Last evening the Maple Hill Volunteer Fire Department sponsored a wonderful event in Maple Hill City Park called “Trunk or Treat.” Citizens came to the park, pulled into parking places, decorated their car trunks, filled them with treats and then they young people in their creative costumes walked along and helped themselves. What a great idea and very safe!!!

Lana Johnson, a member of the fire department, commented to me that it was a lot different than the Halloweens when we were growing up. In those years, we “decorated” the Main Street with outhouses and farm implements moved from their home locations. Many times it was impossible to drive down Main Street. I don’t know why, but I don’t think there was ever a picture taken.

Anyway, it reminded me of a story my Dad, John “Tim” Clark used to tell about Halloween in his day. He said that the older boys used to take pride in “decorating” Main Street, but the crowning achievement was taking R. T. Updegraff’s hearse out of the barn and rolling it to the back of J. D. Weaver’s office building. It was located where the Post Office is today. The boys would then put heavy planks from the ground up to the roof and roll the horse-drawn hearse up the planks “stranding” it on the building’s roof.

Now my Dad’s Grandfather, Leander “Deacon” Jones, was the town Marshall at that time. After several years of Updegraff complaining about the prank, Deacon thought he would put a stop to it. So on Halloween night, he hid in Updegraff’s hearse (which he also drove for funerals) and thought he’d surprise the boys and stop them.

However my Dad had heard him talking to my Grandmother, bragging about what he was going to do. So my Dad told the other boys and when they went to the barn, they were prepared. The hearse had a hinged back door with a hasp to close it. The first thing the boys did, was just walk to the back door and drop a pin into the hasp so that Grandpa Jones was locked into the hearse and couldn’t get out.

My Dad said they rolled the hearse out of the barn as usual, rolled Grandpa Jones down the street in it kicking and screaming—and then proceeded to roll it up on the roof just as they had always done.

Grandpa Jones was sound asleep inside the hearse when R. T. Updegraff went downtown the next morning and saw that the hearse up on Weaver’s roof just where it had always been.

My Dad said that he thought he’d probably be severely punished, but by the time Grandpa Jones caught up with him, he was laughing about the whole experience.

And I don’t doubt that Lavina Mackie Schulte, Lana Johnson’s mother, was right there with the young folks that Halloween night. She and my Dad and Mother were all very close in age and all students and graduates of Maple Hill High School.

There are more stories to tell, but they’ll have to wait for another time. I don’t know of any extant photos of the Updegraff Hearse, but they were all pretty similar. I found this one on-line. Grandfather Jones loved driving the teams of black horses from the church to the cemetery. Updegraff was the Maple Hill undertaker from about 1910 until he moved to Topeka, in 1931.