Crucial Skills Newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 41
Kerrying On: Memoirs of a Professional Trick-or-Treater

October 28, 2004

by Kerry Patterson

With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I'd draw this month's material from my childhood trick-or-treating experiences. I'll start with a rather bold allegation. I just may have been the best candy grabber in the history of Halloween. "Pshaw!" you say. Well, here's the evidence.

As I walked home with my best friend one crisp October afternoon in 1956, he asked me a startling question: "You want to go trick-or-treating with me?" What a hayseed! Didn't he know anything about the finer art of extracting candy from strangers? First of all, going door to door with friends is a huge mistake. When you travel with friends, you slow down as you talk.

Trick-or-treat rule number one: During the precious few hours of the one night of the year when candy is free for the asking, don't slow down for anything. Every moment lost could cost you a candy bar—which, by the way, just happens to be your only reason for going out in the first place. (It's all about the chocolate.) One Halloween I sprinted by a bank robbery in progress and didn't break stride. You think I'm going to go trick-or-treating with a friend?

Here's another time-related hint. Today's kids tote plastic pumpkins and other such store-bought trinkets for holding their goodies. I carried, and I'm not making this up, a ratty looking burlap bag that originally contained a hundred pounds of potatoes. I chose this cast-off item because I didn't have time to be swapping out sissy bags in the middle of the evening. This choice, quite naturally, caused problems. By the end of the night, a gunnysack jammed with candy weighed just bout as much as I did. Worse still, a lot of people were offended by it. "Look at that thing! It's positively decadent!" they'd say as I held out a bag big enough to schlep a yak. I'd merely smile and think about all the chocolate I'd be bringing home.

Rule number two: Run from door to door. When you only have a five-hour window to get free candy, you run. You don't walk, you don't jog, and you don't even trot. You run. Of course, to be perfectly honest, not everybody took advantage of the full five-hour running period, but I did. I was always the first and last kid on the street. Every year my Halloween started with: "It's not time yet you moron! I'm still doing the lunch dishes!" and ended with: "You woke me out of a dead sleep!"

Rule number three: Put the trick back in trick-or-treat. The candy companies of the fifties didn't produce the stupid little miniature bars they now make, so when someone gave you a candy bar back in my day (and I firmly believe this qualified them for sainthood), you got a genuine five- or ten-cent candy bar. This didn't happen very often, but when it did, you scored big.

So, here was the trick I put in trick-or treat. I'd carry three masks. I didn't normally don a mask because it would limit my vision and slow me down. But if someone gave me, say, a Hershey bar (most folks gave pathetic little penny suckers) I'd hit a couple of neighbors' doors, put on a mask, and return to the place that was giving out the mother load. I would repeat this stunt with a different mask until they caught on to me. "Say, haven't you been here before?" I once scored ten Almond Joy bars from the same house.

Rule number four: Beware of baked goods. I was born in the middle of the June Cleaver era of good housekeeping, so when I was young and roaming the October streets, a handful of homemakers actually made their own treats—cupcakes frosted with an inch of gooey chocolate icing. They'd beam with pride when they opened their front door. "Here you go sonny," they'd say as they held out a tray full of their confectionary concoction while eyeing my bag suspiciously. Now what was I supposed to do with a cupcake? Consuming it was out of the question. That violated the fifth rule of trick-or-treating: Never eat on the job.

One year I made the grievous error of letting a gray-haired grandmother drop a cupcake smack-dab into the center of my bag. I swear it had its own gravitational field—sucking every decent piece of candy into its icing atmosphere until, by the end of the evening, it had grown to the size of a medicine ball. I learned to take cupcakes gingerly in my hand and then use them to mulch the neighbors' flower beds.

Now for the lesson. On a hot summer day in 1959, Mark Erickson, a junior-high-school buddy of mine, invited me to take a swim in his pool. After floating for about an hour under a sweltering August sun, he took me into his kitchen where he opened my eyes to a world I had never seen.

"Do you want a frozen candy bar?" he asked.

Was this supposed to be a trick question? I hadn't seen a candy bar since I had eaten the last U-No bar from my Halloween stash—sometime around 11 A.M on the first of November. Mark then went to the freezer and pulled out two frozen Milky Way bars.

"I got these last Halloween," he casually explained. A quick glance into his Amana revealed a couple dozen frozen gems, all left over from October 31st.

If a space alien had popped out of Mark's chest cavity I wouldn't have been more surprised. He still had candy more than nine months after Halloween. Sure he had a freezer that helped keep the candy from spoiling, but I ate chocolate so fast that even if we had owned a freezer my goodies wouldn't have had time to drop below 65 degrees.

I was thirteen years old and I can still remember thinking to myself, "I didn't know that people like him existed." It was my first lesson in diversity. He was the same gender and race and all, but the guy could keep chocolate around for nearly a year. Now that was a difference that caught my attention.

So there you have it. The chief lesson of the diversity movement struck me like a bolt of lightening at age thirteen. Rubbing elbows with people of differing backgrounds and varying interests exposes you to a whole host of eye-popping views of the world, and that alone is worth its weight in Snickers bars.