“Truth is the most valuable thing we have,” Mark Twain once quipped. “Let us economize it.” That philosophy is at the heart of a club headquartered in Burlington for almost 100 years. That is, if they’re to be believed – the Burlington Liars’ Club might not be the best source for truth.
“The best part of the club is that it started as a lie,” explains Sarah Sullivan, a card-carrying member of the Liars’ Club and the Burlington Historical Society board.
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In 1929, two local reporters, Mannel Hahn and Otis Hulett, wrote joke stories for their papers “reporting” that the town’s old-timers had gathered at the police station on New Year’s Eve to have a lie-telling contest. “The story got picked up by the Associated Press and people wanted to know who the winner was the next year, so they decided to actually start the club,” Sullivan says. An annual “World Champion Liar” has been awarded by a group of judges ever since.
The Burlington Liars’ Club, which charges $1 to become a member, has received tens of thousands of submissions mailed in from around the world over the years. These lies are not the vicious types that might get you divorced or elected to office, but more like little snippets of wit or wordplay.
“My doctor says that it is perfectly normal to toss and turn in your sleep. It’s called sleeping in the futile position.”
– 2024 World Championship Lie, Jerry Worzella, Wisconsin Rapids
“Personally, I look for a fib that is original, perhaps timely, maybe insightful and most importantly makes me chuckle,” says the club’s secretary, Sherry Schenning. An example is Sidney E. Boyum’s winning whopper from 1976: “During a recent cold snap, I saw a nightcrawler steal the fur coat off a caterpillar and crawl back in his hole.”
Burlington decided to make the untruths an attraction. A map on the club’s website will lead you on a self-guided Tall Tales Walking Tour through five blocks of Burlington’s charming downtown, where you’ll find plaques memorializing 26 winning lies from over the years. One of the stops is The Coffee House (492 N. Pine St.), operated by Sullivan’s husband, and fellow Liars’ Club member, Patrick. The plaque here displays 1974’s big lie: “We were so poor in our youth that our parents couldn’t afford window shopping.”
In 2016, Patrick was expanding the cafe into the building next door. As he stripped down a room to its original brick walls, inspiration struck to develop the space into a tribute to Burlington’s history. It’s now the cozy Liars’ Club Bar, open Thursdays through Saturdays. Decorating the walls is a gallery of some of the club’s famous liars, among them co-founder Hulett, who smirks and smokes a pipe as he shows off a pile of submissions; and 1935 winner Jim Jordan, star of the radio comedy “Fibber McGee and Molly” and the only celebrity to win.
Patrick says he sees the bar as an extension of the community vibe of the cafe, which has an open mic night and other events. “Nowadays especially, I think it’s important to have a place for people to be together and share stories,” he says. Whether those stories are true or not is another matter.
