Halloween

(well - better later than never...)

So - As I was reminiscing about what this holiday was like back in the '70s, there were a couple of things that I remembered so vividly.

The first was making Halloween drawings and cutouts.  Piles of orange and black construction paper and our imagination.  Witches, ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, old dead trees, tombstones, bats, etc.  We would spend hours making all of these things.  We would decorate the windows and the walls and anything else mom would let us tape to.

The other things was candy.  My brother, cousin and I would go out together and we would draw out maps of our neighborhood and plan our routes.  We would start as early as we could and stay out a late as possible for maximum candy!

One other thing - a friend of mine and I made a little haunted house.  Our big thing was wet pieces of string hanging down that felt like sticky cobwebs.

It was fun - I hope kids still have as much fun today doing handmade stuff as we did back in the day!

Halloween, Part 7 - The FINAL Chapter

So – there we were – the elevator doors were closing and we were almost free. But – we could hear all the cop cars skidding to a stop just a few yards away. We could see all the flashing lights and hear all the sirens and the radios. Dang! – Those security guards had it going on!

And this is where the security guar… uh… we realized by now that they were indeed full-fledged cops – made a move right out of the movies. Just as the elevator doors were about to clamp shut, a hand slipped between the doors and pulled them open. Now here’s the situation. One cop vs. 7 very tall, very scary, football-like, spike encrusted gloved and helmeted, white masked, red-glowing-eyed guys. We are TOTALLY scared and freaked out, but he can’t see that. I’ll never forget how he slowly moved his hand to his piece – didn’t pull it – but he had it there in case.

He backed up a little bit and very deliberately told us to “exit the elevator, slowly”. Within a couple of seconds, the place was literally swarming with cops and we were basically lined up against the wall being searched. “But, we we’re just having fun!” …we kept saying. “It’s just a joke”, “We just wanted to have some fun…”

They were NOT amused. In what seemed like only a couple of minutes we were all sitting down and listening the cops telling us how much trouble we were in. They had us strip off our skates, gloves, masks and helmets. We didn’t think that things could get much worse, when someone who was obviously in charge appeared on the scene. It turned out that the Chief of Police for the Port of Seattle Police was called out of bed at 2:00 am and he was NOT happy. He proceeded to pace back and forth before us letting us know that he could have us thrown in jail right now. That there were a dozen different offenses he could charge us for.
I have never heard such a combination of language and anger… it didn’t help that we kept talking about “…just having fun”. We soon stopped saying anything and started to just apologize. It was a very long night.

We ended up getting cited for disorderly conduct. We had to walk away from the airport (they confiscated our gear), and then we finally got in touch with our van driver who came and picked us up. We ended up having to get a public defender, going to court and being sentenced to 20 hours of community service work. Of course it could have been a lot worse, but the whole thing was a real eye-opener and kind of surreal.

The fun and ironic ending to this was that we ended up having to wash and wax the very police cars that chased us in the parking garage. It was kind of fun to have the secretaries whispering and excitedly chatting when we showed up the first day. Our little escapade ended up being quite the story around the police office for quite awhile.

So there you have it. Probably the hardest part was telling my folks because I had always been a good kid. Fortunately, they were pretty understanding overall. It’s one of those things that I am actually glad I did. We didn’t cause any harm, hurt anyone or destroy any property. Of course, it’s been a great story to be able to tell over the years, we did have fun through it all, and it was fun to be a part of something bigger than myself.

Thanks for sticking with me on this, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this story. I’ve had a great time reliving and retelling it, and actually writing down the memories. Have a fun, safe and legal Halloween!

Halloween, Part 5

My awesome friend found his pictures! Well – he found the negatives – and he was nice enough to get them developed, scanned them and then emailed them to me. I do not remember that we took all these pictures! This helped me to remember that in the course of the evening, we went a large open space in the middle of the University of Washington called Red Square.

Take a look! (Click to enlarge)

A ‘70’s-ish layout if ever I’ve seen one.

Practicing our “V” formation skating.

The effect would have been better without the flash. I’m number 2, second from the right. Remember – I’m topping out at 6’-5” – so we’re all pretty intimidating.

Oooooh! Scary!

Here we are in a group pic just before we got ready to assault the airport

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Geared up, faces and lights on, ready to go! On the roof of the parking garage at Sea-Tac!

Well - now that you know what we looked like, I bet you're ready to hear the whole story. Tune in tomorrow to read what happened just a few minutes after this shot was taken

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!