Insight: Friendship worth remembering

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

After my brother was born in 1957, our family moved the next summer from a smaller home in Gates, New York to a brand-new larger house in Brighton, New York. The Evans Farm subdivision had hundreds of homes and was a jackpot of places to go trick or treating on Halloween.

The parents of a young man who Ed Pierce befriended 
years ago gave him three of their son's first-edition
Hardy Boys mystery books from the 1920s and 1930s.
PHOTO BY ED PIERCE 

While in second grade in 1960, my mother walked around the neighborhood with me on Halloween as I was only 6 but soon to be 7 that December. She helped me to create my Halloween costume, a re-creation of Phineas T. Bluster, the Mayor of Doodyville on the popular Saturday morning children’s TV show Howdy Doody. I wore a yellow jacket with a red plaid vest with cotton balls my mom fashioned to resemble the white bushy eyebrows of the mayor.

As we walked from house to house down Glenhill Drive in Brighton, we turned onto Carverdale Drive and then left onto Del Rio Drive and into an older section of the subdivision. I rang the doorbell at the first house on that street and to my surprise, a tall young man opened the front door and grinned at me as he carried a dish of candy bars.

His mother and father soon joined him, and they all laughed at my costume. They asked my name, where I went to school and how old I was. The young man, who was their son, was incredibly shy and smiled a lot, but otherwise he had very little to say.

The young man's parents, Jeanne and Fred Dixon, told my mother that their son’s name was Franklin Dixon and that he was 26. As we started to leave, I turned around in their driveway and saw Franklin in the window waving to me. I waved back to him and when we reached the sidewalk, I asked my mother why Franklin didn’t say anything. She told me to mind my own business.

About a week later I was riding my bicycle through the neighborhood and rode past the Dixon’s house as they were outside raking leaves. I stopped and talked to Frank’s father, who told me that Franklin was mentally disabled and had been mute for his entire life.

He was an only child, and his parents had sent him to school when he was young, but other kids had teased him terribly and constantly made fun of him. Rather than subject him further to that, they kept him home and his aunt, a retired teacher, gave him reading and math lessons.

Some days after school when I finished my homework, I would get my baseball mitt and go play catch with Franklin. Or we would throw around a football in his front yard. He never said a word but laughed and smiled all the time.

The next spring, my teacher Miss Cross asked students in our class to choose a book from the school library to read and when we were finished with it, she asked us to stand in the front of the classroom and tell everybody about it. I chose the book “Quest of the Snow Leopard” by Roy Chapman Andrews. It was about an expedition into Tibet and the Yunan Province of China, and a killer snow leopard who escapes capture by hunters.

But while I was choosing that book from the library shelf, I glanced over at the books with authors whose last name started with “D” and spotted a series of books by an author with the last name of Dixon.

When I had read “Quest of the Snow Leopard” and during our next class visit to the school library, I checked out the only book in the F.W. Dixon series that was currently available. It was called “The Secret of the Old Mill.” I discovered that the mystery series was written by an author named Franklin W. Dixon and was about two fictional teen brothers who were amateur detectives, Frank and Joe Hardy. They lived in the city of Bayport with their father, detective Fenton Hardy, their mother, Laura Hardy and their Aunt Gertrude. They solve mysteries along with their friends Chet Morton, Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, Phil Cohen, Tony Prito, Callie Shaw, and Chet’s sister Iola Morton.

One afternoon while playing catch with Franklin, I jokingly asked him if he had written the Hardy Boys book series since his name was the same as the author’s. He shook his head no at me. His father had overheard that and pulled me aside and told me that Franklin W. Dixon was a pen name used by a variety of different authors who were part of a collective team that wrote the Hardy Boys novels.

On Labor Day in 1961, Franklin set off on his bike to get an ice cream cone at a new Carvel shop that had opened on Monroe Avenue in Brighton. A distracted driver swerved suddenly and struck him from behind on Edgewood Avenue. He tumbled off his bike and hit his head on a large rock at the end of a driveway and died instantly.

Several weeks later, Frankin’s father knocked on our door, thanked me for being his son’s friend and gave me three of Franklin’s books, which were all first edition Hardy Boys books from the 1920s and 1930s. I keep those books in my office at home in honor of Franklin’s memory to this very day. <

Insight: Strange and unusual Halloween sightings

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Just like for everyone else, Halloween can be a spooky time for journalists as we investigate and explore strange occurrences related to the supernatural.

A copy of an Oct. 29, 1988 newspaper article about a
'Hanging Tree' in New Mexico where a ghost has been
reported over the years is contained in a box of old clippings
in Ed Pierce's basement. PHOTO BY ED PIERCE  

I’m somewhat skeptical about the subject and throughout my career working for newspapers, I’ve been asked to tell the stories of individuals who say that they have encountered ghosts or experienced things that can’t easily be explained. From the time I watched the original black and white version of the film “Thirteen Ghosts” on television growing up in the 1960s, the topic has interested me, yet I’ll admit I have no belief in ghosts or visitors from the other side.

Back in the early 1980s, airmen at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona where I was stationed, kept telling me about seeing strange lights and being subjected to unusual experiences inside an aircraft hangar there. Being close to Halloween, as editor of the base newspaper I thought it would be an interesting article to report about it for that week’s edition. I spent an evening in the hangar interviewing several people who worked in the structure and was told a wild story.

It seems that the hangar had been used as a training site for German airmen and pilots learning to fly older American fighter aircraft. One of the German mechanics had died from a fall inside the hangar and according to the story, his spirit would return at night searching for tools and his flight suit. Three base security guards told me that while on routine patrol of the flightline during the night, they could see lights coming from inside the darkened hangar, which had been abandoned when the German Air Force began training on a newer aircraft from a hangar up the road on the base.

I also spoke with a civilian painting crew that had been contracted to repaint some offices in the hangar so it could then be used by an American aircraft company testing a new jet there the following year. They said that because of other work obligations, the crew could only work inside the hangar at night and just like the security guards, they also experienced some odd things while working there.

The painters said once without any reason, the overhead lights inside the hangar suddenly went off, leaving them in the dark. They claimed to have heard footsteps walking around inside the hangar and one man said he turned a corner and saw the apparition of an individual walking in the other direction holding a flashlight.

Along with a base photographer and base security, we toured the hangar after dark but unlike our interview subjects, we did not experience anything out of the ordinary. The article appeared on the front page of that week’s base newspaper and each time I ran into the major who directed base security thereafter in the course of my duties, he called me “Ghost Hunter.”

In October 1988, I was reporting on small town south of Albuquerque, New Mexico when I met several people who claimed to have had encounters with ghosts near an old cottonwood tree. According to legend, the tree had been used as a “hanging tree” for convicted criminals in the 19th century and on occasion, people had said they could see bodies hanging from the tree in the middle of the night.

An older resident of the area told me that sometime in the 1890s, a drifter by the name of Homer Salas had been lynched on the tree on Halloween night by a mob which accused him of horse theft. Through the years since, town residents said a ghost would appear in the wee hours of the morning kicking and tugging while hanging from a rope on a tree branch. One man told me that he had been kicked in the face by the boot of the ghost while walking home late one Halloween from an evening spent at a local bar.

He said he thought he heard something in the tree and when he walked closer, he encountered the ghost of Homer Salas up close and personal. He reached into his pocket and showed me a photo that his family had taken of him the next morning with a large red bruise on his cheek.

The article I wrote about the tree appeared in the newspaper on the Saturday before Halloween and after its publication, several other people informed me that they had also experienced unusual events near the tree. One of those people was the town’s assistant librarian, who said her car broke down on the road by the tree and while she waited for her husband to arrive to jumpstart her car, she could hear moaning and sobbing coming from the tree. Another was a man who called me and said his grandfather’s brother had been a part of the lynch mob and he always had avoided that area because he believed that the ghost would exact revenge upon him or his family.

After listening to all these stories, it was difficult to determine if they were credible or figments of these people’s imagination. All these years later, the jury’s still out on that question. <

Insight: Somewhat Spooky Sugary Speculation

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

It seems a bit early this year, but a trip to the grocery store over Labor Day Weekend unveiled for me that a vast selection of Halloween candy is already filling supermarket shelves.

I’m not sure exactly how long candy lasts, but by my calculation at the time of my visit there were at least 58 days left until Halloween. If I had purchased and brought home some candy for this year’s trick-or-treaters, it would have had to sit on my kitchen shelf without being devoured for nearly two months before the evening of Oct. 31 arrives. Knowing my own weakness for sugar, I’m certain I wouldn’t have the willpower to let candy sit for that long at my home without sampling it.

Making the decision to not purchase Halloween candy during this visit, I did, however, carefully examine what products have currently made their way onto the supermarket shelves in 2022, what old favorites are returning, and what is new this fall that I should consider.

The first item that I noticed this year is not something I would hand out to neighborhood kids for Halloween. A price tag of $19.95 for a 1-pound grape-flavored gummy bear in the shape of a skeleton is more of a personal gift for the grandkids in Connecticut, except after mailing them a huge box of Easter candy in April, I have been asked not to mail them sugary snacks going forward to avoid childhood hyperactive “sugar high” meltdowns.

Next, I noticed some odd-looking fun-sized Twix and Snickers candy bars with packages bright green in color. The Twix bars were labeled as “Ghoulish Green” while the Snickers bars were identified as “Ghoulish Green Nougat.” I suppose if these new candy products don’t sell for Halloween that they can always be relabeled and recycled next spring for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.

Moving on, I proceeded to look over a creative section filled with small colorful and collectible tins of Halloween candy that caught my attention. I laughed at the “Sugar Skulls Tins” which encourage celebrations of “Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in colorful style!” Each of these decorative skull tins contain 1.4 ounces of vibrant candy skulls for $3.99 each. The product line also offers “Ouija Mystifying Mints” for $3.99 featuring an embossed tin with retro artwork of the “Mystifying Oracle.” Inside are 1.5 ounces of Ouija planchette-shaped peppermints. I chuckled when I saw the “Childs Play Chucky Tins” filled with sour cherry candy knives and adorned with artwork of the serial killer doll “Chucky” all for just $3.99.

For those trick-or-treaters who can’t live without the sensation of the Pop Rocks candy that explodes in your mouth, there are two new must-have products for 2022. Bags of KOOL-AID GHOUL-AID Popping Candy and Warheads Popping Candy are now found on store shelves. KOOL-AID GHOUL-AID comes in Scary Berry flavor while Warheads Popping Candy features Wicked Watermelon, R.I.P. Raspberry, and Cackle Apple flavors.

There seems to be a lot of gimmicks associated with returning candy favorites this year too. Hershey’s is offering a large candy skull filled with bite-sized treats and chocolate kisses now rendered to resemble eyeballs, while M&Ms, Snickers, Milky Ways and Skittles now come in a bag proclaiming they are “Glow in the Dark.” Kit Kat is selling “Pumpkin Pie” treats, and Reese’s has gone all-in on Halloween this year with an array of new products including King-Sized 2.4-ounce peanut butter and chocolate pumpkins, white crème peanut butter ghosts, and large Reese’s potato chip big cups.

Also new for 2022 are Froot Loops Gummies; Nerds Candy Corn; M&M Creepy Cocoa Crisps; Tootsie Roll Caramel Pops; Dove Dark Chocolate Pumpkins; Monster Mash Jelly Belly jelly beans; Jelly Belly Pumpkin Lollypops; Dubble Bubble Jack O’ Lanterns; Sour Patch Kids Zombie Orange and Purple Candy; Brach’s Caramel Apple candy corn; Fruit Stripe Gummy Candy; Nerds Rainbow Rope Candy; assorted Halloween-themed candy canes; Toxic Waste sour candy in plastic drums; and Red Vines in Halloween candy corn flavor.

Looking over the Halloween aisle this year, my own personal favorites are the Peeps assortment. Made of marshmallow, Peeps were once exclusively shaped like small chicks and were rolled out for Easter in yellow, pink, and blue colors, but they are now available in varying shapes and flavors for other holidays and especially for Halloween. On this visit to the store, I found Halloween orange pumpkin Peeps, green and red Peeps skulls; glowing green Peeps Monsters shaped like Frankenstein heads; all-white Peeps ghosts; and purple spooky Peeps cats. And for the first time this year I spotted Astronaut Freeze-Dried Halloween Peeps in green, orange, and white colors.

As for our household for Halloween this year, we’re more than likely going to purchase our giveaway candy around Oct. 15 and in keeping with Pierce Family tradition, we’ll be handing out an assortment of full-sized Hershey bars, Snickers bars, Kit Kat bars, Reese’s peanut butter cups, Starburst, Skittles, Three Musketeer bars, and Milky Way bars. These typically come in 20-full-size packs.

We always plan on 80 trick-or-treaters and end up having about 48 or so kids ring our doorbell, meaning 32 candy bars are left over for me. <

Insight: Ghosts of Halloween Past

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

Growing up I always looked forward to wearing a costume for Halloween, but to be honest, I’d rather have the bag full of candy than spend hours debating about what to wear when going trick or treating. 

Our family lived in a large tract subdivision with many houses and streets available for visiting on Halloween. These were the early 1960s, prior to the arrival of fun-size and mini-Halloween candy, so virtually every treat handed out in my neighborhood was of generous proportion, except for the occasional apple tossed in my bag.

This was also before McDonald’s and Wendy’s first opened for business, so I never received a gift certificate for hamburgers or fries in my Halloween bag either when the evening’s haul was examined closer.

One year my mother went to Woolworth’s and bought my brother Doug and I some Casper the Friendly Ghost costumes, but by the time the next year had rolled around, those outfits were too small for us, so she made us costumes instead. That consisted of her buying terrycloth bathrobes and coloring them purple with RIT dye in the washing machine.

Once the bathrobes were a shade of bright purple, she put Elmer’s Glue on the collar and shoulders and then sprinkled gold glitter over the glue. She added a gold sash and fashioned a king’s crown out of one of my father’s shoeboxes. Like the robe, she gave the crown sparkle by using glue and gold glitter.

That year we went trick or treating as kings. It just so happened that a few months later I was able to recycle my costume for my role as one of the Three Wise Men in the Our Lady of Lourdes School’s annual Christmas Pageant.

I can recall another year when I was about 10 when my brother went trick or treating as a hobo wearing a long old black coat, a bandana and his face covered with charcoal to appear dirty. That same year I was a cowboy with a brown vest, brown chaps, and a brown cowboy hat. To complete the look, my father painted a mustache on me using brown paint from my Paint-By-Numbers watercolors set. Looking back, it was an outrageous outfit and reminds me now of the “Cowboy” representative of the Village People band of the 1970s.

For some reason my mother seemed to always suggest dressing me in a clown costume for Halloween, an abhorrent idea that I always instantly rejected. To this day I loathe clowns and have little respect for anyone named Winky, Bobo, Bubbles or Jingles.

Many of the boxed Halloween costumes of those days were made of rayon, which made them extremely itchy and hard to wear after several hours.

I remember one boxed costume set I talked my father into buying for me was a skeleton outfit and another year he agreed to buy me a “Hot Stuff the Little Devil” costume at McCurdy’s Department Store. The little devil attire came complete with devil’s mask and a plastic pitchfork too.  

Through the years I went trick or treating as a wizard, a policeman, an astronaut, a magician, a pirate and one year as the cartoon character Underdog.

As I got into my teens, the last time I went trick or treating I wore a King Kong rubber mask I had purchased with my own money I had earned from delivering newspapers on my after-school paper route.

Years passed before I attempted to wear a Halloween costume as an adult. Sometime in the 1980s I remember attending a party with my wife and we went as a gangster and the gangster’s girlfriend, with my wife wearing a men’s grey suit, a fedora, and an orange necktie, while I wore a bright yellow dress and a Carol Channing-style blonde wig.

Years later the newspaper I was working for in Florida had an annual Halloween costume contest for employees and for three years in a row, I won that event with an assortment of humorous outfits. One year I was dressed as an old woman with a paisley dress, a gray wig, a hairnet and a walker and I followed that the next year with a Michael Jackson costume that featured a dyed chef’s jacket, black wig, and sunglasses. I donned a Flavor Flav outfit with a horned helmet, a zany lavender blazer and large clock hanging from my neck for the year after that.

The last Halloween costume contest I entered there, I went as a pregnant bride and wore a size 20 wedding dress I had ordered from eBay and a long blonde wig. Unfortunately, that costume didn’t win, but the looks I received from the newspaper circulation manager while changing into it in the restroom before the contest were priceless to say the least.

I won’t be wearing a costume this year to answer the door for a new generation of trick or treaters, but at least one tradition will endure at our house. In a throwback to my youth, we have three boxes of full-size candy bars to pass out to kids while admiring their imaginative costumes. <

Insight: Ghosts of Halloween Past

By Ed Pierce

Managing Editor

The familiar old pattern just might be shaken up a bit this Halloween for our family.

With my wife being an elementary school teacher and not having much time to shop for Halloween candy, that task usually falls to me and it’s a responsibility I do not take lightly.

For me, I can recall how exciting it was to decide on a costume to wear to go out trick or treating every Halloween in the 1960s and then dumping out my collection on the kitchen table when it was over to see what goodies I had amassed.

Among the assortment of saltwater taffy; Razzles; Fruit Stripe Gum; Atomic Fireballs; Dum Dums; Bazooka Bubble Gum; Dots gumdrops; Bottle Caps; Oh Henrys; Junior  Mints; Sugar Daddys; Milky Ways; Baby Ruths; and Hot Lips, there were always a few apples and occasionally some pennies to go to the corner store and buy a pack of new baseball cards.

This was before the days when “snack size,” or “bite size” or “mini” bags of candy was sold and I could end up with a haul of full-sized candy bars that would last well into the month of November.

Bearing that in mind, at some point in the 1990s, when I had worked my way up to a consistent income, I made the decision to purchase full-sized candy bars for trick or treaters who visit our home every Halloween. My wife thinks I’m crazy for insisting on doing this and chides me for the money that I spend doing this.

But I want the kids who stop by our home to know what it was like back in the 1960s before Halloween candy was merely an afterthought and neighbors wanted to buy the cheapest candy possible available and be done with it.

Every year I buy around 100 full-sized candy bars and typically end up with about 65 bars left over. I probably buy more Halloween candy than I should, but I believe it’s always better to have more on hand rather than to run out early and have to disappoint the trick or treaters.

With that much candy left over, it’s inevitable that I end up eating what remains, so in my book, it’s a win-win situation. Not so for my wife, who will always try to give the leftover candy away to neighborhood children instead of letting me overindulge my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup habit each year.

Overbuying Halloween candy has become a tradition in our household every year as is hiding the stash of full-size Hershey chocolate bars, full-size Skittles, full-size Kit Kats and full-size Butterfingers until Oct. 31 rolls around. Typically, a handful of the full-size bars always seem to be missing ahead of when we fill the candy basket for our Halloween visitors.

And speaking of visitors, a trend I’ve noticed lately in my neighborhood is parents pushing young infants and children under the age of 2 coming up to our door trick or treating. The full-size candy bars are probably not being consumed by these very small kids and my suspicion is Mom and Dad are eating the candy when they get home. But in my book, it’s all good. It’s Halloween and who can be unhappy, other than dentists, about a holiday in which candy is freely distributed across America?

There’s nothing better than to open the door and see excited little ones who have spent hours preparing their costumes while their moms and dads truly look on in awe when they find they can reach into a large bowl and come away with a full-sized candy bar. It makes me happy to hear them proclaim to their parents that they want to come back to our house again next year because we give away the best Halloween candy.     

And that brings me to this year with the uncertainty about health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Do I buy my usual complement of full-size bars again and if so, how many children will be trick or treating this year?  

My thoughts are that I’m probably going to scale back my purchase of full-sized candy by at least half of what I normally purchase.

In years past, we’ve had about 35 kids stop by our home and I just don’t see that many visitors this year. It saddens me that a virus has disrupted our lives to the point that even timeless traditions such as Halloween are affected. Hoping we can soon return to normalcy and the doorbell rings many times on the evening of Oct. 31, 2021. <

Insight: The daunting and terrifying

By Lorraine Glowczak and Nicole-Raye Ellis

Halloween brings out the ghosts and goblins in all of us. Whether we are of the miniature ghoulish variety who knock on doors pleading for candy or of the larger type who honor their inner child by donning costumes no matter our age, this holiday is all about having fun.

However, that’s not always been the case. Halloween was once a grim event where dressing up in menacing costumes was taken seriously.

According to History.com, Halloween originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in) when people lit bonfires and wore costumes to ward off ghosts. Celts believed that on this night, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of spirits made it easier for Celtic priests to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter ahead.

Although we’ve come a long way from the time of the ancient Druids, the volatile aspects of everyday life still exist, and we seek sources of comfort as we face the daunting, and sometimes terrifying events that knock on our doors and enter our lives.

In my recent interview with the new Project Coordinator of Be The Influence (see front page), I had asked Nicole Ellis what advice she could give students on making wise choices using drugs/alcohol during our most difficult and scary times. Below are the words she offered as a source of direction. Although meant for youth, her wisdom can also be heeded by adults, no matter the situation:

Serve others: Try to make it a goal every day to serve others, whether that be helping a friend, a teacher, a stranger in some small, or even, big way. Serving others gets us out of our heads and enables us to feel good about ourselves. 

Stay connected with family: As much as teenagers don't want to be around family, preferring to be around peers, it is crucial we take time to spend with family. Although they can drive us crazy, families also provide a larger perspective. Try not to discount their advice prior to even hearing it, as it’s their advice that may be exactly what you need to hear at the moment.

Develop real friendships: Most importantly don't succumb to the pressure to fit in or be “normal.” True friends, the ones that will still be in your life years from now, will never ever pressure you to do something you don't want to do. 

Dare to be different: Sheep follow their shepherd even if it’s leading them to the wolves because that is the only shepherd they have to follow. Don’t be a sheep. Be a shepherd and walk in your own direction in your own way.

And, I’ll add one more thing - don’t let the unknown scary stuff frighten you, whether it is real or otherwise. Much like finding our way through a haunted maze, while we may not know what is going to happen next, it can be an adventure of discovery.

Happy Halloween!