Halloween and my Grandfather
I was talking to my grandfather about Halloween. He said that when he was a kid (in the late 1920's ), their Halloween would go like this. There were no commercial costumes, if he wanted to go as a hobo, he would take a piece of rope and tie it around his pants as a belt and then burn a cork and use the dark ash to blacken his face and arms. If kid's mother's were industrious, they would make something and the kid would go as a cat or something like that. Kids would go door to door and yell "WE WANT A HAND OUT, WE WANT A HAND OUT", (the phrase "Trick or Treat" had not come about yet). In return for this, people would give them a handful of candy corn, or an apple. or if the grown-ups were into it, they may have made popcorn balls. Prepackaged candy was unheard of at the time.