 |
| Me and Mark on a Halloween night in the 1980s. |
Like millions of American kids, I loved dressing up on Halloween and going door-to-door begging for candy from my neighbors, usually in a cheap dime store costume from Ben Cooper or Collegeville—a plastic half-mask fitted tightly to my sweaty face with a thin elastic strap.
I did so for the last time when I was nine years old, and although I continued to enjoy all the trappings and atmosphere of the spooky season in the years that followed, I didn't dress up again in horrific regalia for almost ten years.
In the picture at the top of today's Dispatch, that's a teenage me on the left wearing the black coat and hat and sporting a chalky white skull mask. My friend Mark Ward (who painted both our masks) is the wolfman on the right.
The two of us went out looking like this out on a Halloween night in the early 1980s. We didn't go door-to-door, however—instead we merely tooled around Fort Wayne aimlessly after dark, occasionally popping into public places like Southtown Mall to gauge people's reactions to our frightful get-ups.
Since this is the time of year when everyone from kids to grownups like to dress up in costumes both fanciful and fearful, here's an interesting article examining the history behind such traditions.
 |
| Photograph ©1964 Diane Arbus |
These days, my October traditions no longer involve wearing spooky garb, but I still have fond childhood memories of walking down the sidewalks in my northside Fort Wayne neighborhood after dark on Halloween—tucked into one of those Collegeville/Ben Cooper costumes from Kresge's or Mr. Wiggs—with a plastic jack-o-lantern bucket swinging from one hand that I hoped by the end of the night would be filled with sugary treats.
There's more to come in the next dispatch.
©2023 SummitCityScribe