CNN punked on 140 year old hot dog story

Well, it sounds believable, doesn’t it?

Okay, maybe not. Googlers were fascinated today by a classic American triumph of hope over the rules of nature, a hot dog that braved the elements buried under the Coney Island boardwalk- in a block of ice, no less- to remain intact and recognizable, a relic of better times when our Kenyan president wasn’t trying to put socialism in the frankfurters.

Questions CNN may not have thought to ask- how did the block of ice survive a place where subways regularly top over ninety degrees starting in May? For over a century? The offending video report, a work of journalism from my own local news channel, Long Island’s News 12, appears to have been pulled from CNN’s website. But the story remains, having ricocheted across blogs and other news sites, all fascinated by the tale of the miracle wiener. (And I managed to grab a screenshot, above, that could have fooled the most intrepid of reporters.)

It appears the hoax wasn’t mean spirited, merely an homage to the gritty, PT Barnum-esque atmosphere of the Boardwalk. Tricia Vita, a spokeswoman for the Coney Island History Project, explained the prank:

“(Milton) Berger was a veteran of the Damon Runyonesque school of Broadway press agentry and the last of the Ballyhoo Boys,” she said in a release. “Before he came to Coney Island in 1952, his fellow publicists always remembered that Milton Berger got a man to sue a barber claiming he had ruined his toupee giving his a haircut, the idea of course being that the toupee was so good, it even fooled the barber.

One thing that didn’t surprise Vita was that the story had legs:

“I was surprised in the beginning at how many people believed it was true,” she said. “But after reading all the buzz about it on Twitter and the Internet, I’m not really that surprised because people want to believe these types of things are true.
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