Earlier Halloweens Remembered

With the recent celebrations going on for this Halloween, it brought back memories of "many" Halloweens ago. There was not the huge attention paid to it in the small rural area where I grew up. Although, the most dire thing done back then was to turn over people's outhouses. For all you young whippersnappers that don't know, there were times when we actually had an "outside" toilet. Come to think of it, there are good sides to everything. You sure didn't have complaints of someone "hogging" the bathroom. It was sweltering hot in the summer and icy cold in the winter. Anyway, there was this one guy in our town who was also the janitor at our school. He was extremely "cranky" so the kids that were inclined to be mischievous seemed to always accomplish turning over his outhouse. That was pretty amazing since he would sit out by it with his shotgun most of the night. In retrospect, the crankiness could have come from him having to put up with all of us everyday, ya think?

My Dad was very involved with young people and had some curious ways of making us think. For instance, one Halloween, he loaded up his pickup (with a camper shell on it) with kids and took us to a town about 35 miles away. His brother-in-law was the deputy sheriff. This uncle took us down in the basement where the jail was located and gave us a tour. To this day, I remember the prisoners yelling and screaming at us. Valuable exposure to that side of life given to us in a purely unassuming way. We all thought at the time that it was just a scary thing to do.

Another time, he suggested that a bunch of us go walk through the cemetery. He recommended a certain route to take. Off we went, it was getting dark with just enough light to make out outlines of things. When we got to the cemetery, we were already worked up in frenzy thinking about all the ghosts that "might" be there. Sure enough, all of a sudden, we heard this "ohhhhhh" noise and looked over to see this ghost just gliding through the graves. Talk about run, anyone of us could have qualified for the Olympics. We beat Dad back to the house and we were excitedly telling Mom about the ghost. About that time, Dad walked up so we told him the story. Before we got to the "ohhhhh" noise Dad said, "Did it sound like this and he made the sound". Needless to say, he was in big trouble. More from laughing too hard than our pommelling him I think.

We had a few trick or treaters last night, not many though. Our Cub worked at the Fall Festival at our Church. She made a "cute" cat.