Font Resize"Warning to Parents," the notice said. "Notice is given that parents will be held responsible for malice, mischief, destroying property, or other Halloween pranks."
By 1952, Park City officials had had enough of Halloween vandalism.
Halloween has been celebrated in Utah since the 1890s. Readers who opened newspapers on Nov. 1 in any year could count on reports of overnight vandalism and occasional bodily harm.
In 1896, Salt Lakers complained about a "menace to the community" when "crowds of youthful people engage in tearing off and carrying away gates, breaking down fences, rooting up trees and shrubbery and other depredations. There were not only boys concerned in this reprehensible business, but numbers of little girls."
In 1900, one Salt Laker went out to get some kindling and was astonished to find "a pile large enough to last a month" stacked on his porch -- unfortunately, the kindling was his own fence. "Hardly a foot-bridge was left in its place," the paper reported, "and many an unsuspecting pedestrian expressed himself more directly than elegantly as, covered with mud and water, he picked himself up out of a ditch where a bridge had been."
Others found their garden gates missing, or rehung with gates from neighbors' fences.
The editor of a Box Elder publication reported that gate stealing was still a fad in 1910: "The mystery is how can any boy find pleasure in tugging gates and bridges around in the middle
Other pranks were more dangerous. In 1904, some Ogden boys stole the wagon owned by a Chinese vegetable peddler. They placed it across the streetcar tracks, angled so that it was partially hidden by telephone poles. A streetcar hit the wagon, destroying both it and the peddler's means of livelihood; the front of the streetcar was caved in and motorman Bernard Strong narrowly escaped injury.
The same streetcar line was the victim in 1907 of boys who threw a dummy onto the tracks to enjoy the screams of passengers who thought a pedestrian had been run down. Ogdenites did get a chuckle, though, when they saw a large sign, removed from a theater and placed across the front of Lindquist's mortuary, announcing that "the matinee will begin at 2 o'clock."
Ogden was still the target in 1927 of youths who "broke windows, greased streetcar track rails, jerked trolleys from cars, lowered arc lights to the ground, stole porch furniture, ruined the paint on automobiles, rolled bales of wire down hills, ran wagons and buggies up on porches, put torpedoes on rails and threw rotten tomatoes."
Deputy Sheriff Fred Tout, chasing vandals, "stumbled over a string across the sidewalk and fell to his knees while girls and boys snickered and giggled."
In 1937, some "goblins" kidnapped two schoolteachers from a house party in Kanab and tied them to a telephone pole, where the women remained stranded until someone found and freed them an hour later.
Davis County residents faced real financial losses in 1939 when five boys dumped 25 tons of sugar beets from a rail car at Syracuse. Automobile owners in Centerville reported the theft of license plates, spark plugs, radiator caps and other car parts. A porch in Layton was set afire by a thrown flare.
Murray was plagued in 1944 by the dangerous game of leaving logs across Vine Street, with the apparent intent of causing traffic accidents.
No wonder Utah cities cracked down on the mischief, with pre-emptive warnings like Park City's in 1952: "Extra officers will be on duty Halloween evening and night, and any minor found breaking the law will be taken to the City Hall, the parents notified and given a chance to 'tell it to the judge.'"
This column was written on Thursday. Here's hoping that Sunday's Tribune has only costumed fun to report, with little of the hooliganism of the last century.
Ardis E. Parshall (AEParshall@aol.com) is a Utah historian who welcomes feedback from readers.
