By SANDRA PAIGE SORELL

As a kid growing up in Potsdam in the 1950s there wasn’t a heck of a lot going on outside the college community. So when the month of October rolled around each year, the prospect of Halloween put us into a frenzy of anticipation. It was simply the most magical night of the year.

In the weeks leading up to Halloween the excitement built at school: What would we dress up as? Would we good candy? Would we get lots of it? Where would we trick or treat? The excitement and anticipation built and built until we thought we would burst.

Deciding on a costume was a really big deal. If you were lucky your mother could sew, but for some of us, Halloween costume hunting meant a trip to Fishman’s or W.T. Grant’s on Market Street. Cheap Halloween costumes made of skimpy material could be purchased in flat cellophane covered packages in Five and Dime stores. I was in this second category with a working mom who had little time or energy for sewing after teaching physical education all day to kids in one-room school houses in the surrounding area.

Trick or treating in Potsdam was an uncertain proposition as the first snow of the season usually falls in October, as anyone who’s lived in the North Country knows. One Halloween I dressed up as what I thought was the most beautiful Cinderella, complete with blue silky gown and blonde wig. Somehow the effect just wasn’t the same wearing heavy black rubber snow boots instead of dainty princess-like slippers.

Just before Halloween our family would drive from Riverside Apartments (Diaper Hill) a short ways out County Route 59 (we called it the Back Hannawa Road), near the intersection of the Bagdad Road to visit a farm that each October was ablaze with fiery orange pumpkins uniformly arranged in rows by size. From a kid’s perspective they must have numbered in the millions. The littlest pumpkins were five cents and the price went up from there. Our family would spend a lot of time walking up and down the many rows until we found just the right pumpkin—with the perfect size and shape and a nice thick, heavy stem.

We would bring our treasure home and Dad would take out his Buck knife and go to work carving a scary pumpkin face. But first (after the top was cut out) it was my job to stick my hand inside the pumpkin and pull out the guts to clean it for carving. I still remember the smell and feel of the slimy seeds and fibers. We would separate the seeds which we would set aside to fry at a later date. They made a delicious snack with a little salt on them.

Halloween night our pumpkin masterpiece would sit on our front porch lit up with a large candle inside. It made us proud to have one of the finest pumpkins on Diaper Hill.

Another event we looked forward to on or near Halloween was our Girl Scout (Troop 12) Halloween party at our regularly scheduled meeting downstairs in the Civic Center. The festivities always included bobbing for apples (an unsanitary game by any standards that would surely be banned today). The Scouts would form a ring around a huge metal washtub full of water with bobbing apples, and when the signal was given we would thrust our faces into the water trying to capture an elusive bobbing apple between our teeth. There would be peals of laughter as we got soaking wet trying to capture our prize.

Halloween day we were giddy looking forward to the night’s spooky events. The biggest event of all was the costume contest at the Civic Center (where the Library is today). The place was always packed to capacity with parents and their manic kids. We would line up on the side of the stage, then on cue climb up the stairs and parade across the big stage to thunderous applause.

By the end of the contest a winner would be declared and he or she got to stand alone on stage and take a bow to even more applause. The next morning the winner’s name would be announced by Con Elliott on station WPDM. I myself never got to experience this euphoric experience and the process by which a winning costume was chosen remains a mystery.

The Civic Center festivities would be capped off by a hayride. Local farmers would hitch their tractors to a flat bed full of hay with slatted sides stuffed full of kids. You could hear the screams of delight as the hayriders took off in different directions—up Main, Pierrepont, Lawrence, or Elm.

After the hayride we launched out on the most important mission of the night—the ultimate purpose of Halloween—trick or treating. We were pretty young - maybe 8 or 9 when we ventured out alone.

Our parents would turn us loose without supervision to hook up with a best friend (in my case, Diane Lawrence), and we would head for a neighborhood where we knew the home owners were not stingy with their treats. We headed for the kind of house that would give out a full size Hershey or Snickers bar. That, of course, would be on upper Leroy Street where some prominent citizens lived like the Putnams, Thomarises, Van Nesses, etc. This was the prime target area for us. We also preferred this area because one house with a huge screened-in front porch always had a cackling witch rocking mysteriously back and forth in a rocking chair.

We avoided houses that gave out loose popcorn in white napkins tied up with curly paper ribbon, and especially we stayed away from houses that gave out apples. Half the houses in Potsdam had an apple tree in their back yard. The word soon got out on the street about which homes to avoid and which ones to hit.

At the end of the night our parents would pick us up at a pre-arranged spot and time. I wore my Mickey Mouse watch for this purpose, periodically checking the time with my metal Dale Evans flashlight. Then we would go home and dump our precious loot out on the kitchen table, resting in the certainty that we had a stash of sweets that would last for at least a week.

Halloween in 1950s era Potsdam was pure magic for little kids. There was no fear in walking the streets after dark, or banging on strangers’ doors, or even occasionally entering a stranger’s home if invited inside. There was no need for parents to examine candy looking for planted needles or razor blades. Halloween Eve was pure delight from beginning to end. It had a certain innocence that has sadly been lost along the way.

Sandra Paige Sorell is a former Potsdam resident who now lives in Delmar.