DATE: Sunday, October 26, 1997              TAG: 9710230381

SECTION: CAROLINA COAST          PAGE: 2    EDITION: FINAL 

COLUMN: SONG OF A SAILOR 

SOURCE: Ronald Speer 

                                            LENGTH:   67 lines

THEN AND NOW, GHOSTIES AND GOBLINS TRILL TRICK-OR-TREATERS

FOR YEARS, Halloween was just another night for me, a stale, watered-down reminder of past glories. Now it has become one of my favorite holidays.

The reason is simple: I got involved.

For decades the only contribution I made was to give out candy when the little beggars came calling in their colorful costumes. They'd march up to our door, I'd give them a cheap sweet, and off they'd go.

Boring. Very boring.

When the Halloween raids were over, I'd lament about modern kids not knowing how to have fun and talk about the joys of the olden days. My kids thought my stories were boring. Very boring.

But I remembered Halloween as a happy holiday when I was young, and after we moved to Roanoke Island three years ago I decided to make it fun again.

And I had help. My neighborhood pal, 8-year-old Grant Tate, believes everything ought to be fun.

So between the two of us, we've turned the holiday into a delight, with witches and ghosties and goblins and other scary sights and sounds.

The central character is a skeleton that comes swooping from a tall tree and swings just over the heads of the tykes trekking to our porch looking for loot.

For little kids, the skeleton is scary. Youngsters who've seen the terror of a bad day in kindergarten think it's pretty tame stuff. But even the hardened first-graders tend to stick close to pop when the skeleton dives at them.

Particularly when the tape-recorder is blaring out words of warning in Grant's scariest voice:

``Goooooooooo baaaaaaaack! Ooooooooh, pleeeeeeease goooooooo baaaaaaaack!

``Therrrrrrrrres a ghooooooooooooooosssst rooooooooooaming the neighborhooooooooooooooooooood looooooooooooking foooooooooor liiitttttttttttllle kiiiiiiiiddddddddss. Gooooooooooo baaaaaaaaaaak while there's still tiiiiiiiiiiimme. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease pleeeeeeeeeeese go baaaaaaaaaaaaaack.''

Some of the littlest visitors dressed as pirates or goblins or ghosts are quite willing to take Grant's advice and skip our show, but mom or pop or big sister usually points out that the skeleton isn't real.

``We don't want to make it too scary and really frighten the real little kids,'' Grant said when he was 6 and we were drafting our mission statement. ``We just want to scare them a little bit.''

A couple of years ago he conned my 90-year-old mother-in-law, Louise DePace, into donning a witch's hat and passing out candy to those who survived the skeleton's dives.

But he doesn't delegate the key job, pulling the skeleton back up the cable to its perch high in a tree and then deciding the perfect moment to turn it loose on the next unsuspecting looters.

Grant hangs on to the business end of our joint venture, too, calling out the number of visitors as saints and sinners, toddlers and teenagers, beauties and beasties parade up to the porch.

The numbers have grown every year, and last year Grant counted about 125 visitors.

In 1995, we ran out of treats, but Grant knew how to deal with the problem.

``Got any dimes, Mr. Speer? Kids like dimes.''

I did and they did.

We'll be working this week to come up with something new for Friday night's Halloween festivities. My biggest worry is that Grant may soon get too old to find it fun to play with an oldtimer.

But I'll be all right because he's taught me well: Give them a chance and today's kids will find fun in the same things we did in the olden days.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu