With Halloween right around the corner, every year I think back to what our Halloween’s were like growing up in small town Beulah, North Dakota in the 80’s. My blog photo is of me and my brother Mark, taken in October of 1975. I was 2 1/2 years old, and Mark was 3 1/2. I would like to tell you that I am on the right wearing the Donald Duck mask…but no. I am wearing the pink bear mask and the entire front of my shirt is soaked with my drool. I am just going to make some bullet points on my random memories of what our Halloween’s were like.
- When we were very young, I remember one Halloween it was so cold that our cheap plastic Halloween costumes froze and cracked into pieces.
- I remember going into an apartment complex down the road from our house, knocking door to door and a guy opened the door and he didn’t know it was Halloween. He went into his kitchen and gave us each an old wrinkly apple.
- We stopped at the house of a man who owned a department store downtown. He made us sing Row, Row, Row your Boat before he would give us any candy.
- I remember someone breaking one of those glow sticks and I touched the liquid inside and somebody saying they were poisonous and I thought I was going to get sick and die.
- When were older, around Halloween we would play “Jason” with our neighbor friends Brian and Mike. Since my brother was the tallest, he would play Jason. In the beginning he would wear a piece of cloth over his head with one eye hole cut out and a rope tied around the neck like in the Friday the 13th movie. It was scary, but Mark would end up getting mad and quitting since we would run away and hide from him. He said it was no fun. Later, we got a hold of one of those plastic hockey masks, and Mark scared one of my other friends to the point he cried.
- I remember chewing one of those Bit O Honey’s and it pulled the cap off my tooth.
- There was a creepy old house down by my Dads “chicken farm” and one year they turned it into a haunted house for Halloween. I remember my sister Julie taking me into the first room of the haunted house, I remember seeing a coffin, and a Dracula or something slowly sitting up in it, and then I remember her taking me back outside.
- I recall one house we stopped at Trick or Treating, the person put a big bowl of candy out on the front porch with a sign that said help yourself…So we did.
- One thing I remember about all the haunted houses, they all had that hole in wall that you had to stick your hand through and touch something gross. It was usually wet spaghetti noodles, and they said it was guts or intestines.
