October 30, 1993

In bed, listening to the Halloween festivities. There was a tradition of having a small riot in Carbondale every year on the weekend closest to Halloween, going back a couple of decades. It had gotten so bad that my first couple of years there they actually closed school for a brief break, so that they could close the dorms and send as many people away as possible. A lot of the worst behavior had been attributed to out of towners (heard that a few years earlier the cops actually had road blocks on all the roads into town and turned away anyone without local ID), the smashed windows and other major property destruction. The previous year I left town myself, but this time I stuck around. Major police presence this night kept it to levels not much worse than an regular weekend on the Strip. Probably between 100 and 200 arrests, mostly alcohol related.