If you asked Eddie Parker what happened on Halloween 50 years ago, he would swear on his father’s grave that he wasn’t afraid that Old Man Brown was waiting for them with a rock salt loaded shotgun on that fateful night.

“I swear he knew we was coming and was loaded for bear,” said Eddie taking a sip of his beer. “We had tipped over this outhouse the year before and he wasn’t about to let it happen again.

A small crowd has gathered around Eddie in Vinnie’s tap on a Saturday afternoon, a week before Halloween. Those sitting along the heavily varnished bar and who had heard the story before rolled their eyes or shook their heads in disbelief and turned back to a college football game on TV. They had heard this story just one too many times and all the embellishment that went along with it.

On this particular Saturday there were a few patrons who hadn’t heard the story and cajoled him with the promise of a few beers to hear him tell the story. Not that it would take too much cajoling; he loved to tell the story every year right around Halloween.

“It was cold and raining on that Halloween night,” Eddie begins in his raspy voice, “the night myself Larry, Sammy, and Bernie, better known as The Cherry Bombers decided to have one last Halloween fling before we graduated from high school.”

For four years running-ever since Eddie his cohorts starting terrorizing the community-they had become notorious for their Halloween pranks-from soaping windows to tipping over outhouses-pretty common pranks back in the late 1950s and early 1960’s in Cherry and other small communities when people still had outhouses to tip over.

However, on that fateful Halloween night 50 years ago they were about to meet their match when they pushed-literally-Floyd “Old Man” Brown too far. Brown, who had passed away in 1980 wasn’t that “old” back in 1958, he was only 50 but to everyone in town, especially the kids he was always referred to as Old Man Brown.

The “gang” had assembled at Elsie’s this popular diner for grade school and high school students on main street early in the evening for burgers and Cokes. Located just down the street from the two-story dark brick grade school that they had graduated from four years earlier, Elsie’s was the perfect starting point for their last night of Halloween shenanigans, and also good for an alibi-just in case they got arrested later and had to explain where they had been that night.