The following article originally appeared on citizenonline.net at this now-defunct link. I have archived this article by Darrell Huckaby for use in my article on Alice Regina Pike.

Date: Thursday, March 11, 2004 12:20 PM

Mrs. Pike, bless her heart. Honesty compels me to admit that I have never met Mrs. Pike, but it has been a long time since the days when everybody in Porterdale knew everybody else. I did see her picture on an Internet Web page, however, and she looks like a nice enough person.

It seems that Mrs. Pike had to run over to Wal-Mart the other day and pick up some things. I have no idea what all she had in her buggy, but when the cashier rang it up it totaled $1671.55. And I thought I had it bad. I mean, I hate to send my lovely wife, Lisa, to the store because she always comes back with more stuff than we need and usually spends more money than we have, but Lisa ain’t never spent $1,671 at Wal-Mart. At least not that I know of. If she did, the credit card would be denied and the check would bounce.

Not a problem for Alice Regina Pike, though. According to the cashier who checked her out, Mrs. Pike intended to pay in cash. As you probably have heard by now, she calmly handed the cashier a $1 million bill and waited patiently for her change, bless her heart.

I guess the cashier didn’t have $998,328.45 in her drawer, because she went to get a manager, who called the police, who arrested Alice Regina Pike, bless her heart, and put her in jail. She reportedly told the police that her husband had gone out of town and left her with the phony money and she even had a couple more in her purse.

As you might imagine, this news story was picked up by the wire services and spread over the Internet before you could say “Jack Robinson.” They tell me that writers from Jay Leno’s show even called to inquire about the incident, and I guess Jay will be poking fun now. I have to admit that the story is pretty funny. But why did the dear lady have to be from Porterdale?

Remember the television show, “Laugh In?” I think it debuted sometime in the late ’60s and featured all sorts of funny clips and skits and vignettes. I suppose it could be considered the forerunner to “Saturday Night Live,” except without the music. My favorite part of “Laugh In” was when Goldie Hawn, clad only in a bikini, if my memory serves me correctly, danced in a go-go cage with all sorts of cute slogans painted on her rather voluptuous body.

During every show someone — usually a celebrity — would appear on stage and say, “Sock it to me!” That person would immediately receive a pie in the face, or worse. One time Richard Nixon appeared on “Laugh In” and said, “Sock it to me!”

Boy they did, too. But if our 37th president had nothing else, he had a sense of humor. Even as he was being abused by the general public over his part in the Watergate scandal, he appeared on the show again. This time his only line was, “You can stop now!”

Just guessing here, but I suspect that my hometown of Porterdale feels just about like Richard Nixon this week. A little national attention is OK, but you can stop now.

In case you missed it, Porterdale was in the national spotlight a couple of weeks ago because two of her police officers had been caught making a month-long wager over who could write the most tickets. Everybody had a good laugh over the incident — except Porterdale city officials and the two officers, who lost their jobs. Oh, yeah. The folks who got the tickets weren’t amused, either.

Well, wouldn’t you know it. Once again, Porterdale is in the national news and, once again, the attention is not particularly flattering. This time the subject of all the commotion is a Porterdale resident named Alice Regina Pike.
I already said that I do not know Alice Regina Pike, and I do not know what she does for a living. She may be a rocket scientist for all I know and, in fact, I sort of wish she were because most of them work in Alabama and I’d much rather hear Jay Leno talking about a Huntsville woman trying to pass a million dollar bill at Wal-Mart than a Porterdale woman.

But really, y’all. Who in the world would think that the U.S. government can afford to print million dollar bills with all the money we are spending in Iraq? And I wonder if she ever stopped to consider how her husband had two million dollars in hard cold cash to give her.

Maybe she thought he had won the lottery. Maybe she assumed he had won a bet. None of the articles I read said whether her husband used to be a police officer.
Oh, well. Maybe Alice Regina Pike’s 15 minutes of infamy will be over soon and Porterdale can go back to being a sleepy little once-prosperous Newton County mill village and escape the jokes and guffaws of the national press for another 50 or 60 years. After all, going by what I read in the paper, I bring enough embarrassment to Porterdale already.

Darrell Huckaby is a Rockdale County author and educator. E-mail him at dHuck 08@aol.com.