BOO!

Now when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn on Halloween, my parents didn’t take me by the hand and go door to door with me while I was dressed in some silly little costume yelling: “Trick or treat.” Nope, we went as we were, little bums, with maybe someone rich enough to own a mask. We got our parents old cloths and wore their hats and ties and sometimes the girls would wear gobs of lipstick, with their Mother’s hats. We went with nothing to hold the loot in, just our grubby little paws and pockets. If you wore the mask you were the leader, to be admired, and you did the talking, because no one knew who you were, after all, you were wearing a mask!

Many a time we would get old socks without holes in them, fill them with flour and a heavy piece of chalk to weight them down, tie a knot to close them at the end then tie a long cord to the knot. We would spin the sock over our heads and like a lariat let it fly against someone’s person, leaving a big powder look and pain from the chalk as it crashed into a victim.

Door to door was really stoop-to-stoop, ringing the bell for each floor and yelling out: “Trick or treat,” and waiting for the occupants of each floor to toss down the loot, through the stair well. There really weren’t any tricks, just treats, as we all knew each other. The treats were mostly pennies or nickels and fruit, yet sometimes we actually got candy. Once in a while we got advice such as: “If you little bastards don’t get the hell out of here, I swear…”

There were some mom and pop stores that were very kind and there were mom and pop stores that were unkind. Loretta the produce lady was good to us, always gave us candy, while sloppy John, her competition just chased us and swore in Italian as we sped by his fruit and vegetables, looking to knock something over if we could.

The fun started right after school, as we ran home to change our clothing, and getting into our “costumes.” It would be starting to turn dark, with the air nippy and biting our cheeks, no one questioning what you were suppose to be, we were all bums, period.

The thing about this tradition was it was repeated on Thanksgiving day, where we went again door-to-door, or stoop-to-stoop looking for treats and yelling as we pressed each door bell: “Happy Thanksgiving!”