The epic of the outhouse and Halloween as seen by a teenager of many years ago

By Gordon Garnos

AT ISSUE: Halloween is an age-old custom that is observed on the eve of All Saints' Day. Dressing up in weird costumes has been a part of this observance, Halloween, not All Saints' Day for about as long as the festivity has been in the history books. However, there were other customs connected with the day, or I should say "night," say 50 to 100 years ago that kids today just don't have any of the contraptions left for them to tip over. Halloween just isn't the same today as it was then....

THE STATUTE OF limitations, I'm sure, probably will protect me for today's column, but I want to make it perfectly clear that a good share of what I am telling came from research and not from personal experience.

Remembering when we were teenagers, we would be regaled with the tales of past Halloweens by some of the patrons in Bill Rueland's pool hall a day or two before the big event. Not that we would ever try to imitate any of those high jinks told to us, we were just entertained by the tales of past Halloweens in my hometown.

For instance, the building on Main Street that used to be the Farmers and Merchants Bank had its front door carved into the northeast corner of the building. That building later became the city library and now is the home of the Lyman County Herald. Anyway, the entry way then was just large enough to hold one outhouse, or as some would call it, a "privy," of course with a little bit of pushing and shoving.

THOSE TELLERS OF TALES never said where that privy came from, but as the story goes, the banker was really upset to find his front door blocked by something so indelicate. We assume the owner of the outhouse was quite upset as well when the next morning rolled around and he or she came out to use it and discovered it wasn't where it was supposed to be.

I believe it was also in those teenage years I heard about a large covey of kids on a Halloween rampage. The City Council told the lone city marshal to record the names of all the young people doing damage. When he caught up with that covey, he handed his notebook around for each one to sign his or her name.

The marshal proudly presented that list the next morning to a special meeting of the City Council. He had them all. They included, Blondie, Dagwood, Smilin' Jack, Steve Canyon, Dick Tracy and about every other character's name found then in comic books. The kindly old man was lucky to keep his job.

THE MAIN EVENT for Halloween back then was tipping over the outhouses and that town had a lot of them. Another incident that has been retold many times was when these older guys tipped over an outhouse, door down. The not-so-feeble cry of the old woman inside was heard for miles. We could hear that scream across town.

But one of my favorite Halloween stories I have heard had to do with the town bully and John's outdoor privy. It was located just a few feet from the edge of a precipice leading down to the Medicine Creek. Every Halloween the trick was to hit that old outhouse hard enough to send it over the cliff. It was a long driveway to that privy and a dead run was needed to hit that outhouse hard enough.

THE LAST YEAR that trick was tried, I believe, good old John got a little smarter and set that privy just behind the hole, between it and the edge of the cliff. By night fall, no one was the wiser and the race was on down that long driveway with the town bully in the lead. You guessed it. In he went--up to his chest. He crawled out of that hole and went home bawling. Strangely, Nobody would go with him. They were too busy laying on the ground laughing, including good old John.

One other Halloween tale being told to us, maybe it was in another town, was when the volunteer firemen held a masquerade dance in the town hall, which was on the opposite end of the block from the fire hall. After the liquid refreshments had been flowing for a while, some unknown people blocked off the streets around both the dance hall and the fire hall with farm implements and a couple of privies. These "unknowns" then built a large bonfire across the street from the local lumberyard.

From the dance hall, the flames looked like the entire lumberyard was aflame, but getting out the fire trucks to extinguish what looked like a major blaze was something else.

NOW, THERE MAY BE both tales and, I believe, some honest-to-goodness, good-old-fashioned true stories here. You, dear reader, will have to make that distinction.....

Gordon Garnos was long-time editor of the Watertown Public Opinion and recently retired after 39 years with that newspaper.  Garnos, a lifelong resident of South Dakota except for his military service in the U.S. Air Force, was born and raised in Presho.

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