VIEW FROM AFAR

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN DALE SUDERMAN
Some memories are ghosts. We are not entirely certain they exist but we know that something happened. I have a ghost memory about Halloween in Hillsboro 40 years ago. I often wonder if local residents remember this story better than I.

There was a tradition of pranks on Halloween Eve in Marion County then. Often these seemed to involve relocating old privies, made obsolete by indoor plumbing, to highly inappropriate places.

Mostly, these were harmless stunts with a minimal amount of property damage resulting only in the aggravation of cleaning up the next morning. These stories were passed on forever-often growing ever so slightly in the retelling.

But the best-or was it worst-Halloween ever started in the old City Cafe on Main Street in Hillsboro. Hillsboro had two young police officers and they bonded with the college students who gathered there late at night for good greasy burgers and conversation.

As I head it, a police officer said, “Well, this Halloween there won’t be any shenanigans in Hillsboro. We will deputize lots of local folks and the city council will be out helping us maintain order.”

Talk like that to bright college students is the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of an untrained bull.

Apparently, some sort of bet or dare was made. The college students promised they could light a bonfire at the corner of Main and Grand on Halloween Eve and get off scot-free. The police officers wagered in the negative.

Come Halloween Eve, clusters of young folks were at all four corners of Main and Grand expecting-something. Parked in the middle of the intersection was the entire police force.

I arrived late and clueless. I had been helping my major professor, Dr. L.J. Frantz grade papers at his home. But in Hillsboro in those days, when you saw a crowd it was always good to stop to see what was happening.

A few minutes after my arrival the police radio started squawking with the news that fire hydrants were open all over the city. All the authority figures roared off to look for pipe wrenches.

No sooner were they gone than about eight hooded figures came down Main at a dead run-each carrying a tire soaked in oil. The last runners threw on a torch.

The bonfire shot up about 30 feet. The runners merged into the cheering crowd. The fire truck made the one-block trip to the scene of the inferno.

The wager was won, but alas the criminal class had developed an unwise addiction to continuing the game of reopening fire hydrants.

As I recall, Sheriff’s Department forces were called in to round up the culprits. The criminal class worried about being apprehended.

As they huddled near the co-op building, they were rescued. Just as the parting of the Red Sea saved those who escaped from the pursuing Egyptians, so a very slow freight train stopped for a minute and the culprits rode to safety on a railroad flatcar.

They expected to get off in Marion, but the train kept on going. They pooled quarters and called a friend back at the college to come and get them and most of them made it their morning classes.

By morning the city gutters looked as though they had survived an 8-inch cloudburst-even though it was a cool dry October night.

The conspirators are old men now-many distinguished as teachers, medical professionals and even, I think, a pastor. They are now the sort of men who worry about the safety of their grandchildren going trick-or-treating.

Theirs was not a good stunt. The water pressure for the city became dangerously low. Apologies were made all around and the students offered to reimburse the city for the wasted water-but, as I recall, they had the audacity to ask for a commercial rate.

Well, they were bulk water users.

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