SNGF: Most Memorable Halloween

Tonight's Saturday night genealogy fun question is to tell about a memorable Halloween. I'm going to attempt to do that and am hoping that I'm not mixing more than one year in my memory, but I think I am not. My most memorable Halloween would have been the year that all of us neighborhood kids actually managed to con enough parents into taking us out trick or treating that we spent most of the night engaged in Halloween activities. We started out in our own neighborhood. We went house to house up and down the streets of the Love Subdivision. Love Subdivision was so-named because it was built on the site of the former Love's Cow Pasture. The little white house at the corner of Boulevard Drive and Hatley Road had been the home of the Loves, according to my Mom. Our home was built in 1959. I'm sure a few of the houses in the subdivision were a little older than ours, but I really don't know when the subdivision began. I guess I've just come up with a question to research that will add a little to the background of one event in our family's lives.

After we went there, we talked my Mom into taking us to Easthaven subdivision. A lot of our school friends lived in Easthaven. My Mom would only take us to the "safe" neighborhoods, and this was one that she deemed to be so. After we got back, we talked another Mom into taking us to the Meadowbrook subdivision. We had a lot of friends who lived in that subdivision as well.

Our next stop was the East Amory Community Center. This particular year is the only year that I really remember going to the "carnival" going on there. There was a cake walk. I won a caramel cake. We bobbed for apples. I believe they had a haunted house in one of the rooms there. I think you could "fish" for candy and other things like that. We didn't stay a really long time there. However, there was one house that David and Delores wanted to go to. It was a house that I'd never trick-or-treated at before so I really didn't know what to expect when we knocked. Mrs. Hodo opened the door. She lived across from St. Andrews Methodist Church on Town and Country Lane. She invited us into her home which was dark and eery. I remember that she had us hold our hands in a dish. The texture of the item in the dish was "gross" to a youngster in the late 1960s. She told us it was eyeballs. (They were really peeled grapes.) I began to wonder what was in store for me. I was scared. She continued to take us through her incredibly spooky home which even had a casket with a skeleton. I wanted nothing more than to get out of there and fast. Delores, however, kept insisting that we stick with it because the reward at the end was worth it. I had my doubts that anything could be worth the fright we were getting, but I was too scared to leave the others in my group so I stuck with it. At the end, Mrs. Hodo took us into her kitchen where she had candy apples or caramel apples as our "treat." To be honest, I think I still wasn't sure that the fright I'd had was worth it when I would have just as soon gone to another house or two on that street and received candy instead.
However, I will admit that the apple was good.

That was my most memorable Halloween as a child.