This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
It's no wonder small boys quickly learn to be suspicious of adults. If a thing turns out to be fun for a boy to do, you can be certain some adult will try to stop it. Take Halloween, for instance. Halloween used to be the best night of the year for Rock Island boys, and a few of the more daring girls, until grownups got ahold of it at the turn of the century.
Before then, a Rock Island Halloween was full of so many things to do, it took most of the night. There were windows to rattle with spools or loose corn, there were streetcar tracks to grease so that streetcars couldn't stop—if they could even start. There were hitching posts at every house and business to tear out of the ground, and literally hundreds of feet of picket fences and board sidewalks to take up. And, of course, there was the outhouse that had to be tipped over to make it a proper Halloween. A boy who worked as hard all year in his schoolwork as he worked on Halloween would have found himself at Harvard.
By 1908 Rock Island boys had worked things out so efficiently that adults began to complain. That year the Argus issued a stern warning from the police that anyone caught damaging property would be arrested and thrown in jail. Additional policemen were put on patrol for the night. And there was little damage and no arrests in 1908.
A year later, however, the damage was back to normal. It was time to take real action by 1910. Up came the wooden sidewalks, and down went cement, much harder to displace. Out went nearly all the hitching posts and in came the new automobile. It took boys a few years to discover what could be done to a car on Halloween. Indoor plumbing replaced many of the outhouses. Picket fences were replaced by iron.
Then, the grown-ups in Rock Island did the meanest thing they could do to boys: the city appointed every boy in Rock Island an honorary policeman for the night.
It worked. Damage on Halloween, 1910, dropped to one-tenth of what it had been in 1909. The fun dropped even more. There were so many boy policemen patrolling the streets, there wasn’t anyone left to arrest.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
