We spent Halloween night with friends in West Fargo and got to watch the little Gremlins who rang their doorbell ! A very nice reaction: our friend greeted the little kids and said “Thank you for coming!”. She is a sweet person all the time!!!!
On October 31 I remember my own Halloweens long ago. When we drove back into town tonight, it was calm and quiet. It wasn’t that way when I was young……kids then had a wild time thinking up pranks to outdo ones that had been done before. One year an old threshing machine was hauled to the school yard (about 6 blocks) by a large gang of “Halloweeners” in the wee hours of Nov 1….. I think. Then there was the removal of a wooden bridge that got put in the middle of a neighborhood street. Every single Oct 31 a gang would always send the empty cream cans a -roll at our old town creamery. That was usually the first thing that happened early in the evening. Outhouses were tipped; bale piles were “re-arranged”…..a lot of mischief was done on October 31.
One Halloween night, our one and only “cop” whom we called “Fearless”…. fell asleep in his car at an intersection—-too much territory for one officer, and he would get exhausted trying to catch pranksters. So there he sat, asleep with his head on the steering wheel. A huge crowd of kids gathered and a few of them quietly pushed the cop-car into the middle of the intersection. As soon as that as done, they broke into a loud roar, waking the hapless “Fearless” who did not know where he was or what he was doing!!! This was “the talk of the town” for months and months….the Pranksters triumphed!
But the biggest prank of all took place before I was born and was told to me by my parents who were a young married couple at the time. On this particular Halloween sometime during the 1930′s, an enormous gang of kids—-more than 100 reportedly….carried an outhouse down Main Street and pushed it up against the door of “Mac’s Sweet Shop” trapping Mac inside. Mac was not your ordinary “Arnold”, the cheerful malt shop guy on “Happy Days”…..Mac was cranky and had earned the kids’ vengeful outhouse plan. Mac stayed inside his shop screeching at the kids who laughed and taunted him from the street. There were plenty of adults watching too, as the prank was well publicized ahead of time—to everyone but Mac!!!! It has to be the all-time champion Halloween Prank pulled off in our small town.
Kids do not “soap windows” any more as kids in my day did. Anyone—especially a teacher,who left his/her car outside on October 31 got the windows soaped but good. The stores downtown got soaped also and the town handyman always had 5 days of steady work scraping off and washing off the soap letters and pictures drawn by the Pranksters. I just hope nobody in their teens reads this blog…it could cause a new eruption of soaped windows.
(Ivory soap worked the best!!!)
In the early 50s we parked a toilet outside the schoolhouse. The next day a teacher’s kid was sticking his head out of one of the holes whille other kids threw snowballs at him. The county nurse saw that and went ballistic. It was moved, PRONTO.