Edmond O'Brien's in Drag, Mr. Peanut's in Burlap and the Mountains are in Papier-Mache

My Fifth Grade teacher was Mrs. Shellenberger and I liked her. She was very nice. She was kind to me. She was a big woman, tall with broad shoulders. She looked like the movie actor Edmond O’Brien. She could have been his sister or him in drag. (O’Brien is pictured right. Mrs. Shellenberger is on the left.) Just picture the actor with long hair wearing a print dress and clunky shoes.

We celebrated Halloween each year at East Ward. Everybody (well, the kids anyway; not so much the teachers) came in costume and the entire student body lined up and paraded around the schoolyard. In our classrooms we had parties afterward with treats and best costume contests. There were prizes for funniest, ugliest, scariest and most beautiful. I won a prize every Halloween from

Fourth grade through Sixth. I won in every category, a different one each year, except most beautiful. I might have even won that once. I dressed as a female one year.  People said I made a pretty girl. It was my eyes. Women would tell my mother they wished they had my eyes. “He has such long lashes,” they would say.
(Right: me as a Playboy Bunny, 1993 – “Pretty Woman, walkin’ down the street” – No? Yes?)

My costumes were always homemade, mostly by my grandmother. We purchased the masks, but everything else came from stuff around the house. I won a little book about birds for being The Ugliest in Sixth Grade. That year I was a witch. My clothes were just old pieces of my grandmother’s wardrobe dyed black. My hat was fashioned out of poster board. I was a rough looking hobo another year in my grandfather’s old clothes. I hate to say it, but the mask bore a resemblance to my Pap-Pap, especially since there was a cigar stub in one corner of the mouth.

One night my mother, grandmother and I went about door-to-door with my grandmother wearing the Witch costume sans hat, my mother as the Hobo and me as a very politically incorrect Black Woman.

The year I started Fifth Grade I also marched in the big Halloween Parade in West Chester. I was marching along having problems seeing through my costume when a man grabbed my arm and pulled me out of line. I wondered what I did wrong. Instead he told me I won third place in the most original costume category (five dollars). I  was dressed as Mr. Peanut. My body was an old potato sack with a cloth monocle sewed on around one eyehole. A pair of grandfather’s Long John’s my grandmother dyed black covered my arms and legs. My cane was one I won at a carnival. My hat was just cardboard cut, glued and taped together.

I received a gift that kept on giving that Christmas. Santa brought me an electric train (his last official visit. this being the year Iva and I had discovered the truth about that old man). Trains became a passion for the rest of my youth. My annual Christmas List included something for the train layout every year thereafter.

My father put a plywood platform in the dining room of 417. I don’t know if he or my grandfather built it. He said it was for the tree and put the tree up at its center. (He put the tree up and almost knocked everything down trying to place the star on top. His stepladder slipped off the edge of the platform.) Christmas morning I came down and a train was chugging around the tree.

Every year at Thanksgiving I would get to put my trains up. Each year I added more to my display. I would get another car or another Plasticville building. My train displays were my pride and joy.

Gary Kinzey (right with my dog, Topper) was a close friend during a few of those years. He was as passionate about electric trains as I, but more focused on the electricity. He made an elaborate control panel with a lot of dials and levers that controlled all aspects of his layout. I considered Gary an electronic genius. He had a Ham Radio in his room and in Junior High he came to class showing off a fountain pen. It wasn’t a working pen, however. He had gutted it of ink and built a radio receiver inside. When Gary became an adult he did go into the electronic field.

I was interested in the design of the layout rather than the power source. My landscape grew as I did. A tourist attraction called Roadside America in Shartlesville, Pennsylvania inspired me.  It billed itself as “The Worlds (sic) Greatest Indoor Miniature Village”.

I wanted to rival it. Thus I build mountains with tunnels by shaping wire mesh into shape and covering it with paper Mache. I placed a small mirror in a valley, built up banks around it to shape create a skating pond. I ran a string of Christmas tree lights beneath the platform and up holes beneath my buildings to give them inside lights that I could turn on and off at will. I hung a plywood sheet on an angle over one end of my little world. I drilled holes and stuck little bulbs through to create a night sky of stars. (Of course, I did a lot of these things as I became a teenager and had a bigger platform in the garage/basement of our home in Bucktown.)

Okay, I came up a little short of Roadside America, but give me a break, I was a kid!

All Hallow's Eve

Sometimes the spookiest scenes aren't from some Hollywood horror film, but just a vintage photograph from the reality of the past, such as this one of someone's halloween in the 1950s.

That was my Trick or Treat period, those early '"50s in Downingtown, inventing a costume from whatever bits and pieces could be scrounged up about the house and then prowling the dark and chill dark knocking on stranger's doors and demanding treats.

They held an annual parade seven miles south in the county seat, which was West Chester. I marched

in that procession in 1951 and won Third Place as Mr. Peanut. My grandmother created my get-up out of cardboard and a potato sack. The cane was one won at a local carnival one summer and the leggings were a pair of my Grandfather's Long John dyed black. The photo is me receiving my prize. I believe it was $5.00. Five dollars was a lot of money in 1951, especially to a ten-year old kid.

I saw a lot of those classic Universal Horror films at the Roosevelt Theater, located on Brandywine Avenue, which followed along the creek of the same name. Those films had a great deal of power upon one way back then and even if I went to the Saturday matinee, as I usually did, it was still always dark out when the show ended during the winter months. I lived almost all the way to the other end of Washington Avenue from the theater and that street tended to be full of shadows if it had any light at all. I would run home or at least as far and fast as I could until my side hurt.

We never stop learning new things in life, or shouldn't. One thing I learned this week was how recent this whole trick or treat business is as I knew it as a child and to this day. It is lest than 80 years a tradition, the first mention of it in a newspaper appearing in 1939. It was created to stem the growing violence of the Holiday. People, especially teenagers, were causing increasing expense damage during the 1930s, burning building, letting livestock loose and worse. Some lady decided to throw her home open and have treats laid out for the kids and she received no nasty tricks that year and thus a new tradition was born. Of course, in more modern times it seems a good bit of the violence and nastiness is returning.

Costumes aren't as much homemade these days either. It is big business now. Today's disguises aren't as politically incorrect as the one I am wearing in the picture on the left in 1957. The witch to my right (your left) was my grandmother and the tough guy to my other side was my mother. Except for the masks everything is homemade.

A couple hours ago I watched the 1931 version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi. That film was pretty scary when it came out, but it a far cry from what you see in horror movies now. For one thing, in a movie about a bloodsucker, you only see one drop of blood in the whole film when Renfield (Dwight Frye) cuts his fingertip while eating at Dracula's castle.

Here is another new fact I learned just today.

In the movie Renfield is a real estate agent bringing a lease to Count Dracula. The Count eventually bends down over the sleeping agent and turns him into a fly eating slave. The scene where Lugosi leans over Enfield totally upset the suits in the production office, who issued a dictate that Dracula was not to assault any males, only females. They feared the homoerotic implications.

Like the lack of blood, there are no overt sexual scenes in the film; however, there is a good deal of eroticism present. The scenes of Lugosi stretching over Lucy or Nina to bite their neck are very suggestive, even though we never see his lips actually touch their skin.  These are rather frightening images as well.

Today we would see his fangs pierce the skin and trickles of blood and in the final scenes where Van Helsing hammers a stake through Dracula's heart there would be a gusher of red shooting up. Instead here the camera wanders away from the action and we only hear the sound of the pounding and Dracula's screams.

I don't dress up for the holiday anymore; really, don't celebrate it at all. The last time I donned any masks was during my tenure at Wilmington Trust. We often dressed up for Halloween and had a little party. Below are my appearances in those days.

I went from Mr. Peanut to an M&M.

I came this year as the World's Ugliest Playboy Bunny.

Aren't you glad it wasn't the centerfold?

I was the Phantom of the Opera during the period I was on steroids for my Graves Disease. The disease mad my eyes pop out of my head and the steroids made my face swell up, so I wa
s pretty much hideous like Erik. This customer caused one of my fellow managers totally freak out.

Oh, I still had a mask on in the photo on the right. My face was bad, but not that bad.


Anyway, hope you are having a perfectly haunting Halloween and watch out for all those calories!

Halloween's Past

I have mixed feelings about Halloween, but it can be fun as long as one keeps it in perspective as just dressing up and going boo.


I enjoyed it as a child, wearing costumes we generally made from things about the house, except the masks. I use to win one of the prizes at grade school often. I still have a little book on birds I won one year as the ugliest. (Did I dress up that year?)


Yeah I did. I was either a witch or a bum.

I won a prize in the annual West Chester Halloween Parade in 1951 when I was 10. I went as Mr. Peanut.  My grandmother sewed the body using a large potato sack. The top hat was just formed out of cardboard and the cane was one I had won at the town carnival. She dyed a pair of my granddad's long johns black to make the leggings and sleeves. The monocle was cardboard and string sewed on and a pair of white cloves completed it.


Here I am on the Judge's Stand at the end of the parade getting my award. I think it was five dollars.


It was really difficult seeing out of the thing.

In 1957 we all got into the act and went out to friends and neighbors. I'm in the middle and I admit my outfit would not be politically correct today. My mother is on the right and my grandmother is the witch on the left.


Dress up for us kind of went by the wayside after marriage. Maybe just the way we dressed in the 1960s made it Halloween everyday.


Eventually we had kids and made costumes for them although some were purchased.

I guess Noelle carried on the tradition of my grandmother's witch.


Laurel wanted to be a Fluppy Dog, I think that was what those characters were.

Getting a little more homemade here. Darryl's was bought, a vampire ghost. Laurel made her own, I'm not sure what she was anymore. I can't tell from this picture.


My wife helped Noelle become a gumball machine, but it was noelle's idea.

This year the girls came up with their own outfits. Noelle is a bee and Laurel is a Zebra.


Hmmm, where's darryl?


Perhaps he was afraid of bees.










I got back in the swing of things in the 1990s. We always dressed up at work.

The first time I did, I kind of borrowed Laurel's homemade costume and went as an M&M. From Mr. Peanut to a piece of candy. What progress.

The next year I was very sexy in my sheer black lingerie at the World's ugliest Playboy Bunny.

The final year I was the Phantom of the Opera.

The hat was actually an Amish Hat I had bough in Dutch Country years before.

I was suffering from my hyperthyroidism at the time and being treated with steroids. This had swollen my face and neck, which kind of added to the look.

One of my fellow managers, Phyllis, was actually terrified by the costume. She couldn't stay in the area with me.

Masked.

Unmasked (but still masked.

(

Noelle carries on. This year she made herself and her friends "Nuns with Bad Habits". One was "Bar Nun", one was "Nun With a Bun" and the black fellow in her group was "Sister brother".  Noelle was "Nun on the Run".

I didn't get the ball and chain around her ankle in the shot.

She carved her Rosary from soap.

Her prison number is Acts 20:23

"I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me."

Enjoy the holiday if you practice it. be careful out there of all the trick and treaters. And BOOO!