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.