The Lou Tintarello Files: Letters to the Editor Hoaxes

The following ‘Letters to the Editor’ are fictional missives written by Timothy Hull to the Editorial Board of the Times-Herald Record over a period of time stretching from May 2003 to April of 2004. These letters, all published within the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section of the New York/Hudson Valley’s largest daily newspaper, revolve around a large cast of dubious characters who grouse and pontificate on myriad topics, mostly related to the closing of a real-life garbage dump in Middletown, NY called the Al Turi Landfill.

The Times-Herald Record printed over thirteen of Timothy Hull’s satirical letters before questioning the validity of such bizarre and obviously falsely-written public opinions. The letters employ a complex system of arguments, points and counter-points, while weaving intricate webs of stories and facts between the sundry characters and their assertions. Topics range from waste-to-ethanol issues, the impossibility of landfill ecology, Bill Clinton, bogus government agencies, Michael Jackson, archaic tax codes and chemicals plants to Wal-Mart and the Mafia.

The fictional letters were written in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s pseudonym satirical letters to the newspapers within the colonies, in order to raise questions and force dialogue using the mechanisms of humor and absurdity. Franklin developed many identities and wrote hundreds of letters to his brother’s newspaper as well as to his own, causing scandal and dissent as well as fostering multiple sides of an argument or illustrating the absurdity of popular claims.

Timothy Hull’s letters were written partly out of boredom wile living in Upstate, New York, but also partly out of a desire to expose the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section as a patently under-utilized and oft lampooned section of the newspapers as well as to illuminate the illusion of a people’s forum that actually can serve as a platform for unsubstantiated claims and bogus identities. The letters were also written to highlight the disorganized and misguided waste disposal policies of local and state government and the essential absurdity of garbage in general. The instance of satirical fictional letter writing to public forums can be considered a vaunted and timeless American pursuit and the Lou Tintarello Files just one piece of a larger history. See Letters.

Times-Herald Record’s eventual discovery of the Lou Tintarello Files, April 2004

Click Here to see the Letters