A Free Ride to Vandalize

I have a memory from a very young age that has stuck with me all these years. I've got a few of these silly memories and certain events, dates or situations will pull these memories from their hiding places in my head. I'm talking about something that I saw back when I was...oh, about six years old. I wish I would have had a camera back then and taken a picture because the picture in my head is clear and I'm not sure if I can capture the scene with words.

This memory would have taken place back in the '70's. We lived a few miles out of the town of Winkler, MB and on Halloween night, sometime after the supper hour, (I remember it being dark anyway) my brother's 17 year-old girlfriend asked my dad for a ride into town. I tagged along. I'm thinking Dad assumed she wanted a ride home but as we pulled into town she asked him to pull over and drop her off on Main Street. When she got out of the vehicle, I looked out of the side window of the pick up and I couldn't believe my baby blues! There was a big crowd of people, mostly teenagers but there may have been some adults in the mix, trashing the street and everything on it. As a girl proceeded to turn over a sidewalk grate, she made eye contact with me. Garbage was strewn about, people were throwing eggs everywhere including at the store fronts, and many were tipping anything that stood upright....it was a huge mess and nobody was doing anything about it. It was a crazy sight.

My dad didn't say a word all the way back home. Either he had not wanted me to see that or he saw it for the first time too. I'm thinking a little bit of both. He never wanted to to talk about it and I got the "look" every time I brought it up. I think he was embarrassed for our little Mennonite town. The population of Winkler at that time may not have been much over five thousand and employed a very small police force. There was nothing anybody could do but ride it out until morning. How awful would that be in this day? It was a license to vandalize on that one night of the year.

My husband, who is only four years my senior, remembers sitting in the car with his dad, parked down the road from the chaos, and watching the scene unfold. I heard years later that this event took place every Halloween and it was a ritual. This activity would have petered out by the time I was of age to partake or I would have heard about it. Something like that was not my bag anyway...I did stupid things but that would not have been one of them.

This morning as I walked my dogs at five in the morning, I couldn't help but think about the scene I witnessed forty-one years ago. I walked past a chip bag wrapper left on somebody's lawn and saw a jack-o-lantern that had rolled off of a front step. Perhaps more damage was done here in Lethbridge last night but never to the extent Winkler's youth used to celebrate. I've never seen anything like it since except for on TV. Maybe my immature brain at the time thought it was crazier than it actually was but I have talked to others that remember how bizarre Halloween night was in our sleepy little prairie town so my memory couldn't be too far off.

Maybe other towns and cities did this kind of thing? .....I haven't actually researched this. Maybe I'm over reacting and it was just a cool thing to do, like smoking in public places.  I'd like to hear from others from this era and get the low-down.