By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Halloween evokes many memories from my Norman Rockwell boyhood in Eastern Pennsylvania. I remember the costumes my mother would make by hand, attending the King Frost Parade in nearby Hamburg, and which neighbors gave out full size candy bars and which gave out apples because that was the healthier choice.
In that bygone time, we somehow managed to finish elementary school without a graduation ceremony or an awards night. But in our neighborhood, once you stopped riding the elementary school bus, it was time to hang up the Halloween masks and begin the seasonal work of vandalizing the cars and homes of our neighbors—especially those who handed out apples. We called it “raiding,” which was not the official name of the charges we would have faced if we were ever caught by the seasoned police officers who patrolled our tree-lined streets on this one night of the year.
Raiding season usually started at the beginning of October when we would pool what little money we had left after buying football cards and trek to the local grocery store to buy two items—rolls of toilet paper and bars of soap. (Irish Spring was the cheapest and thus our soap of choice.) Any cashier who paid the least bit of attention would have known exactly why young teenagers were purchasing these items. They could have refused us service and believed that they had done their good deed for the year by saving us from the seductions of a life of crime.
After we purchased our weapons of choice, we had to find a place to hide them that was beyond our parents’ purview until that fateful night when we unwrapped the soap and toilet paper and tucked them into our dark hoodies. It was like Christmas in October, only we had to hide the wrapping paper. My house had a dank crawl space with a small door at knee level that was hidden by plant growth and opened onto the backyard. It was too small of a space for adults to enter, so we stored the neighborhood arsenal in there for a few weeks.
Since our funds were limited, we also set out after school or on weekends to find local oak trees and gather the abundant acorns into brown paper bags or sacks. We tried to store these in spaces where the squirrels could not find and bury our hard-earned plunder. Or, on the rare occasions when we could access a farmer’s field, we stole ears of feed corn off the stalks and loaded them up in bookbags or pillowcases.
Then we took them to a small wood near our home where we sat around on logs and pushed the hard corn off the cobs and into brown paper lunch bags. Here, we fantasized about whose house we would pepper with that corn, or the inviting metal roof on the front slope of the Kerschner’s house on Opal Avenue––unless their son Roy was sitting there shucking the corn with us. Eventually, we stopped inviting Roy because his friendship was less compelling than the sound of hard corn on metal.
It was in the farm fields where the excitement and danger of the endeavor would slowly build toward Halloween night. My friend Rob Epler, who lived in a different neighborhood and consequently raided on his home streets, remembers running into a barbed wire fence at the edge of a farmer’s property behind the junior high school one night. He shredded a much-loved Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt in an effort to escape the angry farmer. I also learned, at a similar age, that a combine machine is faster than it looks and that trying to outrun a farmer’s BB gun is less perilous than hiding in front of the oncoming blades of a combine.
Of course, the fabled BB gun was based upon the intel provided by a 14-year-old Kevin Sherker who would have no possible way of knowing if the farmer had a relatively harmless pellet gun as opposed to a rifle loaded with buckshot to ward off any pesky deer. Or, even more likely, no gun at all since deer would have been long gone by the time the roar of the engine descended upon that tip end of the farmer’s north field. I deeply trusted Kevin that day when the green combine snuck up on us as it rose over a crest in the field and we sprinted for the tree line hoping that this ended better for us than it did for Peter Rabbit’s father.
Each fall, after hours and days of pulling corn from unrelenting cobs, we would inevitably arrive at dinner tables where our mothers would notice that our thumbs were bleeding and our hands were cracked. We shrugged and blamed the colder air of the season. We were pressed no further.
In stockpiling our weaponry, we had faced stern cashiers and the twisting blades of farm machinery. Our hands bled for this Halloween ritual. We somberly told ourselves that we were ready, though we knew there could be casualties and possible arrests. We thought we were warrior poets as we took to the streets of Pennside with unwrapped bars of Irish Spring and unused rolls of the cheapest single-play toilet paper. We were morons.
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FXBG Advance columnist Drew Gallagher’s book Funny for Nothing was released on July 28 by Long River Press. It’s available for sale in the Fredericksburg area at Novel Bookstore (212 William Street), Liberty Town Arts (916 Liberty Street), The Card Cellar (915 Caroline Street), Wren & Sparrow (807 Caroline Street), and Laudenbach Brewing in Stafford (45 Centreport Parkway, Unit 101). You can also buy it on Amazon.
