Now that Halloween is history, and the little gremlins will have forgotten about it until another year has passed, this seems like a good time to explain what Halloween is REALLY all about. It is not a holiday when you go door to door and report, lamely, "Trick-or-Treat", knowing all about the "treats" are about, but with no idea at all what the "Trick" means. So let me enlighten you...............

      "Trick" can mean a whole bunch of good things, beginning with the old "tipping over toilets" routine. Although I have never taken part in this trick, I've known several boys who have........ only to be taken in hand the next day by the school principal, who accompanied them around personally to see that every single one of these tipped over buildings were untipped over, and set squarely in their original settings.

      This was of course not nearly as much fun as it was the night before when under cover of darkness, the boys could sneak up on an unsuspecting outhouse and with the help of at least 6 husky teenaged lads, upend the mini house, hopefully dragging it several feet off it's foundation, making it so much harder for the up-tippers to restore it to it's foundation, never thinking the up-tippers could very well be them !

      You seniors can not deny the old notched empty thread spool, when you tied a string end around the spool and wound the remainder of the string round and round and round, leaving only enough of the string to give it a good pull. You stuck a pencil through the spool hole, placed the notched spool against a window and yanked the thread. The resulting noise would have given a super jet a run for it's money.

      For some unkown and unintelligent reason, I decided it might be a good idea to take my two oldest - and at that time, only - children around to a few neighbors houses and illustrate how this trick was done. Mrs. Whites' house was the first, and as it turned out, the last, where I demonstrated it to Allen and Diane.

      Placing the spool against one of her windows, and holding the pencil securely, I gave that string a yank that would have done credit to a machine gun rat-a-tat-tat. When Mrs. White sped to her door and yelled, "Who did that? Who did that?"

      I could hardly hear what she said because I was so far behind my kids hiding in the bushes I couldn't make out her words. I hoped Allen and Diane got the message because it was the last time I would demonstrate that particular "trick" and if they didn't catch the details, too bad for them, I wasn't going to antagonize any more neighbors.

      One year it was interesting to see how perplexed the school principal was when he came to school the next morning and found the rocking chair usually sitting on his front porch, was now at the top of the school flagpole............took some doing to hoist it up there,too, that rocking chair was HEAVY.

      One year, to my eternal shame and at my suggestion, we let the air out of all four tires on the car of the father of a dear friend of mine. For some unknown reason he stepped into the car the next morning and drove off, ruining all the tires in the process. You would think that the day after Halloween he would have had the good sense to check, so actually it was not entirely our fault, wouldn't you say?

      We hardly bothered with asking for "treats", because we were having too much fun doing "tricks".