Now, I would think that most children of the 1960s and ‘70s would say that they too loved Halloween, all the more so because our generation was the last that could look upon it as a holiday that was truly ours, one with minimal parental involvement. Oh yes, they still had to buy candy, decorations, and, for the less imaginative and creative children, costumes. But that was, for most of us, the limit of their participation. My brother, sister, and I were, like the majority of our friends, virtually on our own for Halloween. My staple costume idea was Dracula, to which my father’s sole contribution was a dab or two of his Top Brass hair cream, in order to slick my hair back and form a decent Dracula’s widow’s peak. My mother was more practical—she simply gave each of us a few dollars to go up to the Pic’n’Sav and purchase anything we could find that might enhance our costumes. A few tubes of fake blood, a set of vampire’s fangs, an old cloak, dark green but dark enough to appear black when out trick-or-treating, and my costume was complete.

    Now, we had two older sisters who, unfortunately, felt themselves too old for Halloween, and into their care and keeping the younger children were given. In practice, this meant that my little sister was escorted by them on her rounds, while my little brother and I were left to our own devices. And after a productive night of organized begging for candy, it would be back home for a monster movie or two, while consuming a month’s worth of candy in a single sitting.

    If I’m being honest with myself, and by extension you the reader, then what I’m truly nostalgic for is that sense of freedom that I possessed as a child, that sense of being at one with the square mile that roughly defined my world. My friends and I roamed that world as we wished, from our elementary school to the 7/11, the creek where we fished to the playground, and everything in between. Halloween only increased that feeling of independence, as we were cut loose to roam our streets at night.

    That was fifty years ago, and much has changed since then, both for me personally and the world at large. In 2024, no parent in their right mind would give a ten-year-old the same degree of freedom that my mom and dad, in 1974, conferred upon me without a second thought. Many communities across the country now require children to Trick-or-Treat during daylight hours, something that would have been anathema to my friends and I, who never began our revels until it was fully dark. Our parents, to some degree, expected us to exercise some common sense, and we did. We tended to go to homes of people we knew, an easier prospect in the days when people knew their neighbors, and not just the ones whose property adjoined theirs. And when we began to expand our network, we found that, as a group we could easily hit forty or fifty homes that at least one of our number knew well enough to feel was safe. Conversely, we also knew the houses to avoid, those houses whose owners were ‘weird’, or worse, doled out such treats as apples or raisins. And we traveled in a pack, and watched over each other and other groups of children we might encounter.