Argh — kids these days. Always with their faces in those iPhones, sitting in dark rooms playing video games, loitering at EZ Trip. When they do something really bad — graffiti a Stop sign or hang a dead animal from a goal post, it just confirms our knowledge that this generation is going straight to hell in a handbasket, right?
Nope, bad — even terribly destructive and potentially deadly — behavior is nothing new at all. Take, for instance, these two stories I encountered while searching the Dallas Morning News archives for a story.
The first is about an intensely destructive prank that occurred in Lake Highlands in August 1962.
Aug. 1962
“Vandals sent at least a half dozen vehicles free rolling down hills in the Lake Highlands district before dawn Monday … police say the vandals moved through the residential districts northeast of White Rock Lake releasing the emergency brakes of vehicles parked on hilltops and allowing them to roll down the street. In the worst single incident, a car belonging to J.H. Nichols at 9524 Aldwick, was set afire after it rolled down the street and into a vacant field …”
There are no reports of detectives ever catching the culprits in that case.
Oct. 1962
Police did, however, apprehend the teens who caused thousands of dollars worth of damage in October 1962 to Hexter Elementary.
Police reportedly called the act committed by three Lake Highlands youths “the worst vandalism he had seen involving a school in 22 years of police work.”
‘You can’t imagine what they did to that school,’ Detective H.E. Pettigrew told the News. The suspects, aged 16, 16 and 15, went room to room upsetting furniture, ripping textbooks, smearing ink and paint and writing obscenities on blackboards … contents of students lockers spilled on hallway floors … paint was poured over piano keyboards … drum heads were slashed. These kids smashed several windows before leaving and then returning to enter and destroy the interior, police said.
