Get a bunch of guys 70 years and older together at this time of year and the conversation just might turn to Halloweens of yore. One-upmanship sets in as each man brags about Halloween pranks in which he was involved.

One Halloween in the early ’60s some of the guys (I wasn’t in on this one) placed a farm trailer on top of an overhang at our high school gym entrance. The school superintendent walked into our study hall the next morning and with an obviously accurate sixth sense called out about a half dozen names. The guys left with sheepish grins and moved the trailer to the parking lot.

An acquaintance some 30 years my senior loved to tell about a Halloween prank he and his young friends pulled on a cranky old woman in their small town. After tying a strong cord to the handle of a table knife, they slipped the blade of the knife under the wood lap siding of the woman’s home. They then hid in nearby bushes, pulled the cord taut and plucked the cord like a guitar string.

The walls of the house served as a sounding board creating eerie noises inside. My acquaintance said lights came on throughout the house as the poor woman tried to find the source of the creepy sounds. They waited until the lights went out before plucking the string again.

Another older fellow told me about the joy of tipping outhouses. One year, however, the property owner moved his outhouse back a few feet and when the boys came in the dark to tip it over one of them fell into the pit. Decades after the incident the fellow laughed until tears flowed as he described his buddy climbing out of that foul hole.

I will confess to some Halloween indiscretions, but none as mean as the knife and string trick. The poor woman must have been terrified.

By the 1960s in the tiny town where we lived at the time the few outhouses left in town were not regularly used. No fun in tipping them over.

Soaping windows seemed stupid. Besides, if my parents found out I had soaped someone’s windows they would have made me go and clean them. That, of course, would take place after punishment at home. (By the way, I am forever grateful for having been raised like that.)

More than anything on Halloween night my friends and I roamed our small town on foot, looking for trouble but seldom finding it. I recall helping lift a school playground merry-go-round off the stationary pole on which it rotated. One year we stacked a bunch of picnic tables from the town park in the middle of a street.

In other words, we weren’t creative or brave.

Our town hired a handful of local men each year to keep an eye on us kids. A few of the guys let their five-cell flashlights go to their heads. Not so with Elmo.

Late one Halloween night my friend, Morris, and I were walking down a dark street when we ran into Elmo.

“Can I ask you guys a favor?” Elmo inquired.

We both knew Elmo well; he was a good guy and the father of one of our friends.

“Sure,”I said, “what do you need?”

“Here’s the deal — I can’t go home until all of you guys are off the streets. I’m tired. Won’t you just go home so I can call it a night?”

It was the first time we had been asked nicely to do something on Halloween. In other encounters with “deputies” we were usually barked at. What else could we say but, “Okay.”

We called it a night. Morris headed for his grandmother’s house and I went to my house. As I recall, that was the last time I spent Halloween on the streets. When you’re too old for trick-or-treating and you no longer have a fire in your belly for monkey business, Halloween just isn’t fun anymore.

These days my wife and I live in a retirement community and all our neighbors are 55 years and older. There are no kids in our neighborhood to go trick-or-treating.

In a previous community scores of children came to the door on Beggars’ Night prepared to trick you with a riddle so they could earn a treat. Among the best: “Why was the skeleton afraid to cross the road? Because it had no guts.”

That sounds like my youthful Halloweens.

Arvid Huisman can be contacted at huismaniowa@gmail.com. ©2024 by HuismanCommunications.