Halloween Memory # 1 (for 2011)

During my wonderful Junior High School years I had a group of really near and dear pals! It was fairly traumatic for me when I had to move from Brooklyn Park, MN to Wausau, WI, after my 6th grade year. But in Wausau, I met a great group of guys. One of my best friends was Dave S. He, along with Glen W., Bruce S., Jim C., and my Confirmation-Class Pal Dave R., were the core of my gang. We weren't all what could be referred to as classic MONSTER-KIDS, but heck, it was close enough.

It had to be Halloween of 1968 (when the Triceratops still roamed the earth) when Dave S. and I got the idea to have a remote-speaking (with a speaker in his chest) dummy hanging from one of the big trees in his front yard. Actually, I think it was all Dave's idea, he was the creative one! We were going to terrify the young kiddies who would be walking down the side-walk unsuspecting.

The above artwork (above :) ) though not an actual representation of Dave's house is close enough to give you the idea. We couldn't use my house since it was in a brand-new edition and there were no adult sized trees. Dave's house was in an older more established part of Wausau, and he had, in fact, a hug oak tree (like the one above over in the far right corner) that was located in his front yard, with a leaf-thick series of heavy branches that hung ominously over the side-walk.

We contructed a fairly good looking dummy with old clothes, stuffing from straw, cloths, and foam. Dave, though one of the most inventive and clever kids I ever knew, did not come up with a feasible plan to place a speaker in the dummy's chest cavity as we had originally planned. Ah well. Our thought was, that if we could have the dummy drop quickly out of the vegetation (kind of swooping like) so that he fell like a brick only to "come up short" on/in his noose - - - to dangle and swing mere inches away from the faces of the little beggars.... it would scare the heebie-jeebies out of them. In theory... brilliant. In execution... not bad. The dummy looked good. Dave tied a really great hangman's noose. We had a fairly decent pulley-device attached to the dummy from the tree branch, with the rope running back to his upstairs bedroom window. The window was kinda like in the picture (maybe more dormer like). We practiced the release & drop several times in the days (well at night) before HALLOWEEN. It worked well. It had the real capacity to scare the kids.

Our dummy looked something like the guy (above)... only maybe even better, as our ersatz man had wider and more commanding shoulders.

And then, it happened... as it happens almost EVERY single Autumn season in the mid-west, (or in the northern Great-Lake states like Wisconsin)... there was a huge rain storm and wind storm the day before Halloween.
Every single leaf (and there were still hundreds and hundreds of them on the target tree where we had our dummy stashed in eager expectations of terror).... every last piece of camouflage hiding material was stripped away only to leave our ragman totally exposed and "out-in-the-open." And though it gets dark early in Northern Wisconsin at the end of October... the street-lights on the block totally illuminated our surprise... so that it was no surprise... at all. Zero, zilch, nada, nil. Every kid from 19 down to 2 saw the thing up in the tree a full block away... and was expecting something.

We tried the dead-drop a couple of times but with no success. Some of the little vermin actually tried to play Pinata with it. We had to protect our agent, so we ceased the attempts.

The moral of the story is: If you're going to have dummies dropping out of trees in Wisconsin... do it in July (just to be safe).