ENTERTAINMENT

The story of the 1982 Old Town subway hoax

Erin Udell
erinudell@coloradoan.com
The door to a tunnel is opened underneath Old Town October 15, 2016. Fort Collins Tours leads people underground for a different look at the city.

Just say the word "subway" and Vicky Lopez-Terrill knows what's coming.

She's a good sport about it. After five years married to prankster Bob Terrill — who passed away in 2011 — she just laughs at his old antics. The great subway hoax of 1982 is no different.

Always a jokester, Bob wrote a story in 1982 about a subway system built deep beneath Old Town in an effort to attract the 1904 World's Fair. It was published in a November 1982 issue of Poudre Magazine, detailing a subway system known as "the mole," that ran in Fort Collins from 1904 to 1918.

Underground shops and restaurants, with bistro tables still covered in dust, were just steps away from downtown Fort Collins, Bob wrote. It was known by few, and accessible by a set of stairs at the corner of Linden and Walnut streets, he said.

And, of course, it was all fiction.

"It was just Bob," Vicky said of why her late husband wrote the piece. "It's what he would do."

Bob Terrill

Another article titled "Going 'Down the Tube of Imagination" ran in the Rocky Mountain Collegian shortly after, calling Bob the subway system's "architect" and describing how he came up with the idea for the piece while working at Good Samaritan Society, a local nursing home.

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While incredibly detailed, parts were clearly far fetched, as Bob had planned. At one point, he referred to the subway system's role in a decades-old conspiracy to annex Fort Collins to Wyoming and make it the state's capital.

"We would get calls from students who heard about it and wanted to talk to (Bob) about it, thinking there was a subway," Vicky said.

While there never was a subway system, Old Town does have a small network of tunnels beneath its sidewalks and streets. That's possibly the reason some people believed Bob's story.

"I got a call (about the subway) yesterday!" said Lori Juszak, who runs Fort Collins Tours, a local tour company that takes people into Old Town's tunnels. “A woman called to go on a tunnel tour and asked if there were subway tunnels.”

People generally know it's a hoax, Juszak added. And it was one of Bob's best.

Married for five years, and together for seven, Vicky said she and Bob met while working at the Loveland Library.

"One time, he put a cherry pie through the book return slot," Vicky said. Another time, he slipped a security strip from a library book into the lining of a co-worker's coat to repeatedly set off the library's alarm.

He'd make countless prank calls, and even used to jump in strangers' cars.

After his Poudre Magazine days, Vicky said Bob worked for KCSU and was a disc jockey at KRFC-FM before taking a job as a media librarian.

"He was brilliant with music," Vicky said, "and humor.

"April Fools was just a regular day."

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