on lying, surely the honest folk of Mount Sterling will back him.

But will that be enough?

Hamlett sighed, considering.

“I tell you what,” he said finally. “I think I’d rather have the liars on my side.”

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