Halloween, Part 3

As I mentioned in the last post, there were 7 of us guys all outfitted in our Rollerball costumes. I’m 5’-11”, and was the shortest one of the bunch of us. When I had all the gear on, I was about 6’-6” and had the presence of a football player. The tallest guy was 6’-6” before, and over 7’-0” when he was all decked out. I think I have a line on getting some photos, so they should be coming soon. You won’t have to imagine what we looked like because you’ll be able to see it. Keep in mind that these are from the ‘70s, so I hope they’ll do us justice.

So – the big night came and we were ready. We had decided that we would spend the evening (this was Halloween night) going to different bars and trying to win costume contests. We had scanned the newspapers – there wasn’t the web to surf back then – to find out all the places that were having contests. We identified a bunch of places where we could go and try to win. There were varying prizes, some cash, some gifts, and we wanted to try to win them all. We had ended up spending about $100 each to make the costumes, which was a lot of money back then.

We gathered at my friend’s house and planned out our evening. After we got all dressed up, we decided it would be a great idea to take some pictures. We did a bunch of poses that emulated scenes from the movie, and we even made a big silver ball – like the movie – and held it high in some group pictures. We had conscripted one of our friends not dressing up to transport us around, since it was a little difficult to drive with roller skates on. He had a great ‘70s vehicle – a Dodge van, all carpeted, little windows in the side in the back – a veritable epitome of the times. It was the perfect way to go in style.

So – the evening began. I don’t remember how many bars we went to, but it was probably at least a half a dozen. Some of them were small little places with not many people and just a little contest, but others were pretty good sized. I remember the best one was a huge bar and we ended up being one of the top three for the big prize. There was a huge stage and we each took our turn vying for the biggest cheer from the probably fairly tipsy crowd. When our turn came, we skated in a perfect “V” formation and pivoted around to face the audience, with the leader holding up the silver ball in a perfect victory pose. The crowd went wild – it was like being rock stars! I can’t remember if we won – I don’t even know if it mattered all that much – for that moment we were on top of the world.

We had totally succeeded. We had won contests, we’d been the life of the parties we attended, and we’d had a complete blast. But – we didn’t even know that we had the biggest adventure of the night still ahead of us.

Halloween, Part 2

The first thing that we had to do was figure out exactly what we were doing. The year was 1980 and VCR’s and video tapes were just coming into their own. We rented the movie and got together to watch it. There were 7 of us guys that decided to do this together – we thought that would make a good “team” look.

We watched the movie and took extensive notes on their uniforms. I had never seen the movie before – it was a good flick – for the ’70s. After the movie we worked on sketching up the different parts we would need. It was going to take a lot of work to build these things from scratch and with not a lot of money, but we were all game.

My friend and his brother were the real brains behind the project, and they took on the lion’s share of the work. For each costume, we had to buy a set of football shoulder pads; football helmet; a football jersey (with the computer generated-type numbers on them); elbow pads; knee pads; shin and forearm leather wraps; gym shorts and black gloves. We also needed to install spikes in the gloves, and we also put them on the helmets. We added our own little twist to the costumes to help them better work for Halloween. More on that later.

The next couple of weeks were spent working on the costumes. We picked up the shoulder, knee and elbow pads at the local Goodwills and then spray painted and electrical taped them to make them all black. We all bought the same type of new gym short and gloves and helmets. We got some spikes and mounted them on the gloves, and we bought football jerseys and had the numbers silkscreened onto them. We also all sprung for new football helmets and painted them all just like the ones in the movie. My friends impressed me by going way beyond normal “guy” abilities and actually buying vinyl fabric, designing, cutting out and sewing all of the forearm and shin guards. We spent a bunch of late nights getting all this work done and then assembling everything.

But then we took it a step further. Our little twist was that we all bought white gallery-type plastic face masks to cover our faces. We then wired little red LED’s into them and taped them right above the slits for our eyes and mounted the battery packs in our helmets. We ended up with expressionless faces but our glowing eyes stared menacingly from behind. All said and done, we looked pretty darn scary. (I’m trying to find old photos as I write this and will hopefully include them as pics were before this little series is done.)

Look for Part 3 soon!

Halloween, Part 1

So – This will be a multi-post story. With Halloween coming up, this is the perfect time to tell of my greatest Halloween escapade ever. This is a story about a great idea that some friends and I had; a story about a bunch of guys getting together and really putting some effort into a project just for laughs; a story about having some of the most fun I’d ever had on a Halloween, a story about maybe having a little too much fun; and a story about love, passion, sacrifice, deceit and murder… Ok, maybe not the love, passion, etc. – I just threw that in to see if you were paying attention.

In 1975, a movie came out called “Rollerball” starring James Caan. You can read the IMBd on it here http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073631/, or for a more in depth (including spoilers) review, go to Wikipedia. It was a movie set in 2018 (not so far away, now) where an international roller-derby type game determined corporate world dominance in basic human needs on a global basis. You’ll have to read the synopsis to better understand the movie, but the point that applies to this story is that the players on the Houston Rollerball team had these great uniforms.

The skaters were basically geared up like football players on roller-skates. And by the way, there were no such things as roller-blades back then, so get your mind wrapped around the old hockey skate style footwear.
The sport was a violent one so the uniforms were not only a form of protection but were also made for inflicting bodily damage. They were accessorized with sharp steel spiked gloves. Check out the movie poster to see what I mean.

We decided that it would be incredibly cool to recreate the uniforms as costumes for Halloween. Little did we know the work we had gotten ourselves into, the fun we were going to have, or the experience in which we would ultimately be involved.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

Tankers

I posted awhile back about recess at school. There was something that was unique to our school because of where it was located, and it meant that every recess held the possibility of having a very cool event occur – if the timing was just right and a random truck driver was in the mood to oblige a playground full of kids.

I lived in North Seattle in an area called Richmond Beach. My grade school was on the main route up from Puget Sound, and was only about a half a mile up from the water. There was a Standard Oil Refinery not far north of that where ships would off-load oil and then tanker trucks would haul gas/oil up out of Richmond Beach to deliver to various locations around the area.

These tanker trucks or just tankers, as we called them, came right up a long hill right next to the grade school playground. The playground was level with road at the top end, but had a huge built up wall that overlooked that hill at the other end nearer the water. There were always a few kids who seemed to be listening intently for the sound of the trucks chugging up the hill. The shout would ring out across the playground “TANKER!!!”, and instantly every kid out there would make for the fence that overlooked the road and clamor for a front row spot. And then, in an incredible unanimous uproar of children’s voices, the shouting would begin, and we would all start pumping our fists in an action to simulate the pulling of the air horn.

This would go on for what seemed – to us – an eternity before the driver would hopefully finally succumb to our insistent pleas and let go a long, loud blast. This was rewarded with a huge chorus of screams and cheers from the entire playground, and some happy “thank you” waves to the driver. It was so cool! We had all banded together and rallied for a common cause and made something happen! Yeah!

You know how when you’re a kid, you always think that when you grow up, you’ll become a teacher, and be a cool teacher that all the kids like? Or that you’ll be a bus driver and be a cool bus driver that everyone likes? Well, I added to that childhood fantasy the dream of becoming a tanker driver and being a cool tanker driver that everyone would like because I would always honk my air horn for kids on playgrounds whenever they asked.