This week I sent a couple of young reporters to track down a good community story.

It took a while, but eventually they located the source of the story. Upon further investigation they realized there was no story there.

They reported back what they had discovered and we talked about how sometimes you don’t always find a story, but you still have to try to track it down. We also talked about what makes a good community story, and during the course of that conversation they began to snicker.

I was explaining to them that there are children who think outside the box and are able to do things beyond people’s expectations. Stories and photos of those children are wonderful and encapsulate community journalism. I told them a child with a lemonade stand to raise money for a church trip or some other enterprise makes a good story. It was at this point they began to snicker.

When pressed why they were laughing, they explained that during the course of trying to track down the story, they talked to a young lady who told them how she had once called the newspaper pretending to be an old lady. She told the person she talked to there were some children in her neighborhood selling lemonade and she thought it was just delightful.

In 2012 I took such a call and remember it distinctly. That sweet old lady explained that adults driving and walking past were stopping and buying lemonade and that you just didn’t see things like that anymore.

I did send a photographer to shoot a photo and it ran it in the newspaper in April 2012.

The story sounded too much like the one the reporters had heard, so I searched for and found the photo.

Even though she is a little older now, the reporters easily recognized her and at that moment I realized I had been duped by a fifth-grader.

In the photo four children sit around a cooler toasting with cups of lemonade. The girl in the center of the photo has a smile that until now hid her secret.