ELLSWORTH, Maine — Gary Fortier has served the city as a volunteer, emergency medical technician and elected official for almost 50 years. He’s also had some serious fun in Ellsworth — as a Halloween prankster.
Police say that it doesn’t happen here any more, but the 65-year-old city councilor recalls an Ellsworth of the 1960s that teemed with practical jokes most every Halloween. Prank wars often erupted between east- and west-siders, with police manning the Union River bridge on Halloween night to interdict guerrilla forces looking to raid enemy territory.
But the pranksters got around the roadblock.
“We would get backpacks full of eggs, walk across the top of the Union River dam, do our bombing runs, and then walk home over the bridge innocently,” Fortier said.
One Halloween prank is today an Ellsworth legend: Kids rolling pumpkins down Bridge Hill to be smashed by passing vehicles on Bucksport Road. Lots of kids participated, said Fortier, a graduate of the Ellsworth High School Class of 1972.
“It was the whole neighborhood,” Fortier said. “We didn’t steal stuff, we didn’t break stuff. We got cheered by people [when the pranksters rolled pumpkins] because we were doing good, clean fun.”
A measure of how the Bridge Hill tomfoolery has become city folklore: Several City Hall clerks mentioned it Wednesday, as did a group of Ellsworth Elementary Middle School students eating at DragonFire Pizza. One student said her grandmother told her about it.
Pumpkin rolling hasn’t occurred for many years — probably not since the early 1990s, Ellsworth police Capt. Troy Bires said. The city is pretty prankless today in general, he said.
Ellsworth Fire Chief Richard Tupper, 54, remembers the pumpkin rolling. He maintained that he never rolled pumpkins himself — though he smashed one, once. Fortier isn’t buying that.
“He was an eastie boy. He was on the losing side,” Fortier said. “You really don’t admit your failures.”
Occasionally the practical jokes went too far. The captain of a now-defunct Ellsworth volunteer fire station drove into what he thought was a harmlessly fleshy gourd one Halloween on Bayside Road in Trenton. It was a large rock, painted orange.
“It took out his oil pan,” Fortier said.
That would never happen in Fortier’s Chapel Street neighborhood. “Bridge Hill guys,” he said, “were non-violent offenders.”
Today pranks are too easy to get in trouble for, and nobody has a taste for them, said 13-year-old Noah Torrance, who attends Ellsworth Elementary.
“It’s a lot more civilized day and age,” Torrance said.
Fortier scoffed at that notion.
“I think the last couple generations are not into good, clean fun as much as we were. They’re on Facebook or Bookface or whatever the Hell it’s called,” Fortier said.
The best time to roll pumpkins, Fortier said, was at about 9:20 p.m. Tractor-trailer trucks hauling goods from Nova Scotia to Boston came from Bar Harbor’s ferry terminal at 9 p.m. and hit the pumpkins on Bucksport Road, known then as Court Street, 20 minutes later.
“All these tractor trailers would come by and would squash the Hell out of them,” Fortier said.