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A 1941 gag press release predicted a Ridgewood 1-year-old would be president in 1996

In 1941, the Ridgewood Times published a gag press release predicting 1-year-old Robert John Kurtz would become the 42nd president of the United States.

A 1941 gag press release predicted a Ridgewood 1-year-old would be president in 1996
The Ridgewood home once humorously dubbed the future presidential shrine of Robert John Kurtz, as it appears today. Photo via Google Maps.
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On Christmas Eve of 1941, with the country three weeks into World War II, the front page of the Ridgewood Times ran a press release dated 55 years in the future. It announced that a one-year-old boy from 67-09 62nd Street had just been elected the 42nd president of the United States.

The whole thing was a gag, and the QNS columnist who writes under the byline The Old Timer resurfaced it on June 27 in the paper’s “Our Neighborhood: The Way It Was” column. The joke belonged to a newspaperman named Harold Stroh, a friend of the Kurtz family who, the Times reported at the time, wrote the fake announcement on a dare.

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Featured image: photo via Google Maps)

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