We have the radio on, WCQS to be exact, a public radio station. They had on Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keeler. He told about how when he was young, they did practical jokes on Halloween. His stories got me to thinking of what all we did at Halloween and other times.
Growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t much we could do in terms of jokes and the like although there were trees dressed in white strips the next morning and several dozen eggs splattered on various things.
My father used to tell stories of what he did as a kid. Like, take apart a wagon, cart it up to the top of a barn and reassemble it. And how, as they tapped on the last wheel, the farmer struck a match, lit his pipe, and said “Bring ‘er down, boys.”
Keeler said things like folks coming home to find a cow in the living room. And cars moved by sheer force.
My grandfather was a practical joker, although he was real subtle about it. For instance, I’d be leaving to walk home and he’d distract me so that I wouldn’t have my coat on until I was outside. That’s when I’d discovered he’d pinned a sleeve shut.
Or that time he connected the electric fence to someone’s Volkswagen because they’d parked at the gate (again and again until Papaw could take no more), blocking the drive, vs taking the time to open and shut the gate. He sat up there on the porch, smoking his cigarette, sitting right next to the charger which was plugged in there on the porch. The owner of the Bug had to walk all the way back, unplug it, walk back, disconnect the wire from the car, hook it back to the fence, walk all the way back to the porch to plug it back in, then go back to the car again to leave. All the time, Papaw sitting there, just inches from the plug.
Or he’d act like this bale of hay weighed four tons until you picked it up and would fall backwards because it was so light. Yeah, Papaw was a joker but good gracious could he make biscuits! He was a cook during WWII. He used to tell only a few stories of that time. One he liked to tell was the time they opened this big bag of dry oatmeal (they’d open these big bags and dump it into big pots of water) but it ripped and spilled on the floor. So they swept it up and served it to the officers.
The second time I met Lorna’s parents we were all out to dinner. We were eating the rolls as we waited for the main course. Winnie sees that Clarence has put butter on the last roll. He offers it to her but she declines, saying she didn’t want butter. We are talking and a bit later he hands her an unbuttered chunk of bread. She takes it, still conversing, and bites into it. She grins, slaps him, and laughs. He’d turned the piece upside down to hide the butter. It was at the moment when I figured out how Lorna tolerated my humor so well. She’d grown up with it.
To walk home from my grandparents to our house was maybe a quarter mile, if that much. As a straight shot, it was much less but it was impossible to cross that field in the dark so we went down the road. Anyway, we are walking home, it is late and cold and very dark. Gravel roads kind of glow in the dark, standing out against the dark grass and dirt. To the right is the fenced in pasture and to the left is the field I just mentioned. (I never liked the dark. I need to see what is there.) I hear something move to my right and I say, aloud, “Maude? Is that you?” Maude was our horse. Immediately after asking that, another person I was with answered for her, in a high pitched voice. Let me tell you, I was home in record time! Really freaked me! I knew she wasn’t the one to answer, but an answer was not what I was expecting.
One year for Halloween we set up several speakers (from broken radios) and wired them all to the working stereo inside the house. We put on the Star Wars music, which, in the dark, is rather scary sounding. We set it up with a switch so that when some kid got out of the car and came up the drive, we could hit that switch and start the music. I then would make weird noises on my French horn, making it moan and ‘talk’. Heh. We got to keep a lot of candy that year since so few made it to the house.
Great post for Halloween! Brings back memories, of my own mischief and stories I heard from my folks. My Mom still tells of the time some boys in her class, 1940 as I recall, snuck into the school one night and somehow got a farmer’s mule onto the stage in the high school auditorium. Imagine the uproar the next morning when the curtains were opened at morning assembly. Quite a feat since there was only a narrow set of about 4 steps leading up to the stage. Took the school officials a while to figure out how to get the mule down, and then of course, clean up the mess it had made overnight.
One of Lorna’s co-workers once told of what he and others had done to another student in high school. The boy had gotten a VW Bug, one of the first in this area. He bragged about how much mileage he got with it. So Larry and the others started topping his tank off each day. The guy was up to 100mpg when it evened out.
Then they started siphoning gas off each day.
As for the mule, Keeler was saying that kids rarely got into trouble for it because folks respected the effort it took them to do the joke. Like, get that mule into the auditorium. He also said, tho, that the kids knew they were responsible for whatever happened. Like if the cow tied to the flag pole caused an accident.