Halloween on Eagle Street

Mom was born on October 31, 1921.  She was a Halloween baby, and as such, she was convinced that this fact gave her special powers.  She was a "good" witch, she told me, with psychic powers.  Mom didn't really celebrate her birthday as one normally does, with a cake, party,  or special dinner.  I think it was because she had a real issue with the fact that each birthday made her older.  This was a fact she could not and did not accept. So Halloween, even though it was her birthday, was all about the kids.

For some reason, I never remember Dad being around on Halloween.  He did not take part in a birthday celebration, nor did he take us Trick-or-treating.  It was probably because he was either at work on the evening shift or sleeping because he was working a super-early morning shift.  Whatever the reason, he was never in any of my Halloween memories.

Unlike today, where everyone, even adults, dresses up in expensive costumes and party on Halloween, Trick-or-Treat was really just a kid thing.  The mood would start a few days before, when the elementary schools in the neighborhood would have their Halloween Carnivals.  Yes, we were allowed to call it what it was.  No Fall festival, no Autumn multi-cultural happiness day.  No worrying about offending someone-it was an unapologetic celebration of the pagan holiday Halloween.  These simple school carnivals were so much fun, with costume contests, games, and my all-time favorite event where I spent all my money, the Cake Walk. Grant Elementary sat right next to the old, dying Calvary Cemetery.  It was just on the other side of the original abode wall.  We would get up on tip-toe to look at the gravestones, some huge and ornate, some crumbling and half collapsed in a grass-less dirt field, and imagine that ghosts were all there, listening to the fun we were having just on the other side of the wall, and wishing they could come over and scare us.

In October, if mom happened to take us to Sav-on Drug store, KMart, or Fed-Co, we would make a bee-line to the Halloween aisle to ogle the boxed costumes. Costumes were cheap and simple.  They typically consisted of a flimsy rayon "pajama style" flame-resistant costume. And it had a mask which was plastic and fastened to your face with an elastic band.

A 1970s newspaper ad for cheap costumes

 The cheapest ones were generic things like ghosts, devils, cats dogs, bunnies, and witch costume sets. For an extra dollar, you could get a cartoon character like Casper the Friendly Ghost or Batman and Robin.  But we never got to pick out a new box set for Halloween.  Because we had the Halloween box at home.

The Halloween box was a large cardboard carton that normally resided on the dusty dirt floor of the crawlspace under our house.  It was about about a yard high and a foot wide. This old box had held various Halloween objects for the older siblings who came before us, and was now creased and torn from being dragged to and from the basement for countless years.  It waited quietly all year below the floorboards until October 31st, when someone would retrieve it. If Darwin was home, he would usually be the one to go get it, because he was the only one who wasn't afraid of the being in the basement.  Once he left home, however, the task fell to me.

Just peeking inside the basement door was scary enough for me.  It was dark and isolated from the living part of the house. There were spider webs and sometimes skittering grey mice. I hated going down there, but if I didn't, there would be no Trick-or-treat that night, because there was no way Mom was going to go down there and get it herself.  So I would calm my nerves, grab the flashlight, and go searching in the dark crawlspace.  Somewhere in the dark, tucked behind the Easter box, the Christmas box, and a moldering trunk that Mom said contained her father's Coffin flag, was the box that would enable us kids to gorge on candy for the next month.  That was enough incentive for me to find it.

Once I lugged the Halloween box into the house, Mom opened it up.  We kids stood there in anticipation, as though she was opening a newly discovered treasure chest. The thing was, we already knew what was in there.  It was the same stuff from last year, and the year before: Old vintage robes, hats, gloves, gowns, and cheap little masks that were once brand new and sitting on the Sav-on drug store shelf in their own little boxes, but eventually ended up at someone's garage sale for mom to find, buy for a nickle and add to the hodge-podge collection.   Everything was old and tattered, from years of trick-or-treating by other kids during the fifties and sixties.  But this was what we had to work with, and we always figured out some way to utilize these cast-off costumes.

Tammy's first treat-or-treat, 1963

My worst costume ever-tiny poodle mask and a threadbare 20 year old clown suit that didn't close in the back.  Recognize the leopard outfit? I wore it 7 years prior.  We got the free trick-or-treat bags from Jack in the Box.

These days, people start working on their costumes a month in advance, but back then we usually had about an hour to get it figured out, grab our plastic pumpkins and head out for an hour or so of candy hunting.

Mom used to let us go out by ourselves at dusk and do Eagle and Falcon streets.  At that time, Eagle Street had mostly elderly homeowners. They usually gave out treats from their era--popcorn balls, apples or raisin boxes, stuff we were not interested in eating.  One old lady would offer us ribbon candy, left over from the previous Christmas, stuck in one fused chunk in a glass candy dish.  Another old lady handed out gross orange circus peanut candy, tootsie rolls and Double Bubble gum.  The younger home owners usually had jack-o-lanterns on their porches and gave us real candy bars, sometimes even full sized ones.  A lonely old widow on Falcon Street would invite every kid into her house and scoop them up a real ice cream cone. You just had to sit on her couch and visit with her a few minutes while you ate it. A reasonable request.  One old man always handed out beautiful tiny polished stones, which some kids hated, but I loved getting to pick out the prettiest stone in the bowl.

After we were done with the two streets, we went home and mom drove us up to Arbor Street by the County Hospital (now its called UCSD Hospital).  We visited an elderly couple who we called "Aunt Dorothy" and "Uncle Jim."  Aunt Dorothy would greet us exuberantly with her peculiar Edith Bunker -accented voice. Her husband Jim, who had a metal hook instead of an arm, just sat quietly on the couch watching TV with Mugsy, their Boxer dog  She gave us lots of candy and then we were allowed to go to some of the Arbor Street houses for more treats while Mom sat with Aunt Dorothy and talked about antiques.

After that, we needed to get home, because after 8 o'clock, the big kids came out and you had a good chance of being egged.  During the six-block drive home from Aunt Dorothy's house, we passed lots of big kids and just imagined that their pockets were full of eggs.  We would get home and hurry inside the house, and Mom turned out the lights so no more kids would come knocking on the door.

We would all go to the kitchen, strip off the sweaty costumes and throw them back into the big box. All candy, coins, rocks, popcorn, apples, and raisins were dumped into big bowls for mom to sort through, and the empty plastic trick or treating pumpkins were tossed into the box as well.

1974-After Trick-or-Treat, dump the pumpkins out, ditch the costumes, and off to bed.

The next day, Mom would tape up the Halloween box, and it would be placed once again in the dark, dusty, creepy basement, next to the Easter box and the Christmas box. There it would wait, amid the spiders and the mice, for next year.

Mom's Collectibles

Mom loved to collect all sorts of stuff.  Coins, stamps, blue Mother's day plates, Madame Alexander dolls, Snow babies, Kewpie dolls, Crystal Balls, Opal rings, memorable newspaper headlines.  She collected and saved just about everything imaginable.

The special things were either anchored to the wall or encased in her fancy gold cabinet.
She was crazy about statues that depicted a mother and her child.  They had to be W. Goebel, which were made in what was then West Germany.  There is always a little bee and a V on the bottom of Goebel statues, along with the year it was made.

When we were visiting Aunt Amy in 1971, Aunt Amy gave mom a statue for her birthday on Halloween.  It was not the one Mom wanted and I could tell she was disappointed with the gift. She had the same look on her face when I gave her cheap dime store vase for mother's day earlier in the year.  Aunt Amy did not realize that Mom didn't want a statue of just a child.  She wanted a mother and child statue.    Plus, Mom hated red-headed kids, so this statue really did not impress her at all.

When we got back to San Diego, Mom put the red headed boy in her cabinet because she loved her sister, but told me she didn't like it and took me to a gift shop to show me which one she really wanted, which was the one I remember seeing on Aunt Amy's bookshelf. Mom told me that those  (she called them Hummels) Mother and child statues were the only things she wanted for gifts.  So these were what I got her for future birthdays and Christmas presents.

For Christmas 1971, Mom saw to it that I had enough spending money to buy her the mother in the blue dress statue, like the one Aunt Amy had.  The other two in this photo were subsequent Christmas presents:

Madame Alexander dolls were highly collectible in the 60s.  There used to be a fancy New York City toy store called F.A.O. Schwartz.  We always got a Christmas catalog in the mail every year, and I used to spend hours studying it and marking all the toys I wished for.  They were expensive toys that you did not see at Sears or KMart, so there was no way we kids were going to get anything from that catalog.  Only rich kids were going to get Schwartz toys for Christmas.  The Madame Alexander dolls were in the catalog.  They were based on story book characters, such as Hansel and Gretel, Little Women, etc. They also made dolls that represented different countries.

 These three dolls are all that remain from her collection. The blonde is Dutch, the middle one is French. They are at least 50 years old and decrepit, falling apart, and one of them is missing its ID tag and a leg:

Snow babies were a strange collectible.  They were toddlers or babies dressed in a snowy suit.  Mom told me they were inspired by a couple of young people who eloping in the winter and were lost in the snow and froze to death.  I have researched this and haven't found any article that corroborates this story. For some odd reason, Mom always encased snow babies separately under a glass dome. It seemed to me that if the story was that two kids froze to death together, you ought to encase two snow babies together, but that's not how Mom presented them in her cabinet.

I took one of them out of its glass dome so you can see it a little better:

The open armed Good Fairy is another odd collectible.  Mom had a big bronze one that lived on top of her her cabinet.  She also had a tiny one, which I still have.  The story she told me about the fairy is that the artist was going to have a child and did not know if it was going to be a boy or a girl, so she made a fairy sculpture that looked like a short haired boy on the left side:

and looked like a long haired girl on the right side:

These Good Fairies were really a thing a hundred years ago.  They were supposed to inspire happy feelings to those who looked at them.  And they were always half boy/half girl.

Lots of collectibles came in and out of Eagle Street, bought, sold, and traded for Blue Chip, Top Value, or S & H Green Stamps.  Mom was not only a master collector, she was also was a master salesperson.

 In the end, her most precious collections disappeared, and the rest of it was thrown outside like garbage, where a rare summer rain soaked and ruined everything.  All of the things in these photos are essentially worthless.  They are merely, to me, a reminder of Life on Eagle Street.

Mom's Cabinet

Anyone who came to 4071 Eagle Street remembers Mom's French cabinet.  It was really fancy.  It was gold, with flowers painted on the lower part of the curved locking glass door. The back of the cabinet was mirrored glass. She got it in the mid sixties and kept all her favorite things in it for display.  She kept her Kewpie doll there.  She also collected crystal balls, snow babies, Madame Alexander Dolls, antiques and highly breakable things.  Its amazing that this cabinet outlived her considering there were so many erratic toddlers and crazy, violent people that stormed through the living room over the 20 plus years that it stood there.

I don't remember when the cabinet came to Eagle Street.  Looking through family photos, I have concluded, based on photo dates, that early 1965 is the likely time of its addition to the household. I was four years old. Mom was obsessed with the gold cabinet.  She liked to pose me and the younger kids in front of it for photo opportunities.  Mostly, she posed us so that we would be looking at the cabinet. Like this:

Tammy

And this:

 Mom liked to take naked photos of her kids.  I respectfully gave them cover here

 Lynda is the only person who knows where this cabinet came from.  Here is her story:

"Mom and I answered an ad in the newspaper for something. I don't remember what we originally went to look at.  When we got to the woman's house, Mom and the woman immediately got along pretty well, and the woman was showing Mom some of her prized possessions.  One of these possessions was the gold cabinet.  There was also lots of expensive jewelry.  As they visited, the woman started opening up about why she had so much stuff.  She had embezzled from her employer to get extra money and went on a big shopping spree, and now she didn't know what to do.  She was starting to get very worried that she was going to get caught and go to jail.

Mom, who was really good at sizing up her opportunities, figured out real fast that she could take advantage of this woman's situation.The woman was particularly worried that if the cops caught her, she would lose her gold cabinet.  She said she didn't really care about the jewelry or any of the other stuff, but no matter what, she did not want anything happening to her precious cabinet.  Mom promised she would help her if something happened.

Suddenly, some police showed up at her door.  They would not let us leave, but Mom convinced them that she was the woman's friend, and we were there because we were picking up Mom's cabinet to bring it back to our house. She told the cops that that cabinet had been placed there temporarily to showcase the crystal that was being sold at a crystal party that Mom had arranged at the woman's house. (Home parties for crystal and Tupperware were the rage in the sixties)  The woman picked up on the story and affirmed that she had just borrowed it for the crystal party, and that it was not hers.  The cops took the woman in another room and began to question her, while mom grabbed handfuls of jewelry and pocketed it.

We moved the cabinet out to our car as the cops handcuffed the crying woman and put her in the police car.   We drove off with the woman's prized cabinet and alot of the jewelry that she probably bought with the embezzled money, and the cops had no idea that mom just stole a lot of expensive stuff.

We saw the story on the news.  I don't remember the amount of the embezzlement, but it was alot of money.  Amazingly, Mom, after seeing the news report, took me back out to the scene of the crime to see if there was anything else she could steal.  But the house was yellow-taped, and even Mom was afraid to break into the house.  I am sure that if  Skip had been with us, she would have sent him inside.

 The woman eventually was sent to prison for many years.

Mom always told me that she would give me the cabinet one day, because I was the only one who knew how we got it, and that it was a secret that I could never tell to anyone.

Mom made money off that woman.  Many times, we would go to a downtown jewelry store and sell some of it the jewelry. I don't know how much money she got for the stuff, but Mom was always so happy after those trips to the jewelry store.

After Mom died in 1986, Tabatha took the cabinet.  She sold it for a couple hundred bucks."

Thanks for an incredible story, Lynda!  For anyone who knew Mom, this is entirely believable and a good example of her usual Sociopathic personality.

A Visit to Normalcy

The trip to Aunt Amy and Uncle Ed's house in central Washington state was a spur of the moment thing.  Mom somehow convinced the airline  ticket seller that Tabatha was too young to need a ticket, so I had to carry her the whole time and keep her on my lap on the plane.  It was a long travel day, flying from San Diego to Spokane, with a change of planes somewhere in between. Then we had to finish the air travel in a little putt-putt plane.  Jeff and Tabatha were never good travelers.  They always threw up in the car, and they threw up on the Putt Putt plane ride too.  It was always my job to hold what we called the"blek bags" for them.

We arrived at a tiny regional airport late at night, and it was freezing cold.  All we brought to keep us warm were knit sweaters, which are fine in San Diego but useless in real weather.  Aunt Amy and little Amy, her granddaughter, met us with hooded down jackets to put on, and soon we were piled in her big station wagon on a short road trip to her house in Ephrata.

I am really not sure how long we were there, but I know I was not at school for picture day and we spent Halloween trick-or-treating in the snow, so we were probably gone for a month.  That month was the best month of my childhood.

Aunt Amy had custody of her two young grandchildren from daughter Phyllis.  She ran a structured household.  We had breakfast, lunch and dinner, and we sat at a table and ate together. The food was home-cooked.  This is the first time I ever had butternut squash, and I loved it.  There were no TV dinners, no O-O Spaghetti Ohs, no sugary cereals, no soda pop, no going to furniture stores to have cookies and punch for dinner. Jeff and Tabatha were no longer acting out with temper tantrums. And we didn't get screamed at and hit every day like we were used to at home.  I was allowed to play outside with the other kids and didn't have to stay indoors being a best friend and confidante to Mom.  No seances, no fortune cards, no crazy family stories.  It was a nice break.

Aunt Amy's backyard had a playhouse, a huge tree with a swing, and several fruit trees.  I spent lots of time climbing those fruit trees, picking  and eating the high-hanging peaches and apricots, which by October were dried and chewy. Getting up in those trees, away from everyone, was great medicine for me.

Tabatha and Little Amy

Aunt Amy, who had previously worked as a childhood educator, had lots of really great books for kids of all ages.  She assigned us books to read, and my favorite one was Charlotte's Web. I kept up my piano practice on her little spinet in the living room.  And while we were there, Aunt Amy spent lots of time in her basement sewing room making all of us beautiful new clothes.

Little Amy, Tabatha, Tammy, Jeff

It snowed just before Halloween, only a tiny bit, but we went nuts over it.  Aunt Amy carved a jack-o-lantern, something we didn't do at home because Mom thought it was a waste of money. After seeing an ad for free Colonel Sanders masks at Kentucky Fried Chicken, they drove over and picked up a bunch of them and we all marched door to door in the sparsely snowy neighborhood all looking like the Colonel.

Little Ed, Jeff,Tabatha, Little Amy, Tammy

I never wanted to leave Aunt Amy's house. Aunt Amy made the offer to let me stay.  I wished Mom would just leave me there.  But, I was a "grown up" now, and had to help her with the kids, so we all went home in early November.  Back to a very sad and creepy 4071 Eagle St.  Back to evil Mrs. Anderson.

Mrs. Anderson

 And I had missed over a month of school.  She would have plenty of reasons to make an example out of me now. And she did on a daily basis for the rest of the school year.

The trip to Aunt Amy's house showed us that there was another way to live.  Calm. Respectful.  Content. Where kids were kids and adults were adults. But now it was back to reality.

October 1971, The month I became a Grown Up.

When Dad died, things suddenly changed at 4071 Eagle Street. Dad was the one person who kept Mom under control to a certain extent.  We all felt grounded and safe with Dad in spite of the weird unexplained undercurrents swirling just beneath the surface,   Without Dad, it seemed as though we were walking on shifting sand.

School was starting up.  I was going into 6th grade at St Vincent's Catholic school, and had spent the summer dreading the return to school. The 6th grade homeroom teacher, Mrs Anderson, was a horrible bully who did not like me and let me know at the church rummage sale last spring that she couldn't wait until I was in her class so she could make an example out of me.  I woke up on the first day of school with a horrid stomach ache and told Mom I was afraid to go to school.  Mom was preoccupied with everything grownups deal with when people die.  She told me to just go up to my teacher and tell her that Dad died last week, and she would probably feel sorry for me and lay off the abuse, then she shooed me out of the house. After the pledge of allegiance and the morning prayer, I made my way up to Mrs Anderson's desk, summoned up my courage, and told her my Dad died last week.  Mrs Anderson just said, "Oh, that's too bad.  I will tell the priest to say a Mass for him tomorrow," and then went back to looking at her lesson plan. She had no mercy; from day one, she fulfilled her threat to make an example out of me.  When I got home and told Mom, her reply was, "Oh shit, now I have to go to the goddamned mass tomorrow!"

October came, and it seemed like Mom was keeping herself busy.  She had just bred her Poodles Gidget and Collette to a tiny white Poodle whose owners briefly rented an apartment across the street.  She was looking at new cars and was focusing on a Volvo station wagon. But she also was acting a bit strangely too. We were taking nightly trips to El Cajon Blvd, which back then used to have lots of fancy furniture stores.  In those days, the furniture stores set out cookies on a silver platter for the customers, and while mom was looking at couches and bookshelves, we three kids were helping ourselves to the goodies.  Back at home, she would be constantly digging out old photos and reminiscing about earlier times.

One night, after Jeff and Tabatha were put to bed, Mom told me that I was not a kid anymore, and that I needed to know some things that a kid would not understand.  She said she needed to tell me some secrets that I could never tell to anyone and that I was going to have to act grown up now and help her take care of the kids.

First, she told me a long story about how she met Dad. This is what Mom told me when I was 10 years old, one month after Dad died:

Years before I was born,  she was a young widow with 5 children. Her first husband was an abusive crazy man who killed himself.  She had a boyfriend named Jack Goodman ( I think that was his last name) who was crazy about her and the kids.  And the kids loved him too, especially Patty and Susan.  Jack was always pursuing get rich quick schemes, and spent a lot of time in Alaska.  Mom met Darwin S Warriner when she went to get her 5 kids photographs taken.  She said he used to babysit the kids when she went out with Jack. It became obvious that Darwin S was in love with Mom too, but he was unattractive and no woman wanted him.

Mom was hoping that she and Jack would soon marry, but then one time when he returned from a long trip to Alaska, his backpack fell over and a prescription tube fell out.  She picked it up and saw that it was a medicine for crab lice.  She figured out that he probably had picked up a whore. She was turned off.  Then she told me what crab lice were and what they did if you caught them.

Returning to her story,  she said that after Jack left town again, she started going out with Darwin S, but didn't want to get serious with him. He was just a stand-in during Jack's absences. Then one day, Darwin S came to her and asked her to marry him.  She said he had already bragged to his co-workers and family that he had this gorgeous girlfriend and was engaged to her.  She said she would think about it.  Then Jack came back  from Alaska with a marriage proposal too.  Now she was conflicted.  Who to choose? A handsome adventurer, who was probably a lice-infested philanderer, or an unattractive guy who was safe, solid, and dependable.  She was in love with Jack, and told Darwin S. she wanted Jack instead.  He made a deal with her.  To allow him to save face with his friends and family, they would get married, and after a little time, they would divorce and then she could go and marry Jack if she wanted to.    She agreed to the temporary marriage.  Mom then told me that there are two kinds of love:  Just regular love that you feel for family and friends, and being in love, which is what you feel for the person you want to get married to.  She said she was never in love with Dad, even though he was in love with her. The only reason baby Darwin was born was because she finally felt sorry for her husband and slept with him, and became pregnant.

That was a complicated story for a little girl to hear and it made me uncomfortable.

 Then she told me two more things:

Tabatha and Jeff were not her biological children.  She then proceeded to tell me that Lynda was Tabatha's real mother, and that she adopted the baby to save Lynda from embarrassment.  Jeff, she told me, was Dad's son from an adulterous affair that he had with a Dutch woman he picked up in a bar after work. When the Dutch woman told him about the pregnancy, and that her husband was going to have her deported, Dad confessed to Mom, and she, out of the goodness of her heart, offered to take the baby in when it was born.

I was stunned.

But what also went through my mind was, where did I come from? I always had a weird feeling about us three kids.  So I asked Mom, "What about me, where did I come from?"  She said, " Oh, you are mine.  You came right from here," pointing to her stomach. I instantly knew she was not telling me the truth, but did not feel like I had the right to question her about it, so I stayed quiet, but pondered the question of my parentage from that day forward.

So, when I was 10, I learned that my mom never really loved my dad and thought he was ugly, that my older siblings had a different dad who was crazy and cruel, that my two younger siblings came from other mothers, that people catch crab lice from whores and that these lice cause horrible itching in your crotch, and that Mom was probably lying to me about my own origins.

Knowing all of Mom's confusing and salacious stories somehow transformed me into a "Grown Up."

A few days later I was again woken up in the middle night.  I found myself in the arms of a very large fireman, who had pulled me out of my bed and was running down the hallway, into the living room, and outside into the cold, dewy night. There was a big firetruck with flashing red lights out front. Two other fireman were right behind us, carrying Jeff and Tabatha.  They sat us down on the concrete steps and checked to make sure we were breathing properly.  Mom was talking to another fireman, telling him she had no idea how the gas line to the stove came undone.  They believed her.  She promised to go out and buy an electric stove. Then some fans were set up and the windows and back door opened and the house was aired out.  The fire truck and the big strong men in yellow and black coats left.  Mom made me go to school that morning, and I fell asleep in class all day long, which got me into even more trouble with Mrs Anderson.  I didn't bother telling her we were almost gassed to death in our beds the night before.  She wouldn't have cared.

Within days after we were almost killed, Mom dropped the dogs off at Lynda's house and the four of us were on an airplane to Ephrata, Washington to visit Aunt Amy.