Early night. Summer, 1949. Before Imaginations Died.

The three friends, all 13 years old, were sitting on one parents front stoop. Mischief was always on their minds. Usually it was making it look like a sack of groceries had spilled from a truck, as they hid behind a hedge, waiting for someone to stop. At which point they would rise up and whoop and holler at the suckers.

This night the senior of the boys, he was six months older than the second oldest, came up with a great idea. They would lower the streetlight and take the bulb out.

The streetlight arm could be lowered by a cable that was anchored about 12 feet up from the ground. The boys had watched the city’s maintenance crew replace the bulbs before, when the bulbs had been mysteriously shot out with bb guns.

The boys ran the half block to the pole. They kept any eye out for cars, but in this residential neighborhood the traffic was light. They cupped their eyes from the light, looking up to see the pully hook.