here I am, pictured as one Hunter S. Thompson, I wasn't really planning on playing the good Doktor for Halloween but Dylan was kind enough to bring over a special shwag box from the fine people at star, who did a little film about Doc, contained inside were a hat, the smoke and the glasses, it was all to easy. I took the easy way out and suited up. We ventured down to the WeHo Carnival for the 4th year in a row. Every year it seems like less and less people dress up and more and more people come to play lookie-lou.. sheesh. Participate or stay home I always say. Maybe I don't, who can remember all the things they going around always saying.
It got me thinking about Halloween past though, and one in particular stood out from my child hood. Having grown up on a farm, outside a small town, the small town was the only logical place to visit in order to collect candy, and as we grew older, to create hi-jinx. This particular Halloween exists in the age of hi-jinx. I was in fifth grade, which would have made me whatever age you are in the that grade, 11 I think. The older kids in Paradise (the aforementioned small town) would every year by tradition soap the windows of the business it what was considered the "downtown" area. This area consisted of a gas station, a post office, and Insurance office, a Co-op, the middle school and several disused structures.
Due to it's small size Paradise did not merit a Police station, keeping the peace fell to the county sheriff, some 27 miles away in Russell. On Halloween it seemed that the sheriff liked to have one of his men at least put in an appearance in all small burgs, which always lent the deed of soaping windows some major excitement.
In order to compensate for the possible arrival of the sheriff, which would no doubt be followed by immediate arrest and jail for anyone caught with a bar of soap near a window, it was important to completely block the one paved road that ran through town first. This was really more exciting than the ritual soaping of the windows that would surely follow it. The gas station, ran by a fellow named Jerry, always provided ample material for the road block. We'd roll out large tires, and anything else that wasn't chained down, and make a nice ordered line of junk which would prevent easy passage down main street. Oh what fun it was. I remember this year we even went so far as to roll and old jeep into road. It was really an impressive road block.
Soon the window soaping commenced. We took after all the local business first, giving them a nice havy layer of soap with no doubt some witty writings. Always in good fun of course.
The school was always reserved for last, and attended to with the most vigor.
It's necessary now, to explain the peculiars of the USD 399, or at least the ones relevant to this particular tale of rabble rousing. When it became increasingly more difficult for a family farmer to actually feed and clothe and house a family by farming folks left small towns like Paradise, and they left in droves. So Paradise, which once had a grade school, a middle school and a high school found they didn't really have enough kids to have all three, or really any of the three. But necessity is a real bitch, and this led to the unification of small school districts, so where proud paradise once had their own school, the found they now needed to partner with the neighboring towns, of Natoma, Waldo, and Fairport, in order to have enough kids for a School district. For grade school we kids were bussed from Paradise to Natoma, then for middle school the Natoma kids would be bussed from Natoma to Paradise, then back the other way for High School. Waldo and Fairport kids had to be bussed to these Natoma and Paradise for everything.
So being a kid in Paradise, it was point of pride to show the kids that bussed in what a great job of vandalism we had done the night before on Halloween. The only problem was that our janitor would do way to good of a job in cleaning off the windows every year. This confounded we vandals greatly. We vowed this year it would be different. We brough all sorts of soaps and sticky sick things to put on the windows, and we soaped to hell and back. Good times. My cousin Travis, who I believe was into heavy metal music at the time, decided that this good old fashion form of soaping was just not going to stick, so he escalated the vandalism a bit. I watched him pull from his bag a bottle of glue, and a roll of toilet paper. He proceeded to glue the toilet paper to the window. Ooh! wow! I was impressed, this would surely delay the cleaning process. It didn't stop there. Travis next pulled a book of matches from his bag, and proceeded to light the toilet paper on fire. I was now a bit scared. Fire on public property is a bit alarming to an Eleven year old. The fire burned on the window, and burned for sometime, even melting the paint off the door fram around it. How the fire didn't crack or break the cold October pane I'll never know, luck was at least a little on our side.
The soaping finished, and few more nerve rattling burning pieces of glued toilet paper completed and we were off into the night, and back soon to our beds.
The next morning when we got to school we were pleased to see that
nothing had been cleaned off the windows. My cousin Travis, who was older, had a sister my age, named Andrea, we were the youngest kids along on this toilet paper caper. We became early morning causes for celebration amongst our fellow fifth graders, perhaps a bit to audible was some of the celebration. Due to the volume of the gossip, or the fact the list of potential suspects could not be more than 8, my cousin Andrea and I soon found ourselves face to face with the principal, the interrogation did not take long. Andrea flipped at once, and seeing that the beans had already hit the fan, I followed shortly there after. We ratted out the whole gang, who would have been caught anyway, and the gang spent the next Saturday cleaning our masterpiece from the windows of the school. Good Times.
