A prank to remember

What's the statute of limitations on Halloween pranks?

You know, smashing pumpkins and soaping windows, irritating and childish stuff like that.

It's something like 45 to 50 years after the fact, and I'm still afraid that a complete confession might bring the police chief to my door with a threat to refer me to the juvenile probation officer.

My particular venture into random acts of mindless stupidity came in junior high, which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has survived junior high.

At that age, it's sometimes hard to get out of the house after dark. But a few of us perfected a system during high school football season.

We'd go to the game, usually with our dads, then at some point in the action we'd get a pass out at the gate.

Why passes were issued I will never know.

But with passes in our possession we were free to roam the shadows, getting into various mischief, safe in the knowledge that as long as we didn't lose track of time we could get back into the gates at the football game and reunite with our fathers before heading home.

Sometimes it was a little tough to hold up our end of the conversation about the game on the drive home, but usually we could get a glimpse of the scoreboard and mumble something appropriate.

Without making a blanket confession, it's safe to say that on these extra-football excursions some windows were soaped. Never to the point of criminality, but certainly to the point of irritating homeowners. What can I say? Halloween was in the air.

That's why it was a particular temptation to soap windows when there were actually people at home, sitting in the room, watching television.

At its finest execution, it worked this way. The soaper would stealthily go up on the front porch and would draw a spiral with soap on the glass, ending with a tap on the window that would scare the bejeebers out of the soap-ee who was trying to watch "I Love Lucy."

But not everyone on these excursions could master the technique.

One participant, who now makes his living appropriately enough as a teacher of kids just as ornery as he was, could never get the sequence down properly.

Instead of spiral and tap, he would tap the glass then soap a spiral as the startled homeowners got such a good look at him it would have guaranteed a conviction if he'd been hauled into a line-up at the police station.

Somehow, he never got caught.

I often wondered if anyone recognized him and called his parents. But he had the perfect alibi. He couldn't be out soaping windows. He was at the football game with his father.[[In-content Ad]]