Mr. Kropotnik's Gorilla

Childhood Halloween Memories: By Dale Peterson

Halloween is an interesting holiday.

When else do parents teach their kids that it's ok to disguise their identity and head out in the dark of night to extort candy using the threat of "tricks"?

It's kind of like gangs of little mobsters going out saying, "Got some nice, clean windows there. It would be a shame if someone were to put soap all over them. And I noticed some trees down the street had toilet paper on them. A little candy might prevent that from happening here." 

Of course, not all parents take these veiled threats lying down. Some even plot terror of their own.

I recall one particular year, when I was about ten or eleven. Several parents in the neighborhood each tried to outdo the other in transforming their houses into palaces of horror. Now this was not like today where all you have to do is go down to the big box store in late September, go to the aisle next to the Christmas stuff, and stock up on all the Halloween decorations you want. No, people had to make their own back then. 

The highlight of the houses that year had to be Ernie Kropotnik's. For nearly a month before Halloween he had his house decked out in a manner worthy of a magazine spread. Aside from the obligatory bats, cobwebs, skulls and pumpkins, he had an actual, life size, professional quality gorilla suit stuffed with rags and sitting in a chair right by his front porch.

Each day we would walk by and see that stuffed, harmless gorilla sitting there next to the plastic skeleton. So, on Halloween, kids would fearlessly stroll up to the door demonstrating their bravery to their younger siblings by punching the gorilla right in the stomach. Their bravado was short lived though when the gorilla growled, stood up and beat his chest transforming the brave ghosts, witches and pirates into a stampeding mob running for their very lives. Yes, Mr. Kropotnik was not one to be intimidated by the Halloween racket. You were going to have to really earn your bag of treats from him. 

After a couple of hours of this, when he was pretty sure that the massive swarm of children had died down, he went around to all the other houses in the neighborhood, still in his gorilla suit, to hear the tales from the parents of all the kids who would one day be telling their stories to child psychologists. He was very proud. 

For us, Halloween was about one thing and one thing only, the accumulation of as much candy as was humanly possible in the time allotted. After all, you couldn't start too early, it had to be at least dusk, and you had to be home by 9:00 PM. That was the time that someone from the school would call. If you were home to talk on the phone, you got a prize the next day. Usually it was more candy. 

The best tactic was to go out trick or treating with a group of kids.

Going around with parents was right out. Parents spent too much time chatting with the neighbors, which cut into the valuable candy collecting time. And only real loser kids would go by themselves. But getting with the right group was key. Experience showed me that Shelly Konwerski's group was definitely the one to be in. Sweets to her were like a drug. Why, she was such a steady customer that, if she wasn't out on the street when he came by, the ice cream man would sit in his truck with the music playing knowing it was just a matter of time before he had a guaranteed sale. 

Shelly planned our route with all the skills of a general planning an invasion. There would be two zones. Zone One was our immediate neighborhood. Zone Two was the perimeter area. The plan was to begin with Zone Two; head as far away from the neighborhood as possible immediately and then work our way back to the edge of Zone One. She even had a map of who gave apples last year so we would know which houses to avoid. We were lucky to be under her command.

We had it timed so that we would finish Zone Two at exactly 8:55 PM. At this point, we would each head back to our houses, empty our bags, wait for the phone call from the school, then meet back at the rendezvous location for the assault on Zone One. It was brilliant. 

So here it was, nearly 9:30, many kids' actual curfew. After this we would all return to our own abodes to begin the next phase of Halloween activities - trading candies with your siblings. As we were heading up the sidewalk to the last house on our route, we noticed a trail of candy going across the lawn and ending at a shopping bag with the bottom broken out of it. Beneath the bag, the veritable mother lode lay in a heap - the big score at last. When we asked the woman in the doorway what had happened, she told us in a very tender and sympathetic voice, "Well, poor little Fred Derf was trick or treating all by himself, when suddenly a huge gorilla came up behind him and scared him to death."

Michael Corleone himself couldn't have planned that better.

—Dale Peterson