THE NT CLUB

I don’t remember how our little club started. I don’t even remember all the members. What I do remember is that we were up to no good!

One summer when I was about eight or nine years old, BJ and I began hanging out with Wayne, a boy who lived a few doors down from us. He was BJ’s age and was (is) as nice a guy as you would want to meet. We got the bright idea that we would form a “gang,” our expressed purpose being to frighten the neighbors after dark. Thus, the name “Neighborhood Terrors.” I have a vague recollection that there were other members who came and went, but we were the core group.

What we mostly did was to ring doorbells and run away. Or we might spy on people by peeking in their windows. Then someone came up with the bright idea that we could take the caps from cap guns and tap them with a hammer to make a loud popping sound, about the same sound as those little white twisted pieces of paper we have now that pop when you throw then on a hard surface. For those of you unfamiliar with caps, they were little rolls of paper about ½ inch wide with little black circles interspersed on them at about 1 inch intervals. When they fit into a cap gun, they rolled out as the trigger was pulled, the hammer on the gun hitting the circles and making the loud sound. But the guns could be tricky and we decided that a real hammer was much more effective.

There was a small apartment house on the corner of our street and one night we picked that as our target. As we were sneaking down the driveway in back of the apartments, one of the tenants decided, I guess, that he had had enough. So he came flying out his back door with a sheet over him like a ghost and making a scary sound. Of course, this action was totally unexpected and we fled the scene immediately. But then we regrouped and decided to “attack” from the front. So we sneaked around to the front and BJ and I were happily popping the caps on the window sill of someone else’s apartment when I looked up and here came the same man running toward us from across the lawn.

I remember giggling, and then I just turned and ran. BJ had no idea what was going on and he grabbed her before she realized he was there. He dragged her into his apartment and told his wife to keep an eye on her; he was going after the others. Of course, by then, Wayne and I were long gone and hidden where he couldn’t find us. While BJ was in the apartment, being fussed at by the wife, the telephone rang, and when the lady went to answer it, BJ ran out.

We got back together somehow and decided to go home and hang low for a while. The young couple knew our parents and would probably call them to complain. We knew, of course, if that happened we were in deep you-know-what. But they didn’t call; instead, they talked seriously to us and advised us to refrain from such criminal activities. We took their advice and dismantled our little club.

But BJ and I still talk about the NTs and wonder how on earth we came to get involved in activities that were so foreign to all three of us. We were usually not such delinquents. When I look back on that time, I am still amazed at our behavior!

What will the grandchildren think???