Trick-or-treating in the 1950’s

Growing up in the north end of Wolcott in the 1950’s, there were few more important days than Halloween. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and to a lesser extent Easter were important holidays to be sure, but they were all about families. Even the 4^th of July was adult oriented as my dad set off some roman candles over the sand pit next to our house and the kids ran around the yard with sparklers. But Halloween was all about kids – and candy!

Our allowance in those days would buy a few pieces of penny candy at Martin’s – or, if you wanted to spend the whole thing, a coveted Three Musketeers bar (my favorite!). But a good haul on Halloween night could net you the equivalent of a year’s worth of allowances. So it was certainly worth planning for.

In our neighborhood the purchase of a costume from a store was considered a waste of money. With most families having multiple children the younger children had help from their mothers putting a costume together and the moms, and sometimes dads too, would accompany the kids around the block, strategically waiting out on the street while the group of children knocked on the front door. So it was the pre-teen and early teen years when we designed and built our own costumes and could go out on our own that were the most memorable – and the most lucrative! I remember my last two years of trick-or-treating quite vividly, even though more than half a century has elapsed since then.

We had a pretty long route plotted out. Starting from our house on Seery Rd, we hit the couple of houses down the street, then all the way to the end of Barclare Rd, then up Catherine Dr. and turned the corner to get the last two houses at that end of Seery Rd. From there we went to Hoadley’s across the street, then up Long Swamp Rd, stopping when we did a couple of houses past Stanley St. (the houses were getting too sparse beyond there). Then we looped around Stanley, Clark, and Boulder, getting all the houses in that neighborhood. We didn’t go up Woodtick Rd. as there were too few houses to bother with, but we did go up Rt. 69 as far as Jay Piekell’s house. Turning back we did all the homes on Rt. 69 back to Witham Rd. That much of the route pretty much filled a paper bag with candy (as well as a few apples, a couple of popcorn balls, and other non-candy items from the parents that wanted us to eat more healthy stuff). So we’d hide the haul thus far in our garage before heading off on part two of the route.

The second part of the night (until it got too dark), went down to North St. We skipped Averill Ave, as many of the homes there were summer homes and were unoccupied in late October. Down North St, then doing Cedar Ave and Lakeview Dr. before calling it a night. We skipped Cedar Point for the same reason as Averill Ave. Second part of the night was not as lucrative as the first part, but a lot of families on Cedar Ave and Lakeview had kids and the homes were close together so we got another half-bag of candy from that part of the route. As I look at a map now, we probably walked over four miles that night. With all the stops it took 2-3 hours.

The next-to-last year of my trick-or-treating, I decided to make a robot costume. I collected a few boxes of different sizes. Using a knife for cutting appropriate holes, crayons to enhance the facial features, and a bunch of tape (I don’t recall having duct tape in those days, so it was probably masking tape), I fashioned what I thought was a reasonable facsimile of a robot. What I failed to properly estimate was what the process of doing all that walking would do to my design.

At the beginning of the night, things were going reasonably well, but the awkwardness of walking was slowing me down a bit. And gradually the constant motion of my arms and legs began to take a toll on my taping job. I eventually abandoned my arm and leg boxes somewhere in the bushes along the road, leaving me with just a larger box around my chest and a smaller one over my head. In the end, even these were starting to come apart and I must have looked like I’d just thrown something together – so unlike all the planning and work that I had put into it.

But it was my costume the next year that finally put an end to my trick-or-treating days. I had decided to avoid the issues with the rigid boxes and have something that was both comfortable and made for easy walking so I could move faster (and get more candy!). I decided to dress as a girl – using one of my mother’s dresses, a wig we’d gotten from somewhere, and other appropriate accompaniments including some of my mother’s makeup. Since I had gotten my growth early, I made for a fairly tall girl, but the costume enable me to do exactly what I had planned – move quickly and get more candy. I decided to do “the rounds” on my own and not with friends that year.

I got a few strange looks from people as I went from house to house, but I probably just ignored them as I was concentrating on hitting as many houses as possible. But it was purely happenstance that a whole group of people, including myself, ended up at the same house at the same time. Mrs. Musso (if my memory of her name serves me correctly) lived just the other side of Martin’s. There was a group of younger kids (with their parents dutifully waiting at the end of the driveway), plus most of my guy friends from the neighborhood. We all crowded around the door and someone rang the doorbell. Mrs. Musso was putting a candy bar in everyone’s bag, but when she got to me she said the fateful words that still ring in my head to this day – “Why aren’t you wearing a costume?”

Evidently my costume that year was TOO good. She, and all the other people whose homes I had just been at, thought I really WAS a girl. They probably thought that I was my sister, who was only a year younger than I.  But unlike the others, she voiced her opinion – and in front of all my friends from the neighborhood! I was humiliated. I don’t remember if I even finished the rest of part one of the route that I’d been planning. I certainly didn’t do part two – where I was likely to encounter other classmates from school.

Looking back, I probably could have laughed it off and delighted that my costume was so good. But for a 12-13 year old boy all I remember is the laughter of my neighborhood friends and the humiliation that I had to endure for the next few weeks from them. That ended my trick-or-treating days. But I was getting to the end of that tradition anyway. Halloween was a kid’s night and I wasn’t a kid anymore.