Halloween 1975
The cardboard box was in the basement, labeled “H’ween,” and every year we six kids hoped there was something cool in there we had forgotten from the previous year. There was a gray and black witch’s wig, a devil’s cape with a plastic trident, a few cracked skeleton masks with the elastic band, and a pink ballerina tutu. Usually, I pushed the box back into the closet and asked one of my older sisters to help me make up a costume.
There were strict trick or treating hours established by the city of South Bend after the razor-in-the-apple scare a few years before, something like 4:30-6:00, but daylight hours were for the grade schoolers, and most houses respected doorbells ringing well after dark. My friends and I wouldn’t be caught dead with the orange plastic pumpkins with handles our parents pushed on us to carry candy, so we’d sneak up to our rooms to grab our pillow cases.
This was well before “Halloween candy” was marketed in the tiny bite-size morsels, which made candy collection fairly uniform and mundane in years to come, so moms had to make a decision as to what type of treater they were going to be. Houses that gave out real candy bars were identified quickly and hit often. Conversely, word spread like lightning to avoid houses that gave out pennies, those suckers with the string loop handles, or any kind of produce. We worked the neighborhood until front porch lights went dark.
Halloween was the only day of the year when I wondered if my mom was a communist. She would have us kids dump our candy in a single pile on the TV room floor, allow us to take two good pieces each, and then combine all the candy into her largest mixing bowl before hiding it! Needless to say, I learned to put my best candy on the back porch before going inside, and recover it afterward to sneak up to my room. That just left the communal bowl to find the next day before my mom ate all the candy bars.
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