Halloween

I first heard about Halloween when I was five or six years old. We lived at Jenny’s Gap and there were no houses close to our house. One Saturday or Sunday, Daddy was home on Halloween. He got a pumpkin out of our garden about an hour before dark and carved the first jack-o-lantern I ever saw. He asked Mommy to get a candle and a piece of cardboard. Mommy didn’t find any cardboard right away, so she ended up opening a ten-cent cherry pie that Daddy would take to work with him. Daddy put the four-inch square piece of cardboard inside the pumpkin. He took it out to the front porch, and placed a lit candle inside. It was almost completely dark by then, and I liked seeing the candle burning in the smiling face. Daddy told us that some people believed witches flew around on brooms on Halloween.

We moved from Jenny’s Gap to Crab Orchard (Glen View) in October, 1955. I was seven years old. A few days before Halloween, Jimmy Cragett asked me if I wanted to go “Trick or Treating” with the group he planned to go with. I had never heard that phrase, so I asked Jimmy what he meant. He told me that kids put a mask on and go around to houses and people give them candy. I thought he was trying to pull my leg. I had already heard about snipe hunting. However, other people confirmed what Jimmy had told me. I remained skeptical until people started giving us candy.

Myrtle Wills was Daddy’s first cousin Clenda Wills’ daughter. She was a teenager who would take many of the younger children around to about forty houses at Glen View. We all got more candy than I had seen outside a store.

I was a juvenile delinquent the night of Halloween, 1959, when I was eleven. The calendar says Halloween was on Saturday, but I believe the trick or treat activity happened on Friday night. Jimmy Cragett and I bought two masks so we could make our rounds twice and double the amount of candy we could collect. A lot of people knew who we were and would not give us candy when we visited their house the second time.

Twin Oaks Country Club (now Daniel’s winery) was having a dance that night. Their main circuit breaker box was located near the main road and was not visible from the club house. We tripped the main breaker and hid in a field of broomsedge. It wasn’t long before we saw a car coming from the club house. A man got out of the car, looked at the breaker box, and reset the breaker. He got back in his car and drove back to the party. He had not gone out of our sight when we tripped the breaker again. In a few minutes, he was back. He reset the breaker a second time and drove back to the party. We threw the breaker again and hid in the broomsedge again. Nobody came to check the breaker box. In a few minutes, a deputy sheriff drove up and parked. He had a very good flashlight that he used to look for us. We were lying as flat as we could, hoping he would not see us. He left about five minutes later and we decided to have more fun somewhere else.

We each had a bar of soap we had picked up before leaving home. We went to Henigar’s store, the local bread and milk store. We wrote “Leslie Demyan” with soap all over the store windows. Leslie didn’t have a father in the home and his mother worked outside the home. Leslie was a “little rich kid” who seemed to get everything he asked for. Even though he had better toys than we did, we didn’t like him very much.

Jimmy said he happened to be in Henigar’s store when Leslie and his mother came in the next morning (Saturday morning). Mrs. Henigar had called Mrs. Demyan and complained about the soap on her windows. Mrs. Demyan looked at the windows and asked Leslie why he had written his name on the windows. Leslie said he didn’t do it. Leslie’s mother didn’t believe him and told him to clean the windows. I don’t think we ever told him that we had got him into trouble.

One other little prank we pulled that night was to let the air out of two tires on Roy Meador’s car. He hadn’t done anything to us. Jimmy thought of it and I went along with him.