By MAYLON T. Rice
This Pastime springs from a comment written on a recent column about Halloween and Trick or Treating long ago in Warren
I, too, remember the old “Halloween Carnivals,” held in the hallways and rooms of the old Warren High School on Pine Street.
Those were indeed grand affairs; always held at night, and usually on a Saturday, not always on Oct. 31, but as close as possible.
The “games” or “events” of the Halloween Carnival were put on by the Junior Class with other organizations, i.e. Science Club, Beta Club, NHS, FFA, Home Economics Club and other school groups hosting games or events under the carnival umbrella.
Walking in the front double doors of WHS, (to the right) was the “study hall” – a double length sized, narrow room. Study Hall was transformed into a “cake walk.”
It was a game for all ages attending the fete.
Local attorney, Richard Roper, remembers how his mom, “loved the cake walk,” Roper, said, “I mean she went in there and I could go anywhere else in the building and do anything else I wanted, but she would always be right there – she loved that cake walk.”
Adults congregated in that old study hall where the floor was marked off in an oblong numbered gird trail, complete with each “space” of the track being numbered.
An old hi-fi record player would be manned by the director of the Cake Walk. As the entrants, each buying a ticket (a dime), would walk from one numbered square to another while the music played. When the music stopped, a number was drawn from a jar of all the numbered spaces – and produced – a winner.
The smallest of children, usually accompanied by parents, also took a turn in the cake walk. Often times if there were just children; a cupcake was the prize – saving all the homemade cakes later on for the adults.
The science labs further down the hallways were such games as dropping a coin into a water filled aquarium and trying to sink your own coin into a small glass on the bottom of the aquarium. This is much, much harder than it sounds.
Also, another game was to stand with your feet on a line taped on the floor tiles, staring straight down, trying to drop three wooden clothes pins into a clear glass canning jar.
It took all three pins in the jar to win a mystery prize in a brown-paper sack.
Here also was usually a duck pond, where floating plastic ducks (all numbered) floated. Small kids picked a duck out of the water, a usually won a prize.
I also recall a “knock ‘em down,” section of taped, sand filled bottles to be knocked over by tennis balls. If you knocked them down you won the prize.
Back to the central hallway was the old WHS Auditorium. Usually on the half-hours were usually three local talent shows – often overseen by the Martins. A little singing, playing of guitars and sometimes, an ensemble of band instruments and even a little gospel music was performed. Such acts enticed the cake walkers and other adults in for a show – still just a dime for admission.
Heading back down the main hallway, just past the front doors on the left, was the English class and Tall Timber Times (journalism lab). Here usually there was a small curtain put up inside where homemade fishing poles for the smaller kids. Each pole came with a sting for line and a clothes pin for a “hook” to be thrown over the curtain – to snag a prize (usually clipped on by a volunteer) and the lucky fisher boy or fisher girl – would always win a prize.
Prizes were everything from home-made cookies, plastic whistles, hair ribbons, fake candy lips or even plastic bucked teeth, pencils, pens, and other such nameless prizes. It was just a nickel or dime of play - and a prize every time.
There were dart throws and “grab bag” stations where a coin could produce a prize would be awarded. There were even “pie throws” as teachers stuck their heads through a card-board cutout for a whipped cream pie in the face.
Also in the downstairs were all types of refreshments, popcorn from the FFA; lemonade and sweets from the Home Economics department and even hot dogs from one class or another.
One year, I recall some class, rented a cotton candy spinner – it too, was a big hit.
Down at the corner of the hallway to the left of the office entrance to the school was Mr. Kenneth Wolfe’s math classroom. Usually some game of more chance for older kids could be found therein. The prizes for spinning a “math wheel” or some other protocol involving numbers usually netted good prizes for junior high or high school aged mathematicians. My dime usually went quickly with few positive results in these contests.
Climbing the rickety metal stairs, that opened out to the west entrance to the old high school building, brought you up the stairs to three interconnected classrooms to the right of the stairs. Here in the front room was a WHS Civic Class of Coach George Wayne Jones and later La Ron Davis; this was the entrance to the “Lumberjack House of Horrors.”
For a quarter, we waded into this pit of very scary things.
The initial room, doomsday black and darkened with the shades drawn and the windows covered in newspaper, was where the terrifying journey and all the screaming and wailing began.
A brave escort, armed with a single cell flashlight, asked the groups of five or six at a time to hold hands on the journey into terror.
All sorts of big cardboard boxes along the route held ghastly creatures that moaned and groaned and shrieked as the “escort” conducted the walking tour.
Often an arm would suddenly jut out of these boxes grabbing on to your clothes. Many a girls sweater was left in their grasp, as the wearer, broke off from the group, running screaming away from the box.
If you made it out of the first room (and many did not), the real chamber of terror awaited you in the middle classroom of Mr. Cecil Saunders.
Here under what seemed so bizarre in the late 1960s were “black lights,” “flashing strobe lights” or other mystic revelations to totally terrible things.
Usually someone in the tour had their hand forced into some cool (and sauce less) spaghetti or a bowl of ice-cold Jell-O and were told you were touching some unfortunates “brains.”
And always someone appeared with an over-sized Papier Mache ax (no chair saws back then) ready to chop up misbehaving kids. This was usually a volunteer dad or male teacher, making the scary scene, oh, so real.
And all this for a quarter and five minutes of spine chilling horror.
I can still hear the screams of fright and laughter of others echoing in those hallways long ago, just as this nighttime of Pastime of fun and hijinks will never be forgotten.
Happy Halloween everyone.
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