(This article first appeared on Oct.31, 2019)
Halloween? Bah humbug.
So said many of my predecessors at the Kelowna Courier, who in the 1950s and ’60s were arguing for Halloween to be stamped out.
And it wasn’t just persnickety newspaper men who thought the practice needed to be abolished, by whatever means necessary.
There were influential voices on city council and in Kelowna business circles who believed a Halloween ban was in order.
The reason? A surprising amount of vandalism and theft that seemed to have regularly occurred during bygone Halloweens in Kelowna.
The old days weren’t always so calm and orderly when compared to current goings-on, judging by the lists of Halloween-related misconduct reported in the long-ago pages of this paper.
Consider the massive amount of preparation that city worthies put into protecting Kelowna from Halloween Night, 1961. The army was even called out!
“The patrolling of 18 mapped-off areas of the city by 30 volunteer special police has been arranged,” The Courier reported earlier that day. “The special constables will be sworn into service at 5 pm by Magistrate White.
“Other security patrollers, in addition to the RCMP, include the BC Dragoons, Kelowna firefighters, BC Forest crews, Civil Defense volunteers, and city works crews,” the paper assured the presumably nervous law-abiding citizenry.
What kinds of things had previously happened to warrant such an extra-ordinary preventive action?
Well, here’s a partial list of the Halloween night misdeeds reported by the Courier between 1954 and 1961:
Soaped windows on Bernard Avenue storefronts; broken car antennas; overturned garbage cans, uprooted mailboxes; knocked-down fence posts; widespread setting off of fireworks; paint sprayed on houses; smashed windows; cut down trees; profanity written on buildings.
By 1958, the editor of this paper had had enough.
“The time has come to bury deep the ghosts and goblins and place a couple tons of cement over the graves,” RP Maclean thundered.
“The night, conceived as a time for harmless fun, has become a night of terror, of vandalism, of senseless destruction and bodily injury. Acid thrown onto cars, flour and syrup smeared over cars, broken windows, firecrackers thrown at people’s fences—these things are not pranks.
“If strong-arm methods are required to bring our population of vandals to their senses, well, let’s use the strong-arm method,” Maclean wrote.
Maclean and his wife didn’t have kids, but it’s not just because they weren’t parents that they took a dark view of Halloween, Kelowna-style.
“I’ve got more children than any other member of council, but I still can’t see any reason for Halloween,” Ald. Jack Treadgold said during one council meeting.
“If there is any way we can get rid of Halloween, I’ll go along with it,” added Ald. Ernie Winter. “It’s getting to be too much of a racket.”
In 1959, a businessman denounced the “meaningless, damaging, and dangerous nonsense of Halloween,” and suggested people “blacklist” any shops that sell Halloween-related items.
While city clerk George Dunn informed councilors they couldn’t actually ban Halloween, the big security force deployed in the early ’60s seems to have had the desired effect.
On Nov. 1, 1962, the paper reported happily that major Halloween calamities had been averted. The most notable offense was the theft of a highway sign. Justice was swift, with the culprit arrested and fined $55 in court the next morning.
This miscreant also got a tongue-lashing from the magistrate: “This could have caused a serious traffic accident.”
