Trick or treat, smell my feet

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This column was first published on Oct. 31, 2017. I haven’t managed to improve on it in the years since — yet, anyway — so I present it once more for your perusal. I hope everyone had a wonderful, spooky Halloween and got enough candy to last a long time, even after the parent tax.
It’s Halloween!
Time for costumes, candy, scary stories, candy, all-night horror-movie marathons, candy, school parties, candy, grown-up parties, candy, pumpkins, and let’s not forget the candy!
Well, at least that’s the way it used to be. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, just down the road in Charleston. Like many people
in my generation, especially in small towns, Halloween was a mostly unsupervised event with the coordination of a military exercise.
You teamed up with your buddies, charted out the best routes based on intel from previous outings and early reconnaissance, set rendezvous times and planned for contingencies, including, in some cases, setting up additional costumes for the occasional second round.
After the plans were laid out, training commenced. Quick changes, scare tactics, target practice ... well, maybe not so much the last one, at least in my case.
I like eggs too much to waste them, and I’ve never quite gotten the hang of throwing a properly unraveled roll of toilet paper.
Younger readers may wonder what I’m talking about.
You see, that thing you say to get free candy used to carry consequences for the people handing out treats. If they stiffed you or shorted you on the “treat” side, you were obligated to “trick” them in return.
This could take many forms, from egging their house or festooning a tree in their yard with enough toilet paper to last a month to a simple ding-dong-dash.
You read that right. Trick-or-treat is basically a pint-sized protection racket. When organized crime does it, it’s illegal. When kids do it, it’s holiday fun.
It even follows some of the same rules. In some places, smaller kids must pay respect to the older kids, handing over a portion of their take in order to keep most of what they collected.
Things are different nowadays. The costumes are still there, the candy is — mostly — still there, but our childhood scheming has mostly gone the way of the dodo.

Now it’s all “trunk-or-treat” where the candy-rich drive their cars to a big parking lot and distribute their wealth to the candy-poor, who still dress up in their holiday finery to receive their handout.
They still say the words, but the implied threat is no longer there. It’s just something you say.
I blame the parents. They remember what it was like in the old days and maybe some of them are still smarting over incidents from their own past.
But “this is safer” you say. It is. There’s no arguing against that. All the weirdos that have popped up in the past few decades kind of saw to that. Then again, are there really that more now than 30 years ago?
I don’t really know, but I do know that I wouldn’t dare let my two stepdaughters do most of the things I did as a kid. And I was pretty harmless, aside from having BB-gun wars in the woods with my friends.
I think most generations feel the same way about the ones that follow them. My grandfather used to tell me stories from his childhood that left me shaking my head, specifically about going to the movies and riding trains.
My grandfather grew up in Poplar Bluff in the 1930s. His father — my great-grandfather — worked for the Southern Pacific railroad, so Grandpa got to ride the rails for free.
If he managed somehow to get a bit of money, and sometimes even if he didn’t, he would hop a train to St. Louis for the day. At 12 years old. By himself.
As for the movies, well, as the story goes, the theater is Poplar Bluff often had special screenings, where an adult and a child could get in for a reduced price.
My granddad and his friends would set up camp outside the theaters and wait for older guys without dates to show up and go in with them to take advantage of the deal.
Even by 1980 standards, both of those just sound like they should have ended badly.
Luckily they didn’t, or I wouldn’t be here.
On second thought, maybe this trunk-or-treat thing isn’t such a bad idea after all.
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Robert Cox is publisher of the Perry County Republic-Monitor. His email is RMpublisher63@gmail.com.