| Trick
or Treat! As grade school kids in the late 1940’s, Halloween was looked forward
to with anticipation and excitement. Costumes and “disguises” were simple, no
fashion trend-setting store-bought stuff! For me, a Lone Ranger mask was adequate.
Some would use bandanas and scarfs to dress as pirates. Charcoal smudges on the
cheeks could transform one into a boxcar hobo. The girls were a little more elaborate,
with their princess dresses.
We were sometimes mischievous, but never
destructive. The worst that I can remember was rubbing someone’s window screens
with a bar of soap.
On our rounds of houses in the northeast Houston
neighborhood, one was particularly special. An elderly lady, a widow, likely spent
days baking pastries, cookies, and other treats for us kids. In those days, going
into someone’s house, invited, was not a safety threat. She had her goodies spread
out on several tables for us to choose from. Her snacks were always good to look
at and better to taste.
She would also have wash tubs filled with water
and apples for bobbing. Occasionally, she would give us balloons to take for inflating
later. Filling them with water, they became missiles for balloon “fights”.
We
would take old pants and shirts, tie the cuffs, stitch them together, and stuff
them with grass, old rags, or anything else that we could use in order to make
“dummies”. On one evening, we laid a dummy, splattered with some red paint, alongside
the street where riders would get off of the city bus to walk to their homes.
Most houses were built on concrete block piers, providing a crawl space underneath.
We hid in that darkness to observe reactions. Later that night, one person that
got off the bus didn’t realize that the object was a dummy, ran off, and a short
time later a patrol car arrived to “investigate”. We were terrified that we would
be located and scolded! We dared to breathe, lest our movement would give us away…
To our relief, both the officers and the “victim of our prankish humor”, upon
verifying their “discovery of evidence”, laughed and went on their way. We didn’t
pull that stunt again, though. (Our dummy WAS confiscated, however; we always
wondered its “fate” that night following the incident…)
© Bruce Martin
They
Shoe Horses, Don't They?
October 28, 2013 Guest column
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