I was going through a box of personal belongings a couple of weeks ago, when I stumbled across some pictures of my 1978 high school graduation. My daughter Vonnie laughed at those pictures and asked me if everyone dressed that way in the old days. The old days? 1978 is now the old days? I guess it’s only fair since I used to look at my dad’s high school year book and laugh, thinking he lived back in the Dark Ages. You reap what you sow I guess. In that same box I happened across a batch of photos of my best friend Brian. We were the inseparable dynamic duo always neck high in mischievous trouble, but never to the point of lawlessness or destruction of any kind. The event I am about to discuss here is one of the most daring of all the stunts we pulled.

Brian called me one night in May of 1978 and read a section from a James Harriet novel (I think it was All Creatures Great and Small),  about a guy who dressed like a phantom and walked the country side with a lantern scaring the locals. He thought that would be a great stunt for the two of us to pull as well. What more could I say but “Count me in Bro, sounds like a plan!” The setting was perfect for this copy-cat stunt we were planning, an old two story farm house built in the mid-1800s, a primitive frontier cemetery crowded with spooky looking tombstones, and an old frontier style church house on the far western edge of Livonia, Michigan. What made the atmosphere so fitting was it’s isolation from civilization, out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but farm land as far as the eye could see.

Brian and his family lived in the old farm house, and his father was the Pastor of the old Church, which had been renovated for regular use. This little church was one of three locations for Trinity Baptist Church, and it was also the location I attended as well. The two lane dirt road that ran by the farm house, cemetery, and church never had much traffic in those days, and since we were planning our mischievous deed for late at night, we knew we were in business.

The plan we had in mind was to sneak out of Brian’s room at around 1:30 AM, and to get inside the church where we could throw on an old monk’s robe I had found a couple years before at a garage sale. Just why someone would have a monk’s robe in their garage sale is beyond me, but I thought it would be novel to own it. Brian’s room was on the far eastern end of the second story of the farm house, and his parent’s room was at the opposite end. We had to make sure that they were fast asleep before we commenced to climb out his window with the help of a big hemp rope. We felt like regular Army Rangers on their way to an exciting top secret adventure, hopefully without bloodshed. We crept through the old cemetery and made our way into the old church where Brian pulled on the monk’s robe. We brought with us a rather large railroad oil lantern that we would use as our prop. I lit the lantern and Brian set out across the road about a hundred yards from the front of the church. The cemetery was just behind the old church, with tall hedges that lined a couple of paths into the woods, it made for a great escape route in the event we had to hightail it away from trouble.