Plenty of fun times in my past, for sure.
The first bit of trouble was when we broke into the grade school and stole the 5 pound Hershey bar that was meant for the class that won the magazine sale. While not technically arrested, the authorities were involved and we got caught. Did not have to deal with any legal issues then, however. I was in 8th grade. My career of organized crime was just beginning.
At some point after that the group of us made friends with the cops, which really meant that the cops were always chasing us or catching us. There were 2 cops in town, jack and some other guy. Jack was always known as Jack the Cop or Jack the Dick. The other guy was nameless. I had 2 run-ins of note with Jack, or maybe more. I'm sure it was more like 50 but 2 come to mind.
First was us doing something not good, who knows what it was, in town. Jack said fuck it, and just went straight to my house looking for me. I wasn't there, I was out drinking somewhere. My parents were a little pissed. Nothing came of this either.
One time we were at a bonfire at Pine Hollow, a sort of abandoned piece of land way in the middle of nowhere. You had to walk down 2-3 miles of railroad tracks to get there, or score a ride with someone who had a car. Well we were there, the bonfire was massive. Someone had managed to get 100s of pallets, and it was roaring. These tracks were still active so trains would occasionally go by. I mean huge freight trains. Well 1 train stops and tells us all that the previous train called the police. We don't GAF. We all get on the train and start climbing around, and joking that we're going to go to Pittsburgh. Eventually we get off, the train leaves, and then the cops show up and round up a whole shitload of us. Jack personally chased me through the woods and caught me. After that, he & his partner made jokes when they would see me in town about how I needed to run in my spare time so I wouldn't get caught in the future. In the end they just let us go. How to you arrest 50 people? I'm pretty sure this wasn't even Bloomsbury, come to think of it.
Eventually the town realized that 2 cops for 1000 people was a waste of money and the state cops would drive by once an hour or whatever. First run-in there was when we built an 8+ foot snowman in the middle of the road. We then proceeded to have a massive war with another crew of friends in town, the battle of the snowman. We were on 1 side of the road and they on the other, and the real goal was to obliterate the cars that drove through with snowballs. In the end the cop drove through, we blasted it with snowballs, and ran like hell. Eventually we made our way to the general store which is where they came to get us, I think. That one was close, but the ex-police chief, who was a dad of 1 of my friends, talked them into letting us go. We just spend some QT in the back of the cruiser, no cuffs. They probably had no intention of actually arresting us, and were just trying to scare us.
Second time was the real deal. DWI at something like 17 years and 3 months. The real pisser is that we were just sitting in the car drinking, because it was too cold to drink outside. We wanted the heat. We got bored and drove like a mile to hit the truck stop for video games or food or both. On the way back we got snagged, taken to the station, put in a cell. When I called my step-father he asked, "What is it this time?" I actually stopped drinking & hanging out with the crew that I had wasted the previous 4-5 years of my life with at that point. Probably that was a good decision.
I was an awful child. God I hope our kids are not half as bad as I was. Shit, 1/4 would be a headache.
In college we did less outright bad stuff but then I started doing drugs. But it was amid a world where everyone did this, so it's not like we stood out. Various bits of trouble in the dorms the first 2 years eventually led me to be kicked out of them by the school. Luckily I was not expelled from school altogether. I honestly have no memory of what I did to earn this, maybe Woody remembers. But it was a series of bad things. Were the campus police involved? Who knows.
The only actual run-in with the law was, in all places, while hiking the AT with 3 of my friends later in college. They didn't care about the alcohol but the bag of refer was a no-no. They managed to find it despite the fact that 1 of my friends tried to hide it on the ground, directly between the 2 of them. Amazingly we almost dodged that bullet but as the ranger was about to walk away, he saw it. In the end, 1 of us had some weed on him, so took the fall for all of it since he was doomed anyway.
If I had to guess I have covered only a small fraction of the various run-ins with the law. But most of them were in the high school years when the cops were really just there to keep the town kids from killing themselves. Somehow they managed to do it, so in the end I guess Jack wasn't such a dick after all.