Until the late 1920’s, the toilet facility of the houses in
West View was an outhouse. In those days, it was almost a sure bet than on Halloween night one or two privies in the community would be overturned by pranksters. Another prank popular at that time was to take someone’s front porch swing or front gate and deposit them several houses down the street in someone else’s yard or on their porch. Sometimes they were even found on rooftops. There were other pranks, of course, but most of them weren’t destructive. At most, they were just an
inconvenience or an irritant to the victim. Even the overturning of an outhouse was not destructive since it was relatively easy to turn the thing back up to its original position.
On one particular Halloween night, a group of teenage boys
gathered around a little store on Mingle Avenue and decided to work over an outhouse. They went up Mingle and over
the hill to Keith Street, and Arthur Kidd’s house was right in sight. They went through the field to the back of his house and Mr. Kidd heard them. He stood at a back window and watched. He didn’t try to stop them, just waited.
When the boys came back up Keith toward Mingle, satisfied with the job they had done, Mr. Kidd met them in the middle of Keith, and said, “Okay, boys, I watched you turn ‘er over. Now I will watch you set ‘er back up.”
Of course, they did as he said because he knew each of them
and they knew him. Afterwards, everybody went their own way, still neighbors and friends.
-Name withheld for fear of self-incrimination-
Excerpt from:
West View, A Community Scrapbook 1793-1996
