Coeur d'Alene Neighbors Keep 30-Year April Fools' Prank Tradition Alive

On Spokane Avenue, Zoe Ann Thruman set her alarm for 3:20 a.m. She had a newspaper to intercept.

The Coeur d'Alene resident rose before sunrise on April 1, slipped a counterfeit edition of The Coeur d'Alene Press beneath the real one, and left it at neighbor Steve Sperber's door. The fake front page, dressed up with a hand-lettered "CDA Press" banner, carried the headline: "Local residents win big in Idaho lottery!!" Inside were fabricated quotes and mock interviews with the Sperbers' children. Mary Sperber's reaction, when the ruse landed, summed up 30 years of this friendship in three words: "Where's the money?"

The Sperber-Thruman prank rivalry has run on Spokane Avenue for close to three decades, built on escalating creativity rather than embarrassment. Past editions have included cans tied to car bumpers, balloons stuffed into entryways, and hand-painted smiley faces placed on windows. The fake lottery scoop, complete with a fictitious Steve Sperber quote reading "Wow!! We can't believe it!! We didn't even buy a ticket!!" and a fabricated Mary Sperber reply of "Five trillion dollars!! Are you kidding me!!" represented the 2026 chapter.

For Sperber, the impulse traces back to an older brother who first introduced him to prank humor. That inheritance eventually found a new home on Spokane Avenue, where the pair have described the exchanges as a "nice, clean way to have fun with your neighbors."

The tradition carries particular weight in a Coeur d'Alene that looks considerably different than when the rivalry began. The Coeur d'Alene Metropolitan Statistical Area now counts approximately 188,323 residents, according to 2024 U.S. Census estimates compiled by Regional Economic Development Inc., growing at 1.6% annually, a rate that outpaces the national metro average of 1.1%. Kootenai County, which spans 1,310 square miles and encompasses 18 lakes, 56 miles of navigable rivers, and 360,000 acres of National Forest, recorded a residential population of 171,362 in the 2020 Census.

The Sperbers and Thruman were not alone in their April 1 spirit. A local animal center drew online laughs with a tongue-in-cheek post announcing a "5-acre outdoor enrichment waterpark," a sign that the holiday pulls civic playfulness well beyond any one front porch.

Thirty years of neighborly mischief on Spokane Avenue is its own kind of evidence that some things in Coeur d'Alene grow faster than the census count.