A 1960s Brooklyn Halloween

Here in West Orange County, we're treated to any number of Halloween celebrations. Long gone are the days when children draped under faded fitted sheets simply went door-to-door in search of a sugary fix. Halloween is big business now, with pop-up stores vending all sorts of complex paraphernalia. Cities and towns host trick-or-treaters in safe downtown environments staged by merchant associations, and church and school parking lots feature Trunk-O'ween events, guaranteeing children and parents a safe community experience.

Winter Garden has been known to go especially all out for Halloween: City Hall is transformed into a canvas for giant crawling spiders projected across its Romanesque-Art Deco facade. The Winter Garden Heritage Foundation's Spooky Caboose has become a popular staple attracting a thousand Halloween revelers, and our Central Florida Railroad Museum hosts a Frightfully Fun Lego Night during the season as well.

It was quite different in 1960s Brooklyn. There were no Spirit Halloween stores; costumes were made at home- the ubiquitous white sheeted ghost was the most basic- and, on the other side of the scale, the one mother on the block who was a born seamstress could design and sew Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in an evening.

Short of sheets or seamstresses, we could always run up to Cohen's Five and Ten store to buy one of the boxed Ben Cooper costumes, often based on current events or notable figures. In 1962, for example, the streets were crowded with little boys and girls dressed as John and Jackie Kennedy.

You had to shop early, though; too many kids ended up going house to house wearing bottom-of-the-barrel costumes: the cigar-smoking businessman, the clown with the bashed-in red nose, the Goldilocks with half her braids missing...

There was also a trend in the early 1960s that had boys and girls dressing like and styling their hair after their parents. Little girls could order sets of plastic wigs guaranteed to transform them into miniature versions of Mom:

Manufactured from some strange plastic, you could smell these wigs a block away.

While it was great fun for us middle-schoolers to roam the streets without adult supervision, there were certainly hazards to be aware of. Mostly based in urban legends, we were savvy enough to know that these tales just had to be based in some sort of facts or they never would have seen the light of day:

• You never ate the unwrapped candy until it was inspected by the local Food and Drug Administration (Mom and Dad) because every kid had heard the horrible stories passed along by legions of trick-or-treaters before them. One year, however, we did receive chocolate-covered bird feathers from a woman two streets away who never trimmed the hedges in front of her house.

• You never ate the fruit that some people dropped into your bag. EVER. Apples especially had been known to be dangerously tampered with. Straight into the garbage went the fruit!

• Some houses were just creepy, though they of course still remained on our route. Many legends were attached to these unseen denizens, none of them true, but still. These folks were called on from the safety of the sidewalk as we screamed TRICK OR TREAT at the top of our lungs. Then a door would open, slightly, and a hand would toss candy out to us.

While treating generally brought about the expected rewards, we looked forward to actually being cheated or even insulted by what was tossed into our bags, because then the tricking would commence. We carried ammunition: eggs stolen from our refrigerators, and cans of shaving cream stolen from Dad. Woe to anyone who gave us those orange styrofoam-like circus peanuts, or a lone penny (a nickel or better was OK)... out the shaving cream would come to besmirch front doors, and flung would be the eggs, and then we'd run for our lives. Good times!

My costumes over the years covered ghosts, hobos, clowns, James Bond ("Don't put anybody's eye out with those fake bullets!"), and nuns. Though I won't be parading down Plant Street as a postulant from the Convent of the Divine Chronic Ramblers, you will find me and my co-workers at the Spooky Caboose on Friday, Halloween Day, from 3 to 8 pm. Stop by and say hello... and pick up a (safely-wrapped) treat!

BOOOOOOOOO!