Rotten apples in the fall of 1950

By Tod Lundy

A mischievous apple fight in small-town America in 1950 lands eleven-year-old Tod Lundy and his friends in trouble with the police. More than seventy years later, Tod reflects on the compassion of a judge who gave them a second chance, and the very different consequences of juvenile justice today.

This is the fifth in a series of personal reflections from Tod, drawing from his own experience of life. He is a retired architect living in Astoria, Oregon, and is the facilitator of Humanist Discussions of Astoria which is held online every Monday.

This is a story about eleven-year-old boys in a small town. It took place early in my first year of junior high school. Like most kids starting out in a new school, I wanted to fit in and make new friends. I was especially drawn to a clique of boys from Edison Grade School. One boy in that group was a risk-taker. His name was Bob. This group of boys often followed Bob’s lead in mischievous behaviour.

I was with these boys from Edison on a Saturday evening in the fall of 1950. We were wandering through my neighbourhood. The Edison boys had grown up in the adjoining school district and were unfamiliar with my side of the school district boundary. I found myself acting as a guide, and suggested that we go to see if there were any apples left in an abandoned apple orchard on Hendricks Park Road. We walked up the hill and behind the old farmhouse to the orchard. The apples had all fallen. They lay on the ground and seemed to be undamaged, but when we picked them up, it was evident that while the skin was intact, the insides of the apples were rotten and mushy. Apparently, the apple skins were undamaged because they had fallen into the deep grass of the unattended orchard.  

These rotten apples were nature’s water balloons. Bob threw one at one of the other boys. An apple battle followed. Laughing and shouting, hidden by twilight and sheltered behind the trunks of the gnarled old trees, we lobbed apple bombs at one another. The apple fight was fun for a short time, but the excitement soon wore thin. A car drove by, and Bob said: “Hey! Let’s throw them at cars.” I felt that this was not a good idea, but none of the other boys objected. I didn’t voice my feelings as I did not want to be considered a sissy and fall into disfavour with this group of potential friends. We each gathered an armful of rotten apples and proceeded down the hill to a nearby house, which had a low hedge overlooking Fairmount Boulevard. The hedge was like a fortress wall. Behind it, we were out of sight. A couple of cars passed: we stood up and threw our sloppy grenades at them. The apples hit the cars with a kersplat. The cars accelerated away. The apples made a mess, but would not damage the cars. A bus came by, and we pelted it.

There was a lull in the traffic: having only a few apples left, we waited. Eventually, a car approached slowly. We tossed our last apples at it. It accelerated, but rather than try to escape our barrage, it came toward us and drove into the driveway next to our fortress hedge. As it pulled off the street, we saw that it was a police car. We all ran up the hill behind the house. Three of the boys stopped partway up the hill. I ran a few steps further and crawled under a pine tree and behind scotch broom bushes. Bob continued to run into the woods beyond. When an officer rounded the corner of the house with his flashlight, he spotted the three boys standing in a group at the edge of the woods. He commanded: “You boys stop right there.” They froze in the light of his lantern. Unlike boys of today, we did not fear the police. This was more like being caught for a foul by the referee in a basketball game. The officer approached the three boys, saying something about the danger of our vandalism and the potential damage that we could have caused. I was out of sight but only a few feet from them. As he spoke, he pointed his flashlight around at the surrounding brush. His light passed over me in my hiding place. I thought: “He sees me.” Then he commanded: “You boys come with me.”  

Thinking he had seen me, I crawled out from under the tree. But the officer had not seen me: he was clearly surprised at my appearance. Bob was not caught. The officer put us in his cruiser. Three boys were in the back seat. I sat in the front passenger seat. There was no electronic console, nor was there a steel screen between front and back seats, as police cruisers have today. He took us to the police station and jail. Upon entering, he proudly announced to the other officers: “These are the boys who were throwing apples up on Fairmount Boulevard.”  The police questioned us. We each had our fingerprints and photograph taken. We were not put in a cell; rather, we were told to wait in the lobby while they contacted our parents to come and pick us up. Dad arrived in formal clothes. He and Mom had been attending an event at the country club. The officer explained what had happened.  I followed Dad to his car, a four-door sedan with bench seats. There was another couple with him.  He said: “Tod, you get in back with the women.”  I suppose this was to show my lowly status.  No one spoke as we drove home.    

The following Monday, in the school cafeteria, we were telling other boys about our rotten apple arrest. I was clearly one of the gang now that we had been arrested together. Bob rebuked us for getting caught. He said: “If you had kept running into the woods, none of us would have been caught.”

Two weeks later, we boys and our parents were summoned to the court of Judge Barber. The judge was the father of one of our high school friends. He told us that we were “skating on thin ice”. He said that he would be keeping an eye on each of us, and that if we stayed out of trouble in future, he would expunge our records so that this arrest would not shade our futures.

That was it: no handcuffs, no trials, no fines, no jail time. We did stay out of trouble, or at least most of us did. Bob went on to be arrested several times, always for adolescent pranks. Among the parents, Bob was referred to as the ringleader and the rotten apple of our group.  

Now, writing about these events more than 70 years later, I am aware that each of the boys involved in the rotten apple arrest went on to have families and successful careers. Bob, the “bad apple”, rose to the highest status of any of us. He was a university professor and researcher. He was an internationally recognised authority in his field of marine parasitology, and authored over 400 publications. There is no doubt that the leniency of Judge Barber and the legal system of our small town were instrumental in our having lived fulfilling lives. Had any of us, most likely Bob, been treated as a criminal and sent to a “juvenile correctional facility”, as is done now, his life would have turned out very differently. I think about the many contemporary kids in the US, especially black boys in urban centres, who are sent to prison as juveniles. I wonder how their incarceration and criminal record impact their lives.