Village Faces $28,000 Bill To Repaint The Water Tower

Thirty-nine years later, nobody has admitted climbing it — and everybody still has a theory about whether the boy was ever ill.

Trustees voted 4–3 on Tuesday to strip and repaint the north water tower, at a cost the village engineer put at $28,400. The tower has carried the same six-foot lettering since one night in the spring of 1987, when somebody went up the access ladder with a brush and painted a classmate’s name across the tank.

What followed is the part the village has never settled. Within a week there were collection tins in four shops, a benefit at the Legion hall, and a reported $9,000 raised for the family of a boy said to be seriously unwell.

Within a fortnight there was a letter to this paper from a reader who said she had seen the same boy on a float in the downtown parade that same afternoon, in good health and, she wrote, “conducting.”

No charge was ever brought. No family has ever commented. The money, by every account we can find, was returned.

Trustee Reyes, who voted against, said the tower should be left alone. “It is the only thing in this village anybody under fifty can point to,” she said. “You are not repainting a tank. You are repainting an argument.”