Fox Night is such a strange part of the lore of my youth. It was a huge topic of conversation in grade school for about a week every year, starting a few days before Oct. 30 and ending a few days later. For all the talk about hooliganism that went on, I only remember personally being involved in one Fox Night incident.

In 1987 I heard voices outside the kitchen window and peeped out just as a group of ninth-grade classmates were egging my house. I quickly got on the phone, assembled a crew, and took part in a retaliatory egging, which later escalated  to the point where one kid's older brother came after us with a tire iron.

So yeah, it doesn't need to be repeated or celebrated. It was stupid. 

But it fascinates me how Fox Night was such a well-known thing in my neighborhood during a very short era. I've asked people who were West Duluth teenagers in the early 1970s about Fox Night and they have no idea what I'm talking about. And by the mid-1990s I think the whole concept had died out completely.

I came to assume Fox Night was a thing unique to West Duluth when I went off to college -- just a few miles away to Superior -- and when Oct. 30 came around I brought it up in conversation and people thought I was making it up.

But it turns out it wasn't unique to West Duluth at all. Somehow Guy Fawkes Night became a pervasive thing in my neighborhood, to the point where we all assumed it was a nationwide or worldwide thing, yet we all thought it was "Fox Night" and had no idea there was a Guy Fawkes or who the hell he was.