Naw, I'm pretty sure it was more a matter of stolen signs.  Both papers reported on Jackass Lane and its peculiar name with regularity throughout the 1970s and 1980s.  As the ADN's online archives only go back to late 1985 and the older stuff is long gone from Google Newspapers, you would have to actually do a little research instead of expecting Google to hand it to you, hence the lack of perspective inherent in the article.