Ask and ye shall receive… In yesterday’s post I referenced one of my dad’s practical jokes that brought out emergency personnel and was remembered in a story in the newspaper years later. Some of you wanted to hear that story, so today I’m welcoming a special guest poster to tell it.
Here’s the story in my dad’s own words.*
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I lived about one block from a water tower that had stood behind my junior high school for many years.
When I was about 16 I stuffed newspaper inside an old pair of blue jeans and my old hockey team jacket to make a life-sized dummy. Halloween came and went and I didn’t use the dummy so it continued hanging in our basement in the laundry room. When my mother objected to having to dodge around it, I was instructed to dispose of it.
That night I took my dummy down the street and climbed up inside one of the girders on the water tower until I reached the catwalk. I had brought a rope that I tied around the dummy’s neck. I tied the other end around a cross brace before sliding it out so it hung out of reach between two of the girders.
We had a neighbor across the back lane who was a night clerk at a local hotel, and I think he used to drink at work. The next morning I saw our neighbor staggering around in his back yard with a pair of field glasses up to his eyes looking toward the water tower.
I went out our front door to see what he was looking at and suddenly remembered what I had done the night before. The schoolyard was filled with fire engines, a couple of police cars, at least one ambulance and a crowd of spectators. A fireman climbed up a very long ladder toward my dummy. He cut it down and as it fell to the ground people screamed and turned away.
I quickly got dressed, jumped on my bike and rode to school (a high school far away from the scene of the crime) hoping that nobody would notice it was my hockey jacket on the dummy.
The “hanging” made the front page of the evening newspaper and was referred to as a Guy Fawkes prank (I’d never heard of him). The event was remembered 25 years later on the front page of the newspaper in their “On this Date 25 Years Ago” section.
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*Name omitted because, you know, they might still be looking for him.
Thanks for sharing, Dad! xo
