Dan's Papers - June 20, 2008

Last Friday morning, kids and teachers came to East Hampton High School to find a Ford Escort in the cafeteria. It was an odd place for it. But it was possible. And the word went around that this was part of the senior prank, which comes at the end of every school year, when all those who are graduating to go off to points unknown festoon the school in shaving foam, pennants, balloons and sticky spray string.

The Escort was on cinderblocks in the cafeteria. The idea was, apparently, that it would be stored there for some time while its owner was away. The license plates had been removed. And the cafeteria tables and chairs were right where they always were, except they were a bit closer together to make way for the space needed in the center for the car.

Speculation about how this was done was the topic of the morning. There was discussion about whether all the doors between the front door and the center of the cafeteria had been wide enough to get the car in with people just pushing it with the wheels on. If not, they would have had to turn it on its side and bring it in that way, perhaps with several of those carpeted furniture mover decks with roller skates under them.

In any case, whoever did this (ahem), had gone to the trouble of putting black coverings over the surveillance system cameras involved along the way before they commenced with the project.

The administration, in its righteous indignation, reminded everybody that these kids were truly dumb if they believed removing the license plates would avoid detection. All cars have a VIN number.

How this has turned out I do not know, but some years are worse than others, in the senior prank department. This was a pretty good one.

The grand-daddy of all the pranks ever done at a school in the Hamptons also took place at East Hampton High School, in 1952, when the seniors decided to get the eastbound 6:42 a.m. Long Island Rail Road train to plow into the school cafeteria.

Those involved in this, bearing the last names of some of the longtime local residents such as Dayton, Cooper, Osborne, Strong and Lester, are still around today, enjoying their grandfatherdom. They grew up before the prices of real estate went through the roof. They got married and bought houses here. They opened businesses, had families and stayed. I guess they'd be in their mid-70s by now. But oh, I can tell you that they remember this.

At the time, East Hampton High School was not where it is today. It was located in what is now the Middle School on Newtown Lane, right across from Herrick Park. The railroad ran behind that school, as it still does, but after leaving East Hampton station going east, there was a short spur that angled off of it to the right, to just behind the school. It was where a single railroad car bearing supplies for the school, having been brought out from New York City, could be parked to be unloaded.

The kids always wondered about that spur. For one reason, it got in the way of the play yard in the back. For another, a railroad car was parked there only once a month or so.

The kids had a good look at the angle of the spur. They noted that the continuation of this angle went right into the new cafeteria. They tested the strength of the metal stop at the end of the spur, which was designed to halt only one railroad car, not a whole freight train. And they examined the metal switch that moved the tracks so the railroad car could be brought out onto the spur, taking particular note of the tools they might need to break the lock that held it in place.

On the night in question, one or more of these people named Dayton, Strong, Cooper, Osborne, Lester and perhaps Herrick, went out to behind the school at 4 a.m., and they broke the lock, turned the switch and moved the tracks.

Two hours later, the eastbound 6:13 a.m. barreled down the tracks at about 30 miles an hour, got switched onto the spur and, to the horror of the engineer and the fireman, with a bang, went through the stop and crashed toward the cafeteria. As it went, the train began to burrow along through the play yard, its wheels churning through the grass and slowly digging a considerable trench into the dirt.

The dirt piled up in front of the train, slowing it. And indeed, finally, the train came to a halt just one car-length before the modern glass windows of the student cafeteria. It was also just one car-length from three propane tanks attached to the cafeteria, which, if hit, would have blown everyone to Kingdom Come.

The train sat there for many days, with the two passenger cars closest to the front all at slight angles to upright, but not fallen over, and the rest of the train trailing out behind on the single track, blocking all train service for the rest of the day.

Inside the train, there were 52 passengers, eight of whom were injured. None was injured seriously, but one man suffered a broken arm. Needless to say, both the railroad and the school took this very seriously.

I do not know what went on in the homes of those young people later that day, and I am not going to ask any of them about it. But this was in the days when children were spanked - and worse - when dad came home. It was how kids were kept on the straight and narrow back then.

Of course, when I started publishing Dan's Papers eight years after all this took place, there were people who told me to tell this story, and I did.

Interestingly, I was involved in a similar sort of school prank the same year the train wreck took place in East Hampton.

I was born and raised in Millburn, New Jersey and was, at that time, an eighth grader in what was then called Millburn Junior High.

As I recall, it was around 7:30 in the morning and as I walked to the school, I saw a small crowd of kids in the parking lot there, so I went over. They were standing around a brand-new car that one of the teachers had bought the preceding week. The car was called a Nash Metropolitan, and it was a little tiny thing that looked a bit like a Donald Duck cartoon car. It probably weighed just 1,500 pounds. I guess it was about the size of a Smart Car today.

Anyway, it was green with white trim, and it was brand-new, and the ninth graders were sizing it up to decide what they ought to do with it. Certainly there were enough of us to do something. A lookout was posted. One idea was that we ought to turn it upside down, but there were the cautious types who said that the teacher was a nice guy and it would scratch up the roof.

Finally we decided to pick it up, which we did, and carry it through the woods around to the other side of the school, where we could put it in another parking lot. So that's what we did.

For the record, I didn't lift anything, but I did walk along behind. It was fun. And the teacher surely must have thought he was losing his mind at the end of the school day.

Well, it doesn't compare to the Ford having lunch. And it surely doesn't compare to the great high school train wreck of 1952.