I went trick-or-treating a little early this year.
I’m about midway through my stint as guest speaker at the Stamford Women’s Club’s October luncheon when I decide to stray from my prepared remarks and improvise. Or rather, I ask them to improvise. I hope to demonstrate how to build a column from scratch.
“Who can share memories about what they dressed up as on Halloween, or about any Halloween traditions from childhood?” I ask.
This could be a treat. Or a trick I’m just pulling on myself if no one answers the bell.
Many of the 118-year-old club’s members are seniors. They might as well change into Halloween costumes to become kids again. I swear I hear music from “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” as our soundtrack.
Not a single recollection comes with a store-bought costume (I hear a chorus of murmurings that “we couldn’t afford them”). Maybe that’s why the memories are so vivid.
Barbara Diliberto is the first to volunteer an answer. She grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. Then, as now, they do things a little differently in Brooklyn. Barbara recalls knocking on doors in typical Oct. 31 costumes on a different autumn day (Thanksgiving) with a different question.
“What do you have for Thanksgiving?”
“And then they would give you something,” she continues.
I check my phone to make sure this isn’t April Fool’s Day.
“Anyone else here from Brooklyn?” I ask. “Was that a thing?”
Nope. Just Barbara.
Others share memories that don’t follow the Halloween script either. Jane Golden grew up in the Belltown section of Stamford, where her father required visiting spirits and monsters to perform (“he made them sing a song or play the piano”) before handing over the candy. He also offered fresh cider to all.
“I don’t know if it was hard cider or not,” she says.
Polly O’Brien Morrow gazes back at a year her mother made costumes.
“I was a pilgrim and my brother was a zebra,” Polly says. “I could never see the connection.”
I try to crack the decades-old mystery: “You were both in black-and-white.”
Vintage memories, of course, tend to reside in monochrome. Polly tosses a familiar Halloween hue onto the palette when she reminds her fellow audience members of collecting donations to UNICEF in orange cardboard boxes. Maybe it dropped a coin in Polly’s mind at the time, for she has become synonymous with charitable work.
Polly also recalls a year she dressed up the day after Halloween. She attended Catholic school at Our Lady Star of the Sea in Stamford, where students were asked to dress as patron saints on Nov. 1, which is All Saints’ Day. As her birth name is Paula, her parents made her dress as St. Paul.
“I was mortified.”
Since costumes were made from available supplies, some vestments have since become taboo. This may be the first time I’ve heard the word “hobo” since my own Halloween days (there were commercial versions then as well, complete with plastic masks). Dot Green summons a similarly anachronistic synonym for a homeless person.
“You wore your father’s hat, got an old jacket and you were a bum,” she says, punctuating the final word like a Brooklyn Dodgers fan (she actually hails from Pelham, N.Y.) or Mickey the trainer in “Rocky.”
Lee Pashayan confesses that she used to answer the door as an adult in a costume “that would be completely inappropriate today.”
Everyone in the room seems to hold their breath for a moment.
“Not that way,” Lee chides. “It was an Indian costume, with feathers, moccasins and beads.”
Rose Vacca also remembers assuming a role (for a Pitney Bowes variety show) that has since become politically incorrect.
“I was always a Gypsy. I was excited because I got to wear lipstick.”
Kathleen Bordelon details making her own outfit to become the Tin Man from “The Wizard of Oz.” She painted a trash can silver, flipped it over and cut out holes for arms. She carried an oil can and put a paper heart on her chest.
It begs the question of whether she was joined by a Dorothy, a lion and a scarecrow. She can’t recall.
“I don’t remember. Making the costume just took so long.”
The fan favorite in the room seems to be Mildred Ritchie’s reveal that “I was a pumpkin.” Roberta Eichler, though, details a costume her older brother made for her during their Wallingford childhood. It would win a contest even today.
“He put a sheet over my head and made holes so I could see. He had me hold a white balloon that looked like a skull so it looked like I was headless,” she says of her brother, who grew up to become an abstract artist.
As I look over the gathering of Stamford Woman’s Club members one more time before closing the door, it’s hard not to see them as kids in the old getups. But I also know many of them for their work with nonprofit agencies. Roberta was the longtime executive director of the Volunteer Center. Kathleen currently has the same title at SilverSource, which supports seniors. Others served in elected posts. Every member helps the Stamford Woman’s Club support nonprofits.
They all made their own costumes as kids, then grew up to become superheroes.
John Breunig is editorial page editor of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. jbreunig@scni.com; twitter.com/johnbreunig.
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