Professors’ spooky pasts
Charlie Brown waited with his friends for the arrival of The Great Pumpkin. And Jerry Seinfeld admits he wore a cheap Superman mask that would break.
When Seinfeld went out to trick-or-treat, his red cape and blue suit vanished because his mother made him wear his winter coat.
Some Utah State University professors didn’t wait for The Great Pumpkin and didn’t worry about the elastic on their superman mask snapping but they have their own memories.
Dr. Mom’s laboratory
Jan Roush, associate professor for the English department, said Halloween was always an experience with her creative-minded mother.
She said her mother claims she was “forced to create on the go” due to the lack of time the children gave her.
“She was extremely creative when making the most out of any materials she could find around the house,” she said.
Roush admitted her true desire growing up was to be something pretty like a princess or a butterfly.
After years of complaining, she finally got to be a butterfly, but that was only once.
“Instead I ended up in such costumes, today are not politically correct, like Aunt Jemima,” she said. “Political correctness was not as prevalent as it is today, we couldn’t get away with that in this day and age.”
With stuffed pillows in her shirt and a make-up job, her mother’s creation was complete.
Even politically correct costumes came to life by her mother.
“I was so embarrassed, my mother at her most creative – I went as an upside-down man,” Roush said.
With pants on her arms and shoes on her hands Roush said she was at the Halloween party all night with her arms raised in the air.
“My legs [were] into the sleeves of a jacket and I’ve got this stuffed head dangling between my legs as I’m walking around, uncomfortably, as an upside-down person,” Roush said.
When Roush was swabbed in cotton, she used a pipe and top hat to become Frosty the Snowman. But being wrapped up in old newspaper, she transformed into the paper itself.
“I never got to be who I truly wanted to be,” Roush said. “But I was always there, and my mother always came through with the costume.
“I often won a prize,” she said. “I was never [awarded] ‘Most Beautiful’ it was ‘More Often or Not’ or ‘Most Original.'”
Shakin’ in them cowboy boots
Kelly Cargile Cook, assistant professor in English, said her creative costumes were remembered in college.
She said growing up in a “spread-out community” in Texas it was hard to trick-or-treat.
She said the community met in the old Community Center and played bobbing-for-apples and “all sorts of scary games.”
After the activities in the center, hay rides with a tractor and a trailer were offered, to give children rides down the cemetery road.
“Once the trailer arrived half a mile away from the cemetery, scary things started happening,” Cargile Cook said.
The children saw scary images like the Headless Horseman. Years later she discovered it was the older generations who played tricks on them.
But some things still remain a mystery to her.
“We had a haunted farm when I grew up,” she said. “It really was. My husband says no, but I say yes.”
A man named Harvey was killed in a cotton gin, she said. Years later, the gin was torn down and her grandfather purchased the wood to build a barn between her home and her grandparent’s home, which was about half-mile distance.
“From where we were, the barn light was at the top of the hill,” Cargile Cook said. “And if you went out in the backyard, you could look up and see Harvey dancing underneath the light. And when you’d say the Lord’s Prayer – Harvey would kneel down.”
In the barn, hay hooks moved a lot by themselves, she said.
“If you looked up in the right place at the roof of the barn – there was this illuminated smile at the top of [the inside of] the barn,” she said.
Cargile Cook said on Halloween they would look for courage to go inside of the barn with Harvey inside.
“Halloween was about how brave we were,” she said.
Crappy Halloween
Ross Peterson, director of Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, said Halloween in 1952 got messy with a brother’s help.
“[We] encouraged our milk cows to, in the immortal words of Tony Sang, ‘defecate and urinate,’ while we milked them,” he said. “[Then] we carefully scooped the deposed material into paper grocery bags.”
Once they received enough material needed, they visited those who did not pay their bills on his paper route and placed the bag, with the fresh gift inside, on the porch and lit them on fire.
“We then rang the doorbell, pounded on the door and raced away to a safe haven,” Peterson said.
When the “delinquent subscribers” saw the fire they stomped on the bag to put the fire out, they also stomped “in very fresh cow manure,” he said.
“Shoes were ruined, one pajama bottom caught on fire,” Peterson said. “[Even] numerous doors, windows, and concrete were stained by the splattered contents of our grocery sacks.”
When their father overheard them “bragging” about their adventure, he said they had to go clean the windows, porches, doors and even apologize.
“My dad later admitted to knocking outhouses over onto door(s) while occupied on Halloween,” Peterson said.
Utah’s children have a sweet tooth
Denise Conover, lecturer in history, said in rural south Georgia they did things different than Utah.
She was a member of the Methodist church and their mission was to collect money – not candy – for the United Nations relief fund for children, she said.
When she moved from Georgia she noticed Halloween had more activities.
“Connecticut, like other places in the East, has trees – lots of trees – which shed tons of leaves each fall,” she said. “A favorite ‘treat’ – or is it ‘trick’? – teenagers on Halloween night set fire to the pile of leaves neatly raked along the street side.”
Later on, they even set fire to a woodpile near her house.
“Imagine our surprise as we returned from a church Halloween party to find a fire truck parked at our house and firemen dosing out the flames,” Conover said.
When she moved to Utah is when she noticed trick-or-treating had more than toddlers. She said even teenagers trick-or-treat in Utah.
“Of all the places where I’ve experienced Halloween (which includes Washington, Indiana, California), I must say that Utah is the best place for a kid to be for Halloween,” she said.
-srkrebs@cc.usu.edu