First printed October 1983

Wednesday is Halloween and as usual many youngsters in the area will be out trick or treating, and the custom over the past several years has been to treat instead of trick, but this wasn't the case back 50 to 60 years ago when the youngster pulled more tricks and received fewer treats than the present generation.

One older Lafayette resident told me back several years ago they never done any harm to anyone, and never any damage to property, but the young men back then stayed pretty busy one Halloween night.

Sixty years ago soaping windows was unheard of and there were no automobile tires to let the air out of, but still the youngster of that day and time had their fun.

Back in those days almost everyone in Lafayette had a fence around their homes and one of the favorite pranks in those days was to take the front gate from the fence and carry it down the street eight or ten houses and then put it on another man's gatepost.

Most of the pranks pulled over a half a century ago required a lot of work. One Halloween night many years ago a group of Lafayette boys took the fence rails from a vacant lot near the public square and fenced off a section of College Street right beside the present McClard Drug Store building, closing off the street. “I'll bet the fence was 25 rails high across the road right up next to the square,” the old timer told me back several years ago.

“And then we put a donkey inside the fence,” he said.

Early the next morning it was a sight to behold when all the merchants came to work and right there just off the public square was this enclosure with the donkey still inside it.

And it was down on Long Creek many Halloween nights ago when a group of boys got together and took a farmer's wagon apart and piece by piece reassembled it on top of the farmer's barn. Carroll Wheeley can verify that one, I think.

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And there are still several “boys” around such as Phillip Brockette, Roger Parker, Billy Hunt, Edward and Marvin Miller and myself who can still remember the time we decided to go up to John Hunt's house which was located where the present Lafayette Upholstery building is now located, and take the small culvert which crossed the ditch in front of John's home and carry it up to Uncle Alex Jenkins' home and put it on his front porch. Uncle Alex lived where the present Lafayette Church of Christ building now stands.

It was a good idea and we were laughing among ourselves, but the trick backfired. That was back before the days of street lights in Lafayette and we didn't know what we were getting into. The culvert was rather heavy and we all attempted to pick it up at the same time. Only thing wrong was John had suspected something out of us boys and just prior to dark that Halloween night had covered the underpart of the culvert with fresh cow manure and we didn't see or smell the manure until it was too late, and we had it all over us. That was the last time we ever attempted to move John's culvert.

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George Tucker was telling me Monday that recently he bought some peanuts at Carl Baker's 5 and 10 Store and they were so tough he might as well have been trying to eat a handful of gravel.

I just couldn't believe that, so I walked into Ben Franklin Store and told Baker that I was representing the Macon County Times Better Business Bureau and that I had a complaint that he was selling “tough” peanuts, and I wanted a sample to see if the complaint could be justified or not.

“Go on, get all you want. Take them all if you want to,” Baker said in his usual hateful manner.

So I scooped up most of the peanuts in one of the bins and told Baker I was taking them for “evidence” and walked out of the store without paying for the peanuts.

I thought the peanuts were pretty good, being as they didn't cost me anything.