(MORE Memories of an Okie Boomer...)

Imagine letting your kids dress up in weird costumes and walk around the neighborhood, unsupervised and at night, collecting candy from complete strangers.

What could possibly go wrong?

But nothing ever did back in the day, when kids were safe, free was good, and none of us on Nebraska Street ever paid a dime for our Halloween costumes. 

You just had to be creative.

If you weren’t, your Mom would make it a “Good Ol’ Charlie Brown Halloween”, outfitting you in yet another dumb ghost costume, consisting of an ill-fitting white sheet with eye holes you couldn’t see out of.

Rats.

The Halloween I was a ghost, the tattered sheet’s eyeholes were all over the place and a major safety hazard.

I took a nasty spill after misjudging a curb, which set me tumbling one way and my sack of candy the other.

A shark frenzy ensued, and I lost most of my candy to the other greedy Trick-or-Treaters.

It wasn’t that big deal, though. Steve and I just went around the block again.

It wasn’t like the adults could tell one kid in a ghost costume from another, and there were hundreds of them.

After the embarrassing ghost costume Halloween, I vowed to come up with a truly great costume the next year. And that was…

A hobo!

If you read my first book, you’ll remember the story about Norman’s annual Lion’s Club Carnival that was held where Main Street intersects with the railroad tracks.

It was awesome fun, but every year there was a horrible smell that worsened as the carnival went on. A teenager told me that the smell was caused by a hobo who’d been run over by a train.   

So what, I ask you, could be better on Halloween than going as a smelly Hobo who was soon to be cut in half by a locomotive?

My hobo costume consisted of the oldest, filthiest and most torn-up jeans from the bottom of my closet, an equally disgusting old shirt from Mom’s rag drawer, and a Navy stocking cap that my Dad brought back from WWII.

But the best part of the costume was the hobo beard! 

My older sisters happily made that by spreading gobs of butter on my face, then sticking handfuls of Cain’s Deluxe Coffee grounds directly onto my buttered-up cheeks and forehead.

Even if you were nine years old, and your face was as smooth as a baby’s behind, a custom-made hobo beard made you look like you’d been riding the rails for decades.

Sadly, authenticity went out the window when you started to sweat profusely.

First, my beard started getting gooey.

Then my face started itching like crazy. I had to scratch it, which removed most of the coffee ground whiskers, but left behind enough oil to lube your car.

It made for a long, uncomfortable night of trick-or-treating.

Okay, so maybe being a hobo wasn’t such a great Halloween costume after all.

But at least it was better than the next year, when Steve’s older brother decided we would all be midgets.

We wore old pillowcases over our heads, upon which were drawn a cartoonish face, a shirt collar and a long necktie. The pillowcase was supposed to be our head, our really long neck, and our upper body.

It tucked neatly into a pair of cut-offs that we’d belted tightly around our knees. So, from a distance, especially if you’d been drinking, we looked exactly like a herd of midgets.

As awesome looking as they were, the costumes were not without logistical problems.

It was more impossible to see out of them than the ghost costumes. And because of the tight belts around our knees, we could only take really tiny steps, like Geisha midgets or something.

Trying to step up on a curb was almost impossible.

Worst of all, there was no way to outrun the older boys who thought “midget-bowling” was the greatest sport ever.

Again, not a costume for the highlight reel.

So I promised myself that I’d think long and hard over the next 12 months to come up with the greatest Halloween costume ever.

Some 364 days later, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to actually do that.

On Halloween Day itself, I begged my sisters and my Mom for creative help. But their ideas were terrible. The best Mom could do was suggest that I be a cowboy, which I had done to death by the time I was six.

Then one sister suggested that I go as a Dallas Cowboy football player.

DING DING DING!

That idea was a real winner because I was fanatical about the Cowboys, and running back Dan Reeves (number 30) was my hero!

I quickly put on my shoulder pads and pulled on my Number 30 Cleveland Cougars’ game jersey. My sisters drew a Cowboys’ star on each side of my helmet, and then slapped some blue electrical tape right down the middle.

My Dallas Cowboys costume was as awesome as it was practical.

I looked like a total bad-ass football player, and I could actually SEE where I was going for the first time in years.

I didn’t accidentally run into a single mailbox or fire hydrant that year. Even better, I got to tackle a few dumb kids dressed as the Great Pumpkin.

About 9pm, Steve and I sat on the curb and, with the help of car headlights, we started the serious business of candy trading. 

I gave Steve all my little Baby Ruths, Banana Split Bars and Almond Joys, and he gave me his Butterfingers, Slo Pokes and Peanut Butter Bars. 

When I got home, my sisters were supposed to carefully go through everything in my bag to make sure some weirdo hadn’t put needles in my candy, which seemed to happen every Halloween in California or New York, according to the TV news.

But what my sisters really did was take the best candy.

I LOUDLY complained, but it really wasn’t that big a deal, because I always had a major haul of candy.

My favorites included: Sugar Babies, Milk Duds, Wax Harmonicas (try getting one of those suckers completely in your mouth!), Bit-O-Honeys, Sugar Daddies, Tootsie Rolls, Tootsie Pops, Hershey’s Kisses, Dubble Bubble, candy corn and little pumpkins, candy cigarettes, Kraft caramels and Dad’s Root Beer Barrels.

After devouring all of them over the next day or two, I’d tuck into Chiclets, Pez, Atomic Fire Balls, Smarties, Chocolate Coins, Hershey bars, SweetTarts, Junior Mints, Star Burst, Pixy Stix, taffy, jelly beans, Necco wafers, and whatever else was guaranteed to give me cavities and juvenile diabetes. 

Never, not even if I was starving to death, did I eat black liquorice, Circus Peanuts or those stupid necklace candies!

And I was vehemently opposed to eating any kind of fruit given out by weirdo adults (who were probably from California or New York) that might have had needles or razor blades in them. 

But, mainly, I rebelled at the thought of filling my tummy with fruit when I could be loading it with millions of free Butterfingers!

#halloweenhumor #boomersooner #halloweenpranks #nostalgia #haunted @Boo

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