Trunk or Treat with American Veterans MC

About this event

Almost every Halloween entry on a motorcycle calendar is a ride. This is not one. It is a stationary evening at a veterans' hall, bikes parked with their boots open, riders handing out sweets to children in costume. The hall belongs to Linden-Tripkos Memorial VFW Post 6654 in De Soto, named for two men whose stories do not appear anywhere the post has published. What the post does publish is the memorial it dedicated in November 2009, out at Penner Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street: a granite tablet subtitled All Gave Some, Some Gave All, listing the town's casualties and wounded war by war from 1898 onward, unveiled with a colour guard and a flyover of vintage military aircraft. De Soto earns that kind of thing. The Sunflower Ordnance Works opened just south of town in 1942, nine thousand acres of it making gunpowder, and the village built for the workers grew to six thousand people before the plant finally shut in 1993. Times, cost and who is actually running the evening are not published. It suits families with small children rather than anyone looking for miles.