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Soupy Sales died a week ago. I heard about his death the same day I was taking my daughters shopping for Halloween costumes and pumpkin picking. It saddened me and I reminisced to them about my childhood – “Lunch with Soupy,” and all our local TV legends from the 1950s and 60s – and, because of our mission that day, about what Halloween was like for us 45 years ago.First of all, I told them, there was no “Halloween season,” with orange lights draped over houses, electronic ghouls suspended from trees, and inflatable graveyards displayed on every other front lawn starting the day we returned to school in the fall.
Our Halloween decoration (singular) was placed on the porch just before dark on Halloween. A carved pumpkin. Period. Usually lit with a candle left over from last Christmas. Big orange vegetables that we carved ourselves at the kitchen table the day before Halloween. They had gap-toothed, crooked smiles and mismatched triangular eyes. And it wasn’t easy, because we carved them with the same knife mom used to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. We were just trying to finish the job with all our fingers accounted for and attached. Have you seen those pumpkin “carving kits” they sell today, with about a dozen assorted plastic “carving tools”? There’s not one item in those packages that a pumpkin has to fear. Now, mom’s turkey knife …
Right about then, we arrived at “Halloween Western Hemisphere” or “Spirit Halloween MegaCavern” or whatever – you know, one of those big-box specialty stores that appears in our neighborhood right after Labor Day and disappears into the mist of their artificial fog machines on November 1 – and my daughters completely tuned me out. They darted around through thousands of square feet of Halloween present, but my memories lingered in Halloween past.
Do you remember when we either dressed in homemade outfits, or one of those boxed Ben Cooper costumes? That was back when Halloween costumes took up a shelf or two at Rexall Drugs or Neisner’s, not 25,000 square feet of display space in a seasonal specialty store. They consisted of a very flimsy fabric costume parody that we stepped into and then tied behind our necks. Each one had a plastic mask artfully designed to equally restrict both our vision and our breathing; that was fastened around our heads with a rubber band which always painfully snagged a few hairs when we removed it to see where we were going – or to gasp for a breath.
There were no “haunted attractions” to thrill us, scare us, and – primarily – empty our parents’ wallets. We had real haunted places (we believed) like the “haunted house” at the corner of Parkway and Valade, where we convinced each other that generations of previous owners were buried in the yard behind the iron fence surrounding the lot. I’ll never know how many pounds of candy we missed collecting on Halloween night because, just to play it safe, we avoided that entire block.
It seemed like there were hundreds of us kids on the street Halloween night dashing from door to door, jostling for position at each doorstep and shouting “Trick of Treat!” I don’t ever remember knocking or ringing a doorbell because the action was non-stop; nobody had time to close their front door!
Our treats were special too, weren’t they? Nobody worried about eating them before they were examined, X-rayed and scanned for trace elements. Heck, sometimes we ate them right on the porch where we got 'em … like Mrs. Shallaf’s homemade popcorn balls, and Mrs. Brown’s homemade caramel apples – she actually melted the Kraft caramels and dipped the apples herself!
And I remember collecting other special treats, too; ones that related to the neighbors who handed them out. I remember our Twin Pines milkman and pints of cold, delicious chocolate milk – we drained those between his porch and the sidewalk; and the Awrey Bakery deliveryman’s miniature loaves of bread. And, back then, the candy we got really was “fun size” – BIG.
“Dad! We need money!” my daughters cried out, snapping me out of my reminiscent trance at the cash register. Their arms were full of Halloween “must-haves” that I’d never seen before, but their eyes and faces were filled with something very familiar. Excitement. Hey, maybe Halloween hasn’t changed so much, after all.
Next stop was the pumpkin patch. The girls picked a couple of good ones and later that night, we carved them together at the kitchen table… with the knife we’ll use to carve the Thanksgiving turkey.
