For a kid growing up in rural Ohio in the 1960s, the pleasures were as many as they were simple:
Damming the creek in the woods and hunting for crawdads. Building “hay huts” in the neighboring farmer’s fields and skedaddling from them one step ahead of the baling machine. Riding bikes and wagons and souped-up versions of both. And, of course, feasting on the fruits of apple, peach and pear trees, not to forget the neighbor’s Concord grapes and wild blackberries where the fields met the woods.
But come fall, one of the greatest pleasures was the day a large and heavy cardboard box kept high in a closet in one of the bedrooms once again was retrieved. It was the box filled with Halloween costumes, many hand-sewn by Mom, and those classic plastic masks.
Fifty or so years ago, the outfit was a one-piece clown costume made of red material with white polka dots. There was an embarrassing hat to match. But disaster struck late on Halloween afternoon. While the costume had been tried on dozens of times in the run-up to trick-or-treating, the mask had not.
Pulled from the box at the last minute, not only was the elastic used to hold it on the face missing, the mask had been crushed and had cracked. The crestfallen 6-year-old cried.
Plastic tape took care of the cracks. The deformities stayed, turning the happy clown mask into a more apropos sinister one. But the missing elastic still was a problem. And not one mask in the box had its elastic.
One brother proposed the novel solution of stapling it to my head. He was overruled by Mom, who, rummaging through her sewing drawer, produced several pieces of double-sided tape.
Thus, Halloween 1964 had been saved. As per usual, a small cow bell hanging from an old shoe string was placed around my neck — just in case I somehow became separated from Mom — and off we went into The Great Candy-gathering Spooky Abyss.
Many decades later, the same box hauled from the same high closet appeared to be surprisingly smaller and lighter. “Surely, that’s not it,” the comment quickly came to mind. “That box was huge; it weighed a ton,” the still-perplexed adult thought.
Alas, it was the right box, obviously enlarged in memories far beyond what it was in life. But opening it again, and finding that same costume and mask, quickly restored the size of that Halloween box’s childhood import.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
