All Trick, No Treat

Halloween at the turn of the century used to have a very different business model.

Today, the transaction is straightforward. A child dresses as an emergency medical technician or licensed Disney IP, rings a doorbell, and receives a small bar of high-fructose corn syrup wrapped in plastic. The child says thank you. The homeowner smiles. Everyone goes back inside to watch television.

Now flash back to 1903; nobody was giving away food. If you walked up to a door on South K Street on October 31, 1903, and asked for candy, the person on the other side would have asked you what was wrong with you.

Back in the day, Halloween wasn’t an exchange of treats for good behavior. It was an annual window of unpunished domestic sabotage. Kids didn’t want fun-sized chocolate. They wanted to dismantle the city’s electric and transportation grid.

See, in the early 1900s, Tacoma ran on streetcars. The Tacoma Railway and Power Company operated dozens of lines that connected downtown to the waterfront, the smelter at Ruston, and the residential hills expanding toward Point Defiance. The cars were heavy, wooden, and electric. They hummed along steel rails overhead, powered by bare copper trolley wires carrying 500 volts of direct current.

To the adults of the city, the streetcars were the nervous system of modern industrial commerce.

To the kids of South Tacoma, the streetcars were an obstacle course built by the city for their personal entertainment every autumn.

Here’s one example. On the night of October 31, 1903, near what was then Glendale Street, a crew of local kids decided that simply soaping the rails (the standard trick of greasing the tracks on steep upgrades so the electric trolley wheels would spin uselessly in place) was no longer interesting. They wanted a fake a deadly accident.

They built a life-sized mannequin out of straw, old work trousers, and a burlap sack. They carried it out into the dark, laid it across the steel rails of the Glendale car line, and carefully arranged its burlap arm so that it was resting directly against a live overhead power feeder.

Then they sat in the blackberries and waited for the 9:00 p.m. car.

When the streetcar rounded the curve, its headlight caught the figure sprawled across the track. The conductor threw the emergency brake. Steel ground against steel, sparking against the rails as the heavy car skidded to a halt feet from the dummy.

The conductor jumped out, lantern in hand, shouting for an ambulance. He grabbed the figure by the shoulder to pull it clear of the line.

He didn’t get electrocuted—the kids had miscalculated the gap between the wire and the straw—but he did get a lantern full of laughing middle-schoolers running into the brush.

The driver spent twenty minutes clearing straw off the line while the passengers sat inside in the cold, waiting for transit to resume.

This was not an isolated incident. Dig into the microfilms of the Tacoma Times or the digital archives of the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room, and you discover that early Tacoma Halloween was less a holiday and more a temporary collapse of civil authority.

In 1907, a conductor on the Tacoma Avenue line opened his cab door to check a blockage and had a bag of dry quicklime thrown directly into his face by a group of teenager hiding behind a fence.

In 1912, kids in the Eastside neighborhood unbolted two hundred feet of wrought-iron fencing from around a private residence, hauled it four blocks down the hill, and reassembled it around the front steps of the local police precinct.

In 1921, pranksters on 6th Avenue unhooked the trolley poles from three consecutive streetcars, turned off the neighborhood circuit breaker, and removed every wooden porch step on a two-block stretch of South G Street while the homeowners were inside listening to the radio. When the residents heard the commotion on the street and ran out to investigate, they stepped out their front doors and fell four feet into their own rhododendron bushes.

The city tried everything to stop it. They deployed special police patrols. They threatened reform school. They published stern warnings in the newspaper signed by the Chief of Police, reminding parents that destruction of city transit property was a felony punishable by hard labor.

None of it worked. The kids didn’t want the candy. They wanted to see if a 40-ton electric train could be brought to a complete halt by four feet of lard and a stuffed pair of overalls.

What killed the chaos wasn’t police enforcement or civic morality. It was organized bribery.

By the mid-1930s, municipal leaders realized that the only way to stop teenagers from throwing lime at train operators was to buy them off. Business associations, most notably the 26th and Proctor Business Men’s Club in 1935, began organizing massive, highly structured street parties.

They closed off blocks. They hired brass bands. They handed out popcorn, apples, and cheap toys in exchange for a pledge that the kids wouldn’t touch the streetcar lines or unhinge anyone’s front gate.

It was a protection racket, and it worked.

Over the next two decades, the streetcars were decommissioned, replaced by diesel buses that didn’t run on copper wires and couldn’t be derailed with a bucket of lard. The chaos moved off the tracks and onto the sidewalks. By the 1950s, the trade was codified into the passive-aggressive bribe we know today: give us sugar, or we will put toilet paper in your maple tree.

The streetcar lines are gone now, buried under layers of asphalt on 6th Avenue and Pacific. The live wires were torn down eighty years ago. But if you walk down South K Street on a quiet, crisp night at the end of October, past the porch lights and the plastic skeletons, it’s worth remembering what used to happen here.

Before we domesticated the night into small wrapped squares of chocolate, Halloween in Tacoma belonged to the kids with the lard, the straw, and the dark intention of stopping the 9:00 p.m. streetcar in its tracks.