Halloween memories

When you're a kid, Halloween is the second biggest day of the year -- right behind Christmas in the "Boy, I can't wait -- how many days until it gets here?" department. A few days before Halloween, saliva would involuntarily begin leaking out of your mouth due to the anticipation of all that sweet stuff you had coming.

As an somewhat overweight child who liked to eat, Halloween was a big day for me. I lived in a fairly prosperous suburb of Houston, Texas, and back in those innocent days of the 1960s, Halloween had not yet gained the violent, ugly and overall negative connotations it has today. Parents accompanied toddlers trick-or-treating, but they thought nothing of sending their costumed elementary school children out into the neighborhood alone or with a group of friends, armed with nothing but an empty bag and a flashlight (which rarely if ever got used).

My memory is somewhat deficient, but I don't recall ever being a big fan of costumes all that much at Halloween. Those masks you bought at the store (with the laughingly thin rubber bands attached with staples) always were too small for my face, and were hot and uncomfortable to boot. I was usually too big for the manufactured costumes (Batman, Robin, the "fun" Joker), and although I probably took an old sheet and cut out eye holes and a mouth once to become a ghost, that was so cliche even back then to designate the wearer as an unimaginative loser.

So, I believe my usual costume disguise was "chubby pre-teen boy looking for candy." Since none of my school friends lived within walking distance, I usually teamed up with my younger brother. Lazy as we might have been on boring summer days, or when there was yardwork to be done, on Halloween night we were quick-moving, efficient machines of accumulation. While other kids might stop and talk with friends, admiring costumes or showing off props, we were focused like laser beams on the goal of visiting as many houses as we could and filling our sturdy bags as full of sweet swag as possible.

We would quickly scour the four streets in our immediate neighborhood, going methodically down one side of a street, then up the other side, then changing streets and repeating the process. We were always cheerful, polite and said "Thank you," as our parents instructed us to do, but we didn't hang around long.

Once we finished with our neighborhood, my enabler parents would drive us to a larger, somewhat richer neighborhood down the road where they would drop us off for a few hours. We had friends in this neighborhood, who we enjoyed seeing and chatting with, but again, our goal was conquest.

When we'd finally get home late that night -- some of the last kids out on the streets -- we'd come in the living room and dump out our bulging bags of hard-won treasure. The hundreds of pieces of candy that would spill out would cover half the floor. Our parents, on cue, after expressing amazement about how much junk we'd gotten, would warn us not to eat too much at once or we'd get sick. But we always ate a lot at once, and we never got sick, although by about the end of the first week of November we were secretly disgusted with candy, although we'd rarely admit it in case our parents would suggest we throw away the remains.

We'd always begin eating the best candy first, of course -- chocolate bars, Sweet Tarts, caramels, candy corn. After awhile the good stuff would disappear, and all we would have left is the second-rate remains -- rock-hard taffy drops, stale popcorn balls, mints, red licorice. But we'd eventually eat all that as well, unless it was truly nasty. If we couldn't feed it to the dog, only then would we throw it away.

Back in those innocent times, everyone went door-to-door trick-or-treating, and there were no "Fun Nights" or "Fall Festivals" sponsored by churches and other groups like there are today. But going door-to-door back then was truly safe. And every now and then, you'd find a house where the people really got into Halloween. They would have fake spider webs everywhere, with maybe some bloody monster dummies laid out by the front door with a record player blaring "Monster Mash" over and over. A great final touch would be the big black pot filled with water and dry ice to produce clouds of smoke over everything.

I remember at least a few houses in my neighborhood where the family temporarily cleared everything out of the garage, put up some dark curtains and black lights and made a "haunted house" they'd invite trick-or-treaters to come in and tour. In one area there was always a sheet with a hole cut in it, and when you put your hand through you'd be encouraged to dip it into a bowl of what you were told were human brains or intestines, but it always ended up feeling just like cooked spaghetti.

I also remember that Halloween night was a good time to determine which people on each block liked kids, and which did not. The kid-lovers had lights turned on and always had someone stationed by the door, ready to answer and dispense candy from big bowls. The non-kid lovers, by contrast, either had every light turned off (both inside and outside), or they had only a few dim interior lights left on. If you were brave or foolish enough to go up to the door of one of those houses and ring the bell, you'd wait a long time until someone finally opened the door, verrry slowly, and then asked, "Yes?," in a prickly tone as if you were selling life insurance or magazine subscriptions, or as if you had just relieved yourself on their orchids in the front flower beds. They never had candy.

This is hard to believe nowadays, but some people back in the 1960s actually took the time and trouble to make treats to give out on Halloween. They'd put together 700 popcorn balls (each wrapped in Saran Wrap and hand-tied with a little twistie), or make candy apples or little bags of homemade cookies. This wonderful tradition eventually stopped, however, when parents heard reports of sickos putting razor blades in apples and dousing baked goods with poison. Local hospitals would cheerfully offer to X-ray your candy for metal objects hidden within, but people just stopped making and accepting homemade goods.

This is the first Halloween where neither one of our girls is going trick-or-treating. They are both old enough now that they have switched roles and are working at our church's Fall Festival tonight. It's a fun night with big inflatable slides and jumping rooms, horse-drawn carriage rides and lots of games for smaller kids like ring toss and a cake walk. There's still lots and lots of candy given out, and I enjoy it, but somehow it just doesn't compare to those Halloweens of days gone by.

Have a great time tonight with your kids, and save the black licorice jellybeans for me.

My Vinyl Gallery

There is a space between two windows in the Muley back room -- which serves as the office, library and playroom of the Muley house -- that, for the lack of anything more striking, I have made into a rotating exhibit space that might be called "Muley's LP Gallery." I still own hundreds of vinyl LPs from those ancient days before CDs, and so one day I bought a dozen LP frames from a crafts store, arranged them in three rows on the wall, and, "voila!," a gallery was born.

Instead of leaving the same record covers up forever, I decided to rotate them out every now and then for variety's sake. Sometimes they are chosen to match a theme ("Country music," "Standup comedy," "Female balladeers"), and sometimes they are totally random. Here is the gallery that appeared in December 2007 featuring Christmas albums.



Sometime in January, tiring of the cold and bleak winter weather, I took down the Christmas albums and replaced them with ones depicting the warm wahines of sunny Hawaii.



I suspect I am just about the only one who ever notices what records I put up on the wall. My kids think I'm a bit weird and ancient, to begin with, for even owning something as old-fashioned and outdated as LPs. I'm guessing that, to them, I could cut the fronts off of old boxes of cereal and slap them up on the wall and I wouldn't be doing anything any goofier or less visually arresting.

What about other oldtimers such as me? Well, we've had guests in the house for parties, and not once have I ever had anyone comment on the gallery, good or bad. Maybe they're too busy playing the vintage 1980s Nintendo games we have set up in the room (remember "Duck Hunt"?)

To be truthful, I don't really care all that much if no one else notices the LPs. It's sort of like my private Etch-A-Sketch on the wall. I have fun thinking about what theme I'll feature next. After Hawaii, I might do all Beatles albums, or maybe a set of great ol' cheesy 1950s lounge records I bought cheap at the library used book sale. Maybe I'll report back from time to time on what's featured in "the gallery."

What Lies Beneath

Now that the Christmas season is behind us, my family is returning to our continuing project of renovating the Muley home. Last night, Mrs. Muley began removing the old wallpaper in our master bathroom. She was able to peel off our most recent wallpaper by hand, exposing the white backing paper underneath. To get this off, she had to use a chemical that softens the backing and allows it to be peeled off as well.

We got a kick out of what emerged once Mrs. Muley was able to strip off the first chunks of backing:


Floral fantasia! This, we quickly figured out, is the room's original wallpaper, dating from the house's construction during the groovy vibe of the late 1970s. (I remember having a very similar wallpaper pattern greet me every morning in the breakfast room of my house as I was growing up during elementary and junior high). I have no doubt that this pattern was considered tres chic back when it was first attached. Here's a closer look:



Intrigued by her archaeological discovery, Mrs. Muley went to our children's bathroom and peeled off a bit of the current wallpaper there. We we thinking there could be another remnant of the groovy 70s underneath -- maybe flocked or mirrored wallpaper, or wallpaper portraying Smurfs -- but all Mrs. Muley liberated was sheetrock.

Finding that old 70s wallpaper hiding undercover in our bathroom makes a lot of things clearer to me now, such as why whenever I take a shower I keep looking for a nonexistent soap-on-a-rope to be hanging from the shower head, and why I sometimes get this unreasonable fear that Alice the maid from the Brady Bunch is going to walk in on me by accident.

Thingmaker: Make Toys or Grilled Cheese Sandwiches!

This is the third in a series of trips down memory lane featuring Muley's favorite childhood Christmas toys.

This toy was a big favorite with me and my brothers. The foundation of the toy was Thingmaker, basically a heated metal plate that would take metal molds filled with liquid plastic and cook the plastic until the resulting shapes became hard and rubbery. But the product is commonly referred to as "Creepy Crawlers," which was the name given to the products of one of the most popular series of themed molds you could buy to work with Thingmaker.



If you go into a toy store nowadays, I believe they sell something under the Creepy Crawlers name. The idea is the same, but from what I have seen it is a pale imitation of the original Thingmaker system. The new one looks like a modified Easy Bake oven, with plastic parts and using the equivalent of a light bulb to bake the plastic. The original Thingmaker, by contrast, was like a little metal foundry in your home. The molds were made of thick metal, and the Thingmaker was able to heat that metal up so hot that you would burn the dickens out of your tiny, tender hands if you didn't remove the molds just right.

I would guess that Creepy Crawlers were probably the most popular things you could make with Thingmaker, but as you can see from the clipped advertisement here, you could also make other stuff like scary makeup items. I also remember that at our house we had molds that allowed us to create toy soldiers. One mold would make the front part of the soldier's body, a second mold would make the back half, and I guess you were supposed to fit the two halves together while the thing was still warm and sticky so that they'd dry into one figure. A third mold let you make rifles and grenades and such. The idea was that you could eventually create enough of the little guys to form your own army. But, unlike G.I. Joes, Thingmaker soldiers were as rubbery as the fake snakes and vampire teeth it also cooked up. It's as though some alien from space swooped down and removed all of the bones from a U.S. Army battalion.

Besides providing me hours of enjoyment being my own Dr. Frankenstein, I loved the sheer utilitarianism of the names Mattel gave to this toy and its components. The thing you made stuff in was called...the thing maker. The liquid goop you poured into the molds was called...goop.

When it comes to summing up Thingmaker, I believe radarmagazine does it best: "Nothing says safety like an open hot plate. And nothing says fun like using that open hot plate to create molten, rubbery insects you can throw at your sister while narrowly avoiding setting the house ablaze."

Major Matt Mason: Muy Molded Machismo!

In Part Two of what I guess is now a series of looks back at my favorite toys from childhood 1960s Christmases, I want to introduce you to Major Matt Mason (surprisingly, not a product of the 3M Corporation).



I think it was a bit unusual, even back in the groovy Sixties, to have television ad copy read in rhyme. I believe this poem, titled "The Misbegotten Moon of Major Matt Mason," was actually one of the lesser-known works of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Penn Warren, based on a short story by Chekhov.

My little brother and I spent many hours of pleasure taking Major Matt and Sergeant Storm (as an enlisted man, he didn't rate a first name) on adventures across the floor in our dad's study. We would have been green with envy, though, if we'd seen the swanky fantasy play area the boys in the TV commercial have their space station set up in. Not many parents would let their children bring in beach sand and move boulders into the living room, even if they did look like those cardboard imitation boulders used on the original Star Trek episodes.

I don't remember the Captain Laser character at all. Being a battery operated giant, he probably had a giant price tag, which might explain why my parents never saw fit to bring him home to join our crew. Besides, being raised on Mars and all, could you really trust him? Would Major Matt wake up one day in the space station to find one of his rubberized legs chewed off up to his hips, with Captain Laser just licking his lips, his red eyes pulsing rapidly?

It Wasn't Called "Vrroom!" for Nothing

If you were a red-blooded American boy in the 1960s, not old enough to drive and forced to settle for riding a bicycle or tricycle, this was something you wanted from Santa. I finally got one as a Christmas gift, and I can still remember our neighborhood in the days following, with me and other boys riding their bikes down the street, sounding like an invading army of locusts ready for a motocross race.



You just knew this was the coolest because you had your own special key to start the engine. It weren't no toy, you understand.

I love the commercial! Am I wrong, or can no kid have that many huge freckles on his nose? Do you think they painted them on with some sort of dye? And why do all little boys in 1960s commercials look as though their fathers cut their hair with a pair of pruning shears while drunk? Probably because, in many cases, they did.