In 1998, former Hoboken resident Sylvia Lovegren was reading the Hoboken Reporter – one of the eight papers in the Hudson Reporter’s chain of weeklies – and came across a sentence that threw her into fits and giggles. Five years later, hearing the same sentence still makes her squeal with laughter.
The "Police Beat" of the March 1 edition told of the drug confiscation of 14 bags of cocaine and three bags of marijuana. The item was followed by this statement: "If the drugs belong to you, call the Detective Bureau at 420-2106."
Knowing her husband, Ross Petras, and sister-in-law, Katherine Petras, were collecting clips for their Page-a-Day calendar entitled "The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said," Lovegren immediately handed them the clip from the newspaper. Five years later, a sentence written in jest was featured as the stupidest thing ever said on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2003.
"We get thousands of submissions," said Ross Petras. "We get submissions from Italy, France and all over the country. But finding things becomes harder the more we do the calendar."
The calendar is now in its 10th year of publication, and Petras and his sister, Katherine, have come to rely heavily on family and friends to be looking for ideas and clips that can be used in the calendar.
Petras and his sister originally got the idea to make a book containing the stupidest things people said while walking in Hoboken and reading about famous quotes and things people have said.
"We thought, ‘We want to hear the stupid things people have said,’ " Petras said. "We originally wrote a book in the late 1980s, around the Dan Quayle era."
That book, published by Workman Publishing in New York City, became a Page-a-Day calendar in 1995, with more than 2.5 million copies in print. Petras estimates more than 300,000 copies are sold each year since the calendar has been in production.
The Hoboken Reporter wrote the sentence about the detective bureau as a joke, and actually has included it in several different police beat items involving drug discoveries.
This isn’t the Reporter’s first brush with dubious fame. In the mid-1990s, a caption with a story about Mayor Anthony Russo cracking down on people leaving their dog wastes made it onto Jay Leno’s "Headlines" segment. The caption had run under two photos: a dog, and Mayor Russo’s face. The caption said, "Mayor Anthony Russo (left)…" Leno thought it was funny that the writer (Andy Newman, now a staff writer at the New York Times), had needed to identify which photo was the one of Russo. Newman later said he wrote "(left)" as a joke.