Halloween

  The other day we got this very official looking, serious sounding letter signed by the police chief, the mayor and the Superintendent of Schools in  telling us exactly when, how and under what circumstances Halloween would be celebrated this year in our tony top-ranked suburb. A little spooky I thought to myself, having grown up in a Cleveland suburb not far away, but a long time ago. How times have changed, I thought to myself, as I tucked the letter away in a file, just in case. You never know.


  That night my mind drifted back to those wondrous late depression/early war years when we were growing up on Euclid Heights Blvd. in Cleveland Heights. It seemed like everybody, lived on that apartment laden stretch of two blocks from Coventry to Hampshire. There were lots of us, and, for the most part, we all hung together and had glorious times. The ominous specter of war, the desperation of depression, hidden somewhere else for the moment. One of the highlights of the year was planning for Halloween naughtiness.  We called it Halloweening. (No guidance from the police chief in those days.)

We managed to get a pretty good group together for our unauthorized night on the town. Not much for costumes in those days, but we did manage to fill our ample pockets with pebbles we had scooped up from the driveways, and a plentiful supply of wax candles. And we were off. Looking back, this was a potent gang of pre-teens. Mostly now retired, a few no longer with us. A couple of Washington lawyers, a prominent research neurologist, a physicist, and of course the innocent looking little guy who became a daily journalist.

  We would head first for Mrs. Breslin’s.  She had the misfortune of living on the first floor of one of buildings near Lancashire, where we often gathered often and were from time to time unruly. She regularly and angrily complained about the noise and threatened us with reprisals.  She had earned her stripes as an obvious holiday target. A few noisy pebbles smacked her windows. We shouted some naughty words.  And there she was at the window, threatening to call the police.

  We exited rapidly to the next block, innocently trick or treating. Scribbling bad words on some windows, kicking over a few garbage cans, we headed up the hill to the “haunted house” the enormous and very scary Briggs estate, now the Mornington Lane condos.  We left our mark there, too. A couple of broken locks, some graffiti.  Maybe a cracked window.  It was frightening and fun.

  Rest assured the next day there were no arrests, no screaming headlines in the PD, or The Press, or The News, and we were back in school with smirks on our faces, none the worse for wear. But I could not resist fast forwarding in my fantasy to the reaction that this kind of this commotion might have been in circa 2005. How might the PD might react to “suburban vandalism” today?

  On local television: Channel 3 is the first “live” to Mrs. Breslin’s door. ”Bad kids, dangerous!” she would say, dressed in a house coat.  Channel 19 is investigating, “How vandals slipped away from police!” Channel 8 calls in a child psychiatrist...and interviews a neighbor who calls the young vandals, “usually pretty good kids..it’s been a good neighborhood.”  CNN anchor Brown looked at what he called “the growing dangers of holidays like Halloween.  How did did it get that way? Terror in our own back yard!” he concludes.

It is obvious that we are stretching a bit to make a point. Sadly times have changed as has the media. Indeed, “Terror in our own back yards” has a gruesome touch of reality to it.  And perhaps the stern letter from the city fathers is logical, even necessary in these troubled times.
But, as I reflect over a lifetime of suburban living in Greater Cleveland, I long for the days when it wasn’t.