Halloween in the 1950's

We would go out by ourselves, after dark. No adults.

That was important. We didn’t want our parents around to spoil the fun.

Costumes were taken seriously but usually made – or cobbled together – at home.

I remember a costume my mother made for me: I was the Devil. Red flannel pajamas basically, with a coat hanger-supported tail and some floppy pointed ears. There was a Halloween Party at the Herons’ house that Halloween where we literally ducked for apples in a big tin basin. I was wearing my devil suit that night. Probably about 1952. (Dorothy Parker on ducking for apples: “There but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.”)

We carried laundry bags for the loot. As I recall, we would review our goodies the following morning…sometimes along with fellow scroungers from the night before.

Here are some half-remembered qualitative evaluations of the usual “take:”

The Good Stuff:

Tootsie Pops – a personal favorite…especially the orange-flavored ones. There was a Tootsie Roll center that appeared once you’d licked off the globe of orange-flavored carcinogen.

Tootsie Rolls – not bad. Also tended to remove fillings…if you were old enough to have fillings.

M&Ms: Great…if you got a whole bag or a miniature bag, although I cannot remember if they had those back in 1955 or 1956.

Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy – a huge win if you were so fortunate as to receive a whole bar. As I recall, they had vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry flavors of this semi-oozy slab of who-knows-what. It tasted good and could easily remove your fillings in its normal state. We were taught to freeze it in the fridge and then slap it on a hard surface to break it into bite-sized, suckable pieces. Again, scoring a whole bar of this would be like winning the lottery.

Hershey’s Mini-Bars – another big win. Crackle, Mr. Goodbar. A solid little slug of taste wrapped up like the bigger versions of themselves.

Chunky: if you got one of these, you were happy. I can almost hear TV’s Arnold Stang whining: “What a chunk of chocolate!” (Arnold Stang had been a regular cast member on the Milton Berle Show.)

The Stuff we could do without:

Necco Wafers – big LOSER! Tasteless, crumbly discs of some industrial byproduct. Probably sawmill runoff.

Jujubes – hard, sticky little nuggets of a gum-like substance that would get stuck on your teeth.

Hershey’s Kisses – good stuff but usually thrown into your bag one or two at a time by the more parsimonious residents of the neighborhood.

Mary Jane bars – made with peanut butter and molasses. Ugh!

(I’m sure readers will be able to come up with their own roster of treats.)

The best thing about Halloween back then was that it kicked off the Holiday Season and swiftly moved on to Thanksgiving and Christmas as the weather grew colder and we began to pray for snowstorms that would cause the schools to close.

Though those holidays are no longer what they were in my now 79-year-old mind, it is not hard to remember how magical and exciting they were then.