When I was a teenager in the 1960s there was a lot of trying to prove how tough you were. Manliness  was a big factor in our lives.  In high school one way to show our bravado was to take on the green mist.  At the time I was living in Ontario, California, which is only significant because Chino, California and the Chino State Prison were directly south with Francis Avenue serving as our line in the sand between the communities.  The green mist existed in Chino, so to prove our manhood we had to take on both the green mist and possibly any Chinoians who spotted us. We had a little gang war going on at the time, but other than the fact that most of them were Mexicans, I’m not sure what it was about.

The green mist was a green-tinted fog.  No, I don’t know why it was green, but it was.  The story goes that it used to be a popular necking area until one night one of the escaped inmates from the prison killed and gutted the boyfriend leaving him hanging from a tree by his own intestines.  The story is a little fuzzy on whether the girlfriend was also killed, but that’s alright.  Of course, we didn’t have anything as authoritative as the Internet back then to look this sort of information up, but we knew it was true.  To prove your manliness, you had to park your car at night by a certain elementary school and then walk down this deserted road to a bridge over a creek, touch the bridge and then walk back.  Although there was no official marker identifying this road as the site of the killing, Darrel Holland told me he had it on good authority that this was the official slaying spot.  On one side of the road was a thick stand of trees and the other was an open cow pasture that the green mist would come rolling in over and eventually swallow you.

If I remember correctly we did that walk about two or three times during our junior and senior years.  It was then that I got the great idea that we should share the green mist with others.  We got Jim Cook to sucker a couple of other guys into doing the green mist walk.  Darrel and I, plus one other guy prepared the way for them.  I made a dummy our of old clothes and hay.  I even stole one of my mother’s pillow cases to make a head.  Darrell got an old shoe box and cut out two large devil-cat eyes that he covered with red tissue paper and then put a flashlight in the box so he had red-glowing eyes.  Our third member came up with the idea of tying string to the bushes along the side of the road and then shaking the bushes as the people went by.

The night was scheduled.  The three of us drove out in my family’s 1957 Sedan Deville Cadillac, one of my all-time favorite cars.  Of course I could have carried the entire football team out in that car and had room left over for the cheerleaders, but what the hell with gasoline priced at 17 cents a gallon, I was a big man. I dropped my fellow conspirators out along the way, first red-eyes followed by the string-man, and finally me with my dummy.  I parked the Cadi past the bridge where no one would see it.  

We all agreed that we would let the newbies walk all the way down to the bridge and turn around before we started our activities. No sense scaring them too early in the evening.  I decided to hide my dummy on the side of the road with the trees, as close to the road as possible without it being seen. I brought a rope along, tied it to the dummy, buried it in the leaves, ran the rope up over a branch and back to my hiding place behind a large oak tree.  And then I sat there.  The green mist rolled in and swallowed myself and my hiding spot. After what seemed hours, I finally heard Jim coming down the road with his two acolytes, the mist swirling around them. When they reached the bridge they stopped and one of them said, “That wasn’t scary.”

There were no lights along this road and it was doubtful that they could see more than a couple of feet.  One of them must have pocketed a rock earlier in the evening to throw, because I heard it land in the creek bed not too far from my hiding spot.  Probably the rock thrower said, “What’s that?”

Someone else answered, “You threw that.” But they all moved close to the creek and myself to see if there were any knife-wielding, intestine ripping, rock throwing, escaped convicts in the vicinity. As they reached my edge of the pavement I yanked on the rope and the dummy rose up out of the leaves at their feet.  Evidently I didn’t make the dummy too well because the pillow case head fell off.  They did not stay around to investigate.  There were blood curdling screams and they ran for all they were worth.  The walk along the road was about a mile, but there were world records set that night.  As they started to falter, the bushes next to them started to shake, then more bushes shook.  Darrell tried to follow them with his glowing cat eyes, but I’m not sure the speed of light could catch up with them.

Fortunately no one burst a blood vessel or had a heart attack that night, but we laughed and laughed.  I’m not sure why, but we never told those two guys what really happened.  We just felt it was more important to keep the ‘Legend of the Green Mist’ going.