Some past Halloweens turned out downright nasty
Halloween has arrived again, and our history is rich with stories of tricks that our young people have pulled over the last 130 years, actions ranging from funny pranks to almost urban terrorism.
How serious were some of these past Halloween nights? An article in the Pomona Daily Progress of Nov. 1, 1898, detailed the missing bicycles, changed city signs, lost wagons and other damage from the night before. The headline expressed relief that the toll wasn’t so bad: “The Night of Pranks Brought No Fatalities to Pomona.”
Before we go on, a legal notice:
[Disclaimer: The material in the following article will illustrate wide-ranging anti-social activities perpetuated by over-enthusiastic young people of the past, and should any similar actions occur tonight as a result of the article, the author shouldn’t be held accountable no matter how much fun the action appeared to be.]
Oh, what am I thinking? No self-respecting young vandal reads newspapers these days. I’m pretty safe.
Anyway, it’s really amazing that city officials in our past haven’t been motivated during these Oct. 31 disasters to ask the National Guard to be activated.
Consider how tempting a target the main building at San Bernardino High was on Halloween around the turn of the century. The day after the holiday in 1901, a janitor found the school front door wide open and the stairs leading to the second story badly scratched. Added to the school decor was a wagon filled with pumpkins that had been dragged up the stairs and then securely jammed between the sides of the stairs, according to the San Bernardino Times-index on Nov. 1
Not to be undone, those crazy San Bernardino kids went a few steps higher in 1905, this time successfully dragging a full-sized wagon all the way to the roof. At least one of the rig’s wheels was found attached to the top of the flagpole. A dummy was hanging from a nearby telephone pole with a school board member’s name written on it.
Four teens were arrested in Ontario on Halloween 1948 for hitting Ada Lippincott with over-ripe pears as she tried to clean off her car, the target of an earlier fruit barrage. Meanwhile, a cannon was dragged from its usual home in front of the American Legion Hall to the median of Euclid Avenue near E Street, reported the Ontario Daily Report.
Mailboxes were a strangely tempting target in Hemet on Halloween 1926. The quiet of the night was shattered by eight explosions of mailboxes between 11 p.m. and midnight. A few celebrants reportedly used dynamite to also blow up at least six more just outside of town, reported the Riverside
Daily Press on Nov. 3. Others were knocked down and run over on East Florida Avenue.
The San Bernardino Sun on Nov. 2, 1894, listed the damage in Redlands to small bridges in front of houses and the moving of four large stone cylinders from a driveway onto the rails of the Terracina streetcar line. It also spared no words scolding other local newspapers for “making slighting references to this manifestation of what they please to call ‘fun.’ ”
Riverside in 1902 was fairly quiet to the relief of the Riverside Daily Press on Nov. 1. Not much happened except “a few stray wheels adorned telegraph poles this morning and an ancient vehicle or two were to be seen floating in the canal,” reported the newspaper, adding apparently in relief: “But no buildings were removed from their foundations.”
A half-century later, Riverside wasn’t quite so quiet. The Daily Press on Nov. 1, 1953, reported thousands of dollars of damage from fires, broken glass and property. After setting a fire in a barn on Phoenix Avenue, vandals were crazy enough to actually steal a beehive. “The bees were let loose at Ruby’s Drive-in but failed to bite anyone because of sluggishness in the chill night air,” wrote the article.
Police were kept busy on
Halloween in 1929 dealing with an attack on the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in a San Bernardino park, reported the Sun on Nov. 1. “Thirty youths, some of the high school boys, were rolling cannon balls away from the … monument,” said the article. “The police made several of the party roll them back and released them with a warning.”
Harassed police and firefighters sometimes did win in the battle of Halloween vandalism.
In La Verne, 16 high school boys were fined $25 each for blockading Third Street with boxes, cans, garden tools and other items, reported the Progress-bulletin on Nov. 27, 1929. Their fines were later reduced to $5 but most were required to work it off under the direction of a likely ill-tempered street superintendent.
Revenge was sweet for the owners of a structure in Norco, which in 1931 had been set afire. Their decision to lie in wait on Halloween 1932 in case the vandals reappeared worked perfectly. Four young men from Corona were arrested and spent two days in jail before being released to their not especially happy parents.
Finally, since the 1950s and 1960s, cities began to hold parades and Halloween festivals to find ways to curtail a lot of the widespread damage of the night. “Trunk-ortreat” candy distribution events are held by cities and churches to the benefit of local dentists. Most kids soon came to realize that overflowing bags of candy and setting up oversized skeletons on the lawn was really more fun than getting caught destroying neighborhoods.
And while things like setting a palm tree afire may have been funny to the perpetrators, at times Halloween did become downright serious.
A kid thought it clever to pull the fire alarm at Fifth and Garnet streets in San Bernardino in 1919. That Halloween night alarm sent out a fire truck with sirens blaring, only to have it slam into an Orange Belt Line bus. The collision killed one bus passenger and injured two others.
The Pomona paper’s relief about there being “no fatalities” in 1898 almost proved ironic six generations later when two kids, 6 and 10, were shot while trick-or-treating in Pomona on Halloween, said the Progress Bulletin on Nov. 2, 1959.
Robert Fimbres of the Casablanca area near Riverside was visiting one of the kids’ stepfathers in Pomona that night, talking about guns and drinking beer, among other things. When the youngsters came to the door and yelled, “trick or treat,” Fimbres decided he would scare them by picking up a revolver he believed was unloaded. The gun went off striking both of the youngsters, one seriously.
Fimbres later surrendered to sheriff’s deputies. On Nov. 28, he was sentenced to serve six months in county jail for the incident.
Cemetery tour
The final night of the annual Spadra Halloween cemetery history tours by the Historical Society of the Pomona Valley will be tonight from 7 to midnight. It is at 2850 Pomona Blvd., Pomona.
The society began holding the Halloween tours because members had to stand guard at the historic cemetery to protect it from vandals who broke in to spend Halloween drinking and vandalizing the burial ground. Since members were there anyway, the group decided to hold what has become a series of very popular tours to raise funds. Tickets are $20.
Check with https://www. pomonahistorical.org/ for availability on any remaining reservations for tonight’s tour.
Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Empire history. He can be reached at joe. blackstock@gmail.com or Twitter @Joeblackstock. Check out some of our columns of the past at Inland Empire Stories on Facebook at www. facebook.com/iehistory.