John Trippe, left, with Anthony Cardinale during their younger years in Fredonia.

When we were kids growing up in Fredonia, our aunts and uncles would say, “Anthony is an angel but John is a devil.”

It wasn’t that my cousin was evil. He was a gentle soul who just had a propensity for practical jokes.

I miss my cousin John, who died last year. My happiest memories are the tricks he used to pull when we were teenagers in the 1950s.

His favorite target was his father. Now, nobody messed with George Trippe, who was short and stocky and built like a bull. Still . . .

One night the doorbell kept ringing while the family was watching television. Uncle George got up and answered the door several times but no one was there. He was really ticked off.

John had intercepted the doorbell wiring in the basement with an automatic timer.

One day his father came home from the steel plant, put his lunch pail on the kitchen counter and reached for the cigar in the ashtray over the sink. When he went to light it, a tiny “lady finger” firecracker exploded, scattering tobacco all over the sink.

“Joooohnnn!”

Uncle George later laughed. But he never found out who was behind his car conking out at work.

Cousin John rode his bike three miles to Allegheny Ludlum Steel in Dunkirk and replaced his dad’s Chevy ignition with one he’d found in a junkyard. That night Uncle George rode home with a friend, complaining bitterly that his car wouldn’t start.

By then John had his junior driver’s license. So he got back on his bike, pedaled to the steel plant and replaced the ignition, then drove home with his bike in the trunk.

“Gee, Dad, it started right up!”

My cousin was practicing for his future career as an electrician for General Electric. Once John had discovered electricity, no one was safe in Uncle George’s garage. Many visitors liked to sit on a wooden box John had constructed with a hasp and lock. One day he opened the lid and pounded two small nails into it, so that the tips poked out just a fraction of an inch. Then he attached two wires from a dry cell battery to the nails, closed the lid and waited.

Uncle Cosmo Trippe, whose greenhouse business was a block away, came by to visit with a few flats of tomato plants for the garden. Uncle George had just poured him a cup of homemade “red” from the garage refrigerator when Uncle Cos decided to sit on the box.

“Yeow!” he yelled, leaping to his feet. “What the hell was that?”

Late one night Uncle Ray, the youngest brother, came by to pick up something from the garage.

When he opened the door, bright lights flashed and a loud wailing was heard from a bicycle siren John had hooked up to an old washing machine motor. Uncle George and John got up from bed and ran outside in their shorts to turn off the commotion.

Cousin John was also preparing for his other career, as a locksmith. He and I would put nails on the tracks when the freight train was coming, then ride our bikes back to the garage to shape the flat nails into keys on Uncle George’s grinding wheel.

One day John fashioned a key that fit the lock on the boiler room of the Gervas canning factory around the corner. Hey, wasn’t there an identical Master lock on that shed behind Eagle Street School? Back to the tracks, back to the garage and grindstone, back to the school.

After grinding a key for the second lock, John went out and switched locks when nobody was around. Next morning they were using crowbars to open the doors.

One night we made a dummy, tied a rope to it, and laid it off the curb on Eagle Street. Then we hid in the bushes across the street and yanked the rope whenever a car came by. A lot of squealing tires as they slammed on the brakes. But then Bob MacLaren, the photographer, stopped his car and took our dummy down to the police station. There it sat on a chair for the next several days.

Cousin John loved firecrackers. One day we hid a cherry bomb – with an extra-long wick – in the alley behind the M&T Bank in downtown Fredonia. Then we sat down on a bench across the street, in Barker Common, to watch the excitement. An officer was sitting in his cop car by the bank, monitoring traffic (or napping).

Suddenly the bomb went off, and the cop threw on his siren and flashing lights and sped behind the bank to catch the burglars — while we sat innocently in plain sight, laughing hysterically.

Now, there’s a gritty little neighborhood on the edge of town known as Devil’s Half Acre. To get there, you take Eagle Street to the bottom of a steep hill where Porter Avenue begins on your right. Passing over it is a railroad trestle that we used to climb. One night the guy living in the first house came outside, yelled at us, and called the cops. They came and scanned the bridge with their search lights. We held our breath. They eventually left.

It wasn’t nice of that guy to call the cops. So one night we put a cherry bomb in his mailbox, sitting on a post, and hid in the grape vineyards.

Boom!

He bolted out of the house and started to run after us. I lost my galoshes in the mud as we ran in the vineyard parallel to Eagle Street.

Then the man jumped in his black ’54 Ford and raced down Eagle Street, angrily blasting his horn. We made it back to the garage, locked the doors, and hid in the dark. His headlights shined in the windows as he kept peeling around the corners, racing around the neighborhood and blaring his horn.

Clearly, this guy had become too dangerous to handle at close range. So the next night we climbed all the way up Lakeview Avenue with a bow and arrow and found a spot behind the Sunset canning factory overlooking the man’s house. John taped a cherry bomb to an arrow and released it into the night. His aim was true. First we saw the flash on his front lawn, then we heard the explosion. We pedaled home, laughing all the way.

Over the years I’ve thought of apologizing and making restitution to that poor fellow. But his house at 18 Porter Avenue is now gone. Maybe by now he was in a nursing home, but I never knew his name.

Still, the wheels of justice move slowly but surely.

Years later I had a horse farm in Clarence, with a beautiful mailbox shaped like a barn, sitting on a post. One day somebody made off with it, to my great chagrin.

Alas, I had finally paid the price.

Anthony Cardinale is a retired Buffalo News reporter and former Observer intern reporter. You can email him at anthonycardinale114@gmail.com.