Freddogg Off The Chain

PHILLY GOULS AND GOBLINS GET AFTER IT !

The elderly Austrian couple was expecting “trick or treaters” as they answered the knock at the front door on their Ginger Bread style house one late October early evening. But this was “not no” Austrian Alps, Sound of Music, Julie Andrews movie. This was suburban Philadelphia where mischief night lasted a week and the greater the horror the bigger the straw-filled belly laugh.
“Well, it looks like a shoe Hanna. See it up there on the porch roof? One of the children must have thrown it up there. They are such little pranksters, bless their hearts.”
Grandpaw shuffled and reached slowly up to grab the shoe’s toe box. This was 1957 before steroid injections into arthritic joints. Before anyone ever heard of rotator cuffs and arthroscopic surgery. The creaking in the shoulder sounded like stale gingerbread cracking. Gramps tugged at the shoe and down came the body!
It was A number one, freaking all the way, hysterical. These lovely people were instantly terrified! Hyper ventilating, they retreated into the house. We snatched the dummy off the front porch and ran into the woods nearby. It wasn’t cruel because that was not a concept on our cerebral wheel of misfortune. It was just funny cause we “got em!”
Not as badly as we got Mr. Unidentified Motorist as he cruised down the two-lane blacktop dimly lighted Durham Road. Big fat Blub, a prepubescent skeleton surround by an immense amount of adhering fat, just tossed the dummy onto the guy’s hood. It rolled up the windshield, over the roof and came off the trunk, landing in a ditch. We heard the brakes squealing as the car spun and came to rest in the middle of the road facing the wrong way.
We heard some husky guy scream, ”I’ll kill you little bastards!” We ran through the woods like escapees from a prison. We were terrified! We were exhilarated! We were having a great time!
The dummy was hung on a garage hook the next evening in favor of a more diversified attack. We took a ball of black yarn, a thumb tack and a small washer and headed to the neighborhood of split levels which are utilitarian in design but mostly attract a white trashy crowd…not that there’s anything wrong with that.
We affixed the tack to a front window frame, ran the string across the road and lay down in the tall grass. It was amazing. We’d pull the string and the washer would rap tap tap, some bonehead would come out and look around.. and we’d rap tap tap some more, restarting the process.
Amazingly we young boys figured out that after lying in the weeds on a dark night our eyes would become acclimated and everything would look light but we knew we couldn’t be seen. It was a quantum leap of faith for 12 years olds.
But this one night some raging muscular guy came across the street following the string and shouted into the weeds. “I know somebody is in there and if I catch him I’m going to choke his neck until he dies.”
Hearing that, Jimmy Rodgers got up and ran and it was every boy for himself. I took off to the right of a telephone pole and ran waist high into a steel guide wire. I spun around like some cheap toy from the 5 and 10 but was still too quick for capture.
My absolute favorite trick and the most immediately satisfying was really rather simple. We’d creep into a backyard grab the garden hose, and go lie in the grass. Then somebody would knock on the door. When the clueless victim--and it didn’t matter whether it was man or women, healthy or infirm--opened the door, we would squirt them in the face full blast and yell, ”Up your nose with a rubber hose!” We were “way gone” before the stunned adults had a chance to process what had just happened to them.

Kids don't have that kind of clean fun anymore. Today a motion sensor security light would come on following by pit bulls being let loose from the pen and that would be that!