WHEN HALLOWEENS WEREN'T COLD...

Halloween is supposed to be chilling, not freezing, right?
The holiday always makes me miss my childhood — my brothers and my pals and my school and its Halloween Carnival. I suspect I’m not alone in these emotions. Feel free to have some of those memories racing through your memory chips as your sort your Halloween candy.
I don’t remember a Halloween as cold as this one — I do remember a lot of sweaty Halloweens in Texarkana in the ol’ Hazel Street neighborhood.
It was more like the Hazel Street Corridor — a long street of homes and undeveloped lots and even a pasture or two for horses. Hazel is two blocks inside the state line. From our backyard baseball-football field/garden, you could see into Arkansas! Kids from streets on both sides of Hazel came into the neighborhood to play baseball, football, hide-and-seek, go to Cub Scouts and Brownies, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. At Halloween, we’d all go up and down each other’s streets trick-or-treating -- and we'd go to the school Halloween Carnival.
Our stories mostly started in 1947 and ’48 when my contemporaries were born and went all the way to Autumn of ’59. That was our 6th grade year at Highland Park Elementary School and in October the focus was the annual Halloween Carnival. [LARRY NOTE: In those days Highland Park Elementary School had a great reputation because of its dedicated teachers. People thought it was a well-to-do school, but here’s a hint: Our championship flag football team was the Highland Park Hobos.]
I don’t know what you’re wearing today, but as I type this I have on a costume inspired by Walt Disney’s Zorro. I’m kidding. That was part of my era — 1957-1959 and, on our TV, Zorro was in black and white even though it may have been broadcast in color. I was in the 5th grade (maybe) and a kid named Billy had a spot-on Zorro costume that he wore to the Halloween carnival.
That was also the year that the guy who was supposed to play The Wild Man of Borneo bowed out early in the evening and I was asked to stand in for him — well, crouch in for him in the wooden “cage” in the “spook house” created in the basement of our school. I got to scare both my brothers, though middle brother Barry swore he knew it was me all along. 
A room mother dressed as a “gypsy fortune teller” in a dimly lit corner of the basement convinced kids to put their hands in a bowl and feel “eyeballs floating in water.” Grapes. It worked for the little kids.
For the Powell boys, our costumes were always homemade. Mom had a certain flair with the sewing machine and we went along with her. One year my baby brother, Garry, went to the carnival costume as a cat — he had big whiskers, fake pointed ears and a ringed tail — he was in the first grade. I was a hobo, wearing a big ol’ floppy hat that Mom had made for a Zorro costume that never quite developed. I think there is a photo somewhere in one of the boxes I moved out of Mom’s house this year. 
Middle brother Barry, who’d grow up to be a lawyer, costumed himself as a matronly woman that year — it was Mom’s gleeful idea. Yep, he had padding, gray spray in his hair, a hat with netting…he was something. He walked into the Halloween Carnival expecting not to be recognized, but a girl in his class screamed with laughter and shouted, “WHY, BARRY POWELL!” and he turned around left the building, walked 8 blocks home without telling a single adult, changed into a shirt and jeans and returned to the carnival as himself. 

One of the attractions at the carnival was the cake walk. You paid a quarter to walk in a circle — costumed kids and adults walking in a circle to Pop Goes the Weasel — and you’d hope the music stopped while you were standing on the winning number. We never won a cake. That’s OK. The school got the money. I think. It didn’t use the proceeds to put in air-conditioning, as I recall bitterly.

I’m dedicating this Halloween edition to the kids I knew. And their siblings. And their parents. And grandparents. People knew people, you know?
One year a bunch of us — all of us were first-year Boy Scouts by this time — decided to leave the Halloween Carnival together and walk through the neighborhood in the dark, dark night. We spotted the carnival’s “Hayride” — a big ol’ flatbed truck with wooden rails on the sides and bails of hay spread in the bed. The truck, filled with grownups and kid trick-or-treaters was puttering along near the school. One of our guys said, “Let’s egg the hayride” and he ran home and got a dozen eggs. We waited, he came back, handed out eggs and we took positions in somebody’s shrubbery and waited for the ride to come back.
[LARRY ASIDE: In retrospect, this was a mean thing to do. But we didn’t see ourselves as “mean.” We were thoughlessly having what appeared at first to be fun!]
Suddenly the flatbed truck rolled around a corner and someone stage-whispered, “There it is! Wait on it. Wait on it” and as the truck, loaded with grownups and goblins and princesses, rolled even with us, we unloaded the eggs toward a target about 15 dark yards away. It was a case of “throw and run” and we lit out. Behind we could hear people yelling at the villains who were terrified and running.
The post-egging conversation went something like, “I think I might have hit the truck” and “I’m not sure — mine looked like it went over the hood.”
Our ringleader said, “Let’s go to my house and get some water balloons.” We were up for it so four of us walked to his house and he opened the front door, turned and said, “Come on in” and we walked into the little frame home and suddenly realized his dad and his mom, who we all knew and loved, were trying to calm his little sister. “What happened?” our pal asked, suddenly very concerned.
And his dad said, “Somebody egged the hayride and hit your baby sister right in the head. Got egg all in her hair.” 
It was one of those “a hush fell over the crowd” moments. Big brother and the villains were quiet. I can’t remember how we extracted ourselves from this, but we were polite and unrevealing. For years.

The next Halloween, roughly the same bunch of boys made another appearance at the Carnival and left to walk through the neighborhood. We had paper grocery sacks to collect candy and apples and other Halloween treats — popcorn balls! How could i forget those? What a messy treat.
We were happy and having a fun time when we saw a guy, illuminated by a porch light, sitting in a rocker and watching the passing world and handing out candy to little kids. 
The guy who’d egged his sister knew the porch man and greeted him by name. The man sternly looked at us big ol’ sixth graders and said, “You boys are too old to be out doing this.” Stunned into silence, we walked away without any treats.
I guess he was right. The next year we didn’t go trick-or-treating in a “gang.”
I don’t know what we did. A couple of the guys may have had girlfriends by then, I probably stayed home reading or watching TV. Neither of my little brothers dressed as a matronly woman of the ‘50s.
The Halloween Carnival became the “Fall Festival,” TVs got color screens, schools became air-conditioned and the world changed. But not one of us ever egged another hayride. I’m almost certain.
—- Happy Halloween. Send calorie-free candy to [email protected] or click on “comment” below and tell your stories of Halloween. —-