By:  Joseph R. Ellis

Once again, let's get the legalities out of the way with our standard disclaimer: 

DO NOT ATTEMPT ANY OF THE STUNTS DESCRIBED IN THIS BLOG!  THE WORLD IS A MUCH LESS FORGIVING PLACE TODAY - ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO PRANKS INVOLVING PEOPLE'S CARS!

Now on to this week's installment...

The Car Trap

As I mentioned last week, this prank was conceived in Raton, New Mexico.  But it wasn't perfected until I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.  Like many of history's great inventions (of which this most certainly is not), its discovery was made quite by accident.  A bunch of the neighborhood kids had been playing outside.  Someone got their hands on a rather large ball of industrial strength yellow string wrapped around a wooden stake.  It probably came from a construction site, because it was the kind of string that might be used to layout straight lines for concrete forms.  Maybe some curbs were being repaired somewhere.  In any case, we started playing around with it by stretching it across the road. 

My family lived in a house on the corner of a fairly quiet residential neighborhood, and this took place on the street right beside our house.  There wasn't much traffic, but when the occasional car did pass by, we'd have to lower the string to let them pass.  Then someone got brave and decided to raise the string right when a pickup truck was driving by.  The string snagged on the front bumper and the truck wound up driving off dragging our twine-wrapped wooden stick down the road.  Well, we thought that was hilarious!  I think one of the other kids chased after the pickup and managed to retrieve our twine a block or so away, after it wrapped around something (or someone) and broke free.  You'd have thought we'd just invented a new national pastime.  What great promise this new game showed!  Imagine being able to trap cars and trucks with nothing more than string!  I believe it was here that one of us coined the name, "Car Trap."  We decided the prank would be greatly enhanced if we could tie some tin cans and other noisy items to the ends of the string.  Kind of an instant "just married" prank.  We made a few feeble attempts at this, but as I recall, we really didn't have much luck.  You know how it goes...kids have a short attention span and it was getting late.  Moms started calling kids to come in to supper.  Maybe one vehicle took off with our ball of twine for good, I don't really remember what happened to it.  By the next day, the car trap was history.  But not for me!

Fast forward a couple of years.  My family had moved to Charlotte, NC.  Coincidentally, our house was once again located on the corner of a residential intersection.  But this time, it was a much busier intersection at the bottom of a hill.  There was a flashing red light in one direction, and a flashing yellow light for the road with the traffic coming down the hill.  Cars would come flying down the hill, go through the intersection with the flashing yellow light, and proceed up another hill.  It was a dangerous intersection, and they later made it into a 4-way stop with flashing red lights in all directions.  There were a LOT of wrecks during the couple of years that our family lived there.  Our yard was elevated above street level, which proved to be a good thing.  It kept more than one car from coming into our living room - they'd crash into the grass bank, instead.  I remember one year a car crashed into the yard located diagonally across from our house.  Unlike our yard, this one was at street level.  The car demolished their chain link fence.  Before they could get the fence repaired, another car crashed and landed in the same exact spot a few weeks later.  I always wondered if the people tried to collect twice on their homeowner's policy.  But I digress.

 As you might have gathered, the "car trap" seed had been firmly planted in my mind, and I was determined to give it another shot.  This was definitely one of those pranks that required a partner, so I couldn't do anything until I made some more hoodlum friends.  Fortunately, that didn't take too long. 

Phillip lived on the next block and was a year older than me.  So we weren't in the same classes in school, but we did ride the same school bus.  Before long, we were hanging out together and talking about Star Trek (the original series), Estes model rockets (and fireworks in general), and any mischief we could think of. 

Phillip proved to be a worthy partner-in-mischief.  One of his ideas was to dress up like a couple of ruffians and stand at the corner of my family's yard.  This was best done after dark.  We'd wait for a car to approach from the flashing red light part of the intersection, since they'd be driving much slower.  Then we'd perform a mock "knock down, drag out" fist fight.  One of us would pretend to get knocked out and roll down the grass hill in our yard and come to rest at the edge of the road.  Some cars would speed up and drive off.  Some cars didn't even seem to notice us.  But occasionally, one would slow down and stop to see if we were okay.  That was our cue to get up and run away laughing.  Luckily, cell phones weren't available back then so we didn't have to worry about anyone calling 911 and reporting fake dead kids lying on the side of the road.  But we only did that trick a few times.  A good prankster has to have an innate sense of when to quit. 

A few weeks later, I told Phillip about the car trap idea.  This intersection was ideal.  There were trees in our yard, as well as across the street.  Perfect hiding places!   We dressed in dark clothes like a couple of ninjas (again, this prank was best performed at night).  For twine, we used some nylon kite string - strong enough not to break and thin enough to be hard to see.  We collected several soda cans and tied them to both ends of about 30 or 40 feet of the string. 

Approximate location of the perfected car trap prank (before intersection was a 4-way stop).

I took my position behind a tree in our yard and Phillip took his position behind a tree across the street.  And we had one more secret weapon - walkie talkies!  The Car Trap works best when both participants (the trappers) work together as one to trap their victim (the trappee).  Walkie talkies made this possible.  We lay in waiting with our kite string slackened across the road.  We waited for some poor sucker to come speeding down Hillside Avenue.  At the last second, one of us would key the mike on our walkie and say, "NOW!"  We both yanked the kite string up to bumper height (and early 70s cars had some pretty substantial bumpers on which to snag).  It only took us a couple of attempts to get the timing down pat.  It was a beautiful site (and sound): 

Instant "Just Married" prank!

Walkie crackles to life..."NOW"...*snag*...kite string jumps out of our hands and forms dual tails of clanking aluminum cans behind the victim's car!  The driver always stopped within a few feet of getting snagged.  I don't remember ever having a car drive off with our noisy snare.  They'd hear a terrible racket and stop their car.  They'd get out and scratch their head and remove the string from their bumper, then drive off.  Yeah, it was another dumb and dangerous prank.  But we did it at night when the traffic was lighter and always selected a lone car so as not to create a traffic accident (that intersection didn't need any help creating accidents).  As before, we didn't push our luck.  I think we snagged 2 or 3 cars that night and never tried the prank again.  There were more pranks, just not that particular one.

So that is the story of the Car Trap.  The subject for next time:  kids playing with fire!