From the Cedar Valley Times The small town game of ‘Halloweening’ has changed Sleep had just come on that late October night when suddenly from the porch on the other side of the wall, between it and Mom and Dad’s bed, erupted into roaring thunder. “That ### #### Bruce Kirkhoff,” said my dad as the noise just as suddenly stopped and three figures dashed off our wraparound porch and disappeared down the street. Thus was Halloween in small town Oaktown. Mostly it was merely mischief aimed at keeping the town marshall and his deputies busy for the night chasing youngsters up and down the streets and alleys. The game of ‘Halloweening’ was one of those small town traditions, a rite of passage from being a kid to a teenager. Pranks ranged from pelting the front porch with a handful of shelled corn to soaping windows. The idea for most was to get chased by Marshall Darrell Grubaugh and crew-- and to get away. Most often the pranks were harmless. Some grew to legendary proportions -- such as the night a local farmer told a group of boys how to disassemble a farm wagon and then reassemble it on top of the town hall. Only after the last bolt had been tightened did the farmer learn it was his own wagon now perched atop of the town’s building. Yet another was when several boys pushed an outhouse over only to find themselves falling into the hole. They had a great deal of difficulty denying their involvement. I guess you can say the wore the evidence. The local grocery store owners always made certain to have an extra supply of toilet paper and bars of soap for the occasion. They asked few questions when school-aged kids demonstrated a sudden interest in personal cleanliness in the closing days of October. Of course, I took my turn at pulling off some of the pranks but never really felt comfortable while doing so. That might have been at least partially due to the influence of my grandfather. Grandpa Douthitt hated Halloween and the foolishness of those pranks. It wasn’t the corn throwing or other such harmless happenings even though he found plenty of fault in those involved in such things. Tarnation. In the 1940s, Grandpa was driving over to the coal mine to get a load of coal the day after Halloween. He’d left about 4 in the morning and a fog blanketed the area. As he rounded a sharp turn, the road was blocked with a tree someone had dragged across it as a prank. Grandpa lay injured in his badly damaged car for a long time after the collision before someone else came along on lonely rural Sullivan County road and found him. Grandpa was loaded into the bed of a truck and driven to the railroad where a train was flagged down. After being carried onto the bed of a rail car, he traveled by train to Sullivan, Ind., and the hospital there. After a long rehabilitation, Grandpa was never really the same. He always claimed that accident damaged his sense of smell and he was always worried in later years that he could not smell if food in the refrigerator had turned bad. Today, things are much different during the Halloween season. Pranking like we did in the 1960s is almost non-existent and that’s probably a good thing. But, sometimes I get the temptation to buy a bar of Ivory soap and write “Kilroy was here” on a window or two -- just for old times sake. Danged foolishness.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 20:17:10 +0000
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