October 26, 1968

I imagined that retirement would provide me with ample time to write. It should have, but I quickly screwed that up by filling my days with volunteer activities. As I went about my volunteering, I’d often jot down a story idea. A few years ago, I started a list of ideas for writing. This list now has 867 items. It seems excessive, but there must be a couple of gems in there, right? One thing is certain: While my writing ability is a work in progress, I’m a top-level list creator.

I recall hearing actor/filmmaker Seth Rogen suggest that if an idea is good enough, you’ll find yourself returning to it over and over again. The story below, ‘October 26, 1968,’ is one that I keep coming back to.

Writing personal anecdotes does cause me to pause. I wonder if the people mentioned would want the story shared. I also wonder whether my facts are straight.

Many of the stories are decades old. What are the chances that all the details are accurate? Zero chance. What is the likelihood that I haven’t ‘optimized’ the story over time? Again, there is zero chance. Are either of these things done with malice aforethought? No. At this point, I don’t know what portion of my stories are true and how much is revisionist history.

That is a preamble to a story that I’ve kept returning to. I believe that it’s mostly true, but it’s hard to know. Some of the folks in the story have since passed, and the others were very young at the time. This is just my memory of a particular day from 56 years ago. So, take this as a bit of a disclaimer.

October 26, 1968

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, was enacted in June 1968 to schedule Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and the newly created Columbus Day on a Monday. This was back when the federal government was on a roll with things like the Civil Rights Act, funding the moon race, and creating more three-day weekends with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.

In 1968, Halloween was slated to fall on Thursday, October 31st. In the spirit of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, our town council members thought it would be a good idea to do something similar to Halloween. Children trick-or-treating in the dark on a school night is a dangerous scenario. Additionally, those same kids who were ‘jacked up on Hershey bars’ would be a menace during school the next day.

The town committee decided to experiment with moving Halloween to a Saturday. In this case, Saturday, October 26th. It seemed to make a lot of sense. Rather than squeezing in preparations after school, kids would have all day to get themselves ready for the big night. Best of all, the kids could burn off their sugar-fueled energy at home instead of menacing their teachers in the classroom.

On Saturday, October 26th, I sat at the breakfast table with my 6-year-old brother, 5-year-old sister, and mother, who was seven months pregnant. My father wasn’t working his full-time job, but before we’d woken, he’d left for one of his part-time jobs. As the sole provider for our soon-to-be family of six, he always had a couple of part-time jobs to ensure his crew stayed housed and well-fed.

While my father was working his awning installation job, we sat around the table eating Lucky Charms and discussing how we would dress up for Halloween. We didn’t have fancy costumes to put on, but that hardly mattered. It was about the excitement of going house-to-house and getting a haul of Tootsie Rolls and 3 Musketeers. My brother was going as a sheriff from the west. He wore chaps and a cowboy hat and carried a silver cap gun. My sister was going as a princess. She had a sparkly dress, and my mother would put some make-up on her. As for myself, I was going to be a pirate. I’d wear a bandana on my head, draw on a mustache, and carry a wooden sword (which was just a piece of scrap wood I’d found in the garage).

We weren’t planning to head out until it began to get dark, and we also needed to wait until my father came home. My pregnant mother couldn’t walk in the dark on driveways and sidewalks slippery with leaves, so we planned for her to stay home and pass out candy while our father chaperoned us on our candy-gathering journey. We were so excited that we changed into our costumes right after lunch.

We were all gathered in our living room when my father arrived home. A couple of trick-or-treaters had already stopped at our house, and as we looked out the window facing the street, we could see packs of kids and parents walking between houses. We were getting nervous, thinking all the good candy would be gone before we started our neighborhood tour. We were excited, but, as it turned out, our father was not.

I should explain a bit about my father. One, he was a truly generous man. Two, he was a very talented artist. He was also a traditionalist in many ways. He grew up in the aftermath of the Great Depression and during World War II. He served in the Navy during the Korean War. He preferred standard American fare for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He wasn’t keen on Japanese food since we’d fought Japan in the war. He didn’t understand why people did gym workouts or went jogging when they could get plenty of exercise raking their leaves or chopping wood. He didn’t care for the long hair and bell bottoms that were becoming popular. He thought that Carl Yastrzemski getting $100,000 a season to play baseball for the Boston Red Sox was absurd. He was a firefighter and one of the first to become an EMT. Our father would fight a fire, care for a car accident victim, and then come home and make scrambled eggs for his kids. He was our superhero.

On that particular night in 1968, he was adamant that having Halloween on October 26th was a travesty. Halloween had always been on October 31st, and no politicians were going to change that tradition. He turned off the light over the front door and told us to take our costumes off.

As one might imagine, that didn’t go too smoothly. The house was quickly filled with crying kids and an angry pregnant woman. Despite the light being turned off, the doorbell rang as more trick-or-treaters came looking for their goodies.

My father was a firefighter. He was accustomed to and trained in responding to stressful situations. He was experienced in calming victims and triaging emergencies. That said, we’d never seen my mother quite this mad.

My father glanced at the crying and angry crew before him and said, “Let’s go to the movies.”

The crying started to fade. My father continued, “I drove by the theater on the way home and noticed a Disney movie playing. We can get popcorn, Milk Duds, Raisinets, and anything else you guys want. Come on, let’s jump in the car and have some fun.”

There was silence as we all contemplated this new information. My siblings and I were immediately sold on the idea, but we all slowly turned our heads to see our mother’s reaction. Her eyes seemed to shoot invisible beams of information directly into my father’s face. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a mad mother’s glare must exceed that total by far.

“Kids, grab your jackets and get in the car. You can leave the costumes on.” Our mother had spoken and we were all in the car’s backseat in record time.

The ride was quiet as my father drove our family car to the one-screen theater downtown. Passing by nearby neighborhoods, we could see parents escorting their kids along the streets. Flashlight beams marked the progress of the candy-hunting packs as they made their way from house to house. Nobody in our car dared to mention this. We all recognized it, but we all knew to remain silent. Even my younger brother, who was notoriously unfiltered, knew, for once, to keep his mouth shut.

At the theater, we ordered everything. Not just buttered popcorn and soda but also Milk Duds, Raisinets, Sno-Caps, and Sugar Babies. We had a ticket to order everything and wouldn’t let it pass.

Since it was, you know, Halloween, the theater was almost empty. We took our seats and started plowing through our goodies. We were almost through the entire haul before the movie even started. “What’s this movie about, Dad?” I asked. “I’m not quite sure, son. It’s about a dog.” That sounded good to me. We were a dog family. Our current dog, Desiree, a mashup of breeds, was probably busy barking at all the hopeful trick-or-treaters knocking on the door of our empty house.

The movie was called ‘Old Yeller. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, it is about a family trying to survive on the frontier in the late 1860s. Early in the movie, the father departs to sell some cattle and leaves his wife and two sons at their small farm. Eventually, the family adopts a stray dog, Old Yeller, who is hanging around their farm. This decision is very fortunate, as Old Yeller guards the family from a bear, feral hogs, and a wolf.

Sounds great, huh? Frontier family and their beloved canine protector?

Unfortunately, the wolf that Old Yeller had fought off was rabid and had bitten him. As a precaution, the family locks Old Yeller away in quarantine. Old Yeller looks to be okay as the days pass, but things take a turn for the worse. When Old Yeller becomes wildly aggressive, he must be put down. The older son, Travis, takes on the responsibility and shoots Old Yeller dead.

Now, to be fair, the movie was delightful until this sequence.

Fortunately for my father, my little brother and sister had fallen asleep when the treats ran out. This time, only my mother and I were sobbing for the second time on ‘Halloween’ night.

By the time we drove home, the trick-or-treating was long over. I sat in the front seat with my parents while my siblings snoozed in the back seat. My mother told me, “I know you guys missed out on trick-or-treating, but we did buy a bunch of candy to give out. You guys can split that up for yourselves.”

As it would turn out, Halloween fell on a Friday in 1969, a Saturday in 1970, and a Sunday in 1971. By the time 1972 rolled around, the idea of rescheduling Halloween had fallen out of favor, and trick-or-treaters ventured out on a Tuesday night.

That said, Halloween 1969 was not without note. That night, I found myself crouching beside the bushes bordering our neighbor’s yard. My father and our neighbor, Larry, were alongside me.

Larry had caught wind of a plot. A few neighborhood boys planned to soap the windows of his daughter’s car. She’d just received her driver’s license and had bought a used car to drive to school and work. The high school boys were planning to write on the car’s windows with bars of soap.

Once trick-or-treating was done for the night, a small crew of teen boys crept up the street. We jumped out of the bushes as they walked down their target’s driveway. As a runty fifth-grader, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to do. Luckily, the teens dropped their bars of soap and ran into the dark.

My father asked, “Do you know those kids?” I knew the names of every kid, parent, dog, cat, and pet turtle in the neighborhood. I was only ten, but I knew better than to rat out the other kids in the neighborhood. I replied, “Nope, it’s way too dark to tell, Dad.”

Several years later, I learned that my neighbor’s daughter, Lorraine, who had been my babysitter and my friend, was gay. In 1969, at 10, this was a foreign concept to me, but the older kids knew enough. The hateful words those young guys intended to write onto Lorraine’s car windows were what concerned my father most.

While my father was a traditionalist, he was also open to learning and evolving. In 1968, he was trying to protect a holiday tradition. In 1969, he was following his personal tradition of being a protector of people. All people.