#deathmakesaholiday

Introduction: The Candy Man’s Tale

Because it was raining on Halloween 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, a thirty-year-old optician in suburban Houston, accompanied his eight-year-old son Timothy and five-year-old daughter Elizabeth on their eagerly awaited neighborhood rounds of trick-or-treat.

Cautious parents knew that Halloween was already the most dangerous night of the year for children, even without rain. Halloween was traditionally believed to be the night when the veil between life and death was at its most transparent. On a purely statistical basis, this was indeed true. Youthful traffic fatalities rose precipitously and tragically every October 31, owing to masked kids’ drastically reduced fields of vision, not to mention the reduced visibility of the children themselves, often dressed in costumes that merged dangerously with the murk.

Ronald O’Bryan was just one foot soldier in a new, nationwide army of vigilant parents who took to the streets with their children each Halloween. It had once been considered safe for children to roam unchaperoned through their neighborhoods on Beggars’ Night, but now parents were wary. They weren’t concerned about the children’s mischief historically associated with the holiday- the soaped windows, toilet-papered trees, and quaintly toppled outhouses were mostly things of the nostalgic past. Most modern children, in fact, would be totally baffled is a contrarian householder demanded a trick in lieu of dispensing the expected sweet. Now, many commentators bemoaned the transaction’s degeneration into an empty consumer ritual without rhyme, reason, or reciprocity. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, observing the decline of any implied threat in “trick or treat” by the mid-1970′s, waxed nostalgic about earlier times when trick-or-treating had a distinct role in the socializing of children: “It was the one night a year when the child’s world and the adult’s world confronted each other and children were granted to take mild revenge on the adults.”

Somehow, Halloween no longer had anything to do with extending latitude or license to children. It was more about the reaffirmation of parental control, a ceremonial reassurance of the family’s integrity and stability in an uncertain world. By 1974, the bright economic promises of the post-World War II era had faded and, for many, even soured. The unsavory Watergate revelations seriously eroded the idealism of many Americans. Supporting a family, much less protecting it, had become acutely difficult for countless young breadwinners. Inflation had reached the worst levels in twenty-seven years, and unemployment was skyrocketing. Gas lines were everywhere. Halloween handouts were just about the only relief available to the working wounded.

Ronald O’Bryan himself was in considerable debt, even threatened with the repossession of his car. Financial problems had already forced him to give up home ownership. But if these things were on his mind October 31, 1974, he didn’t share them with his children. O’Bryan’s only Halloween mask was a happy face- his own.

This day was about the kids. Ronald O’Bryan would see to it. The O’Bryan children eschewed the traditional, homemade guises of mischief-making witches, ghosts, and goblins, and instead wore officially licensed, profit-making costumes inspired by the 1968 motion picture “Planet of the Apes” and its successful franchise of sequels. Corporate authorization and control now seemed to be just as much a part of the new Halloween as the exercise of parental prerogatives.