Rondo Remembers: Halloween...Looking Back
The years do flip by, like the flapping of vampire bat wings. There's a chill in the air, the leaves are now turning: vivid yellows, yellow-greens, orange, red...it's Halloween season again. A time most of us love and cherish with a bundle of childhood memories.
There's high school football happening Friday nights, the distant cheers from the high school football field wafting over quiet streets. A smell of apples in the air. Pumpkins turning up on porches with stalks of dried corn. Some are six feet tall with wonderful maroon and cream colored Indian corn cobs.
It was like yesterday that I sat on my grandparent Adams' living room couch. There next to me was a glass bowl of Halloween candy called mellocremes. Small candy corn flavored candies that were in Halloween shapes. Yellow moons and corn cobs, orange pumpkins with green stalk tops, brown witches and bats.
On my front closed-in porch in Grove City, PA with my blanket for Dracula cape on. Watching leaves spin, dance and fall from the tree-lined street. Mom had put up those paper-board Halloween decorations on the windows. The ones with the metal clip joints. Pumpkins, witches, ghosts.
At school, the chatter was feverish about trick-or-treating. Costume finds. Around six years old I landed the cool Frankenstein costume. It was a silky one piece thing with a plastic mask, held on your head by a rubber band. It came in one of those windowed boxes from a department store. Probably G.C. Murphys. How can you ever forget the sweat building up, clammy and cold on your face while wearing those type of costumes. In the cover of night, my plastic pumpkin filling up with candy bars and the less desirable Necco wafers and Sweet Tarts. Ah, but pop corn balls were always cool. Apples...nah, too healthy.
Much later, when I was older....ha, like eleven, it was watching those great Halloween movie staples on TV. The classic FRANKENSTEIN (1931), HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1958) and, one Halloween, MAD MONSTER PARTY (1967).
Walking down those slate and brick sidewalks, leaves crunching underfoot. Wow, were Halloweens special. I could keep going. I bet you have a hay wagon full of Halloween flashbacks yourself.
More on Trick-Or-Treating to come in the following weeks as we near October 31st.
Ron Adams
Ligonier, PA
October 2024
Ron runs the TERRIFIC CREEPY CLASSICS listed over there in the links. Check it out.