Halloween night in the old neighborhood

It’s a typical Halloween night in the 1960s, a time when most of the folks in my neighborhood knew each other; when kids could roam from one backyard to another, even to the end of the block, without any fences blocking their way; when the worst thing a trick-or-treater’s parents had to worry about was the next dental bill — and not the cost of an ambulance ride necessitated by a purposely misplaced razor blade.

On this particular night I and my three younger siblings, accompanied by at least one of our parents, have stood on the thresholds of neighboring homes while people tossed goodies into our bags. If there’s an easier gig, I don’t know what it is.

But now we’re at the home of Annie and Pearl Kallikack, where Halloween is a bit different. (As you may have guessed, those aren’t their real names. I’m not afraid they’ll sue me — they’re well beyond that — but they could theoretically haunt me, so why take chances?)

Annie is at least on the cusp of middle age, and Pearl is her mother.

Annie is good-hearted, but tactfulness isn’t always her strong point. I was somehow able to read long before I entered kindergarten, and Annie, convinced that this ability was some kind of trick, was not above shoving a Newsweek in front of my pre-k puss and demanding that I read it out loud, which I easily did, though I probably didn’t understand the words.

Annie is also not overly fond of modern entertainment. Years later she will go to a Steve Martin movie called “Pennies from Heaven,” thinking that it’s the kind of innocent musical she grew up watching. When she finds out that the movie is the exact opposite of what she was expecting, she will angrily flee the theater.

My two aunts will find Annie’s moral scruples ironically amusing, saying that in her younger days, Annie had a reputation for being “fast.” Then again, my two aunts were nuns, so their idea of “fast” might be considered life in the slow lane today.

As for Pearl, she too is kind-hearted and definitely not shy; had she lived a few decades longer, she might have been a shoo-in to play Sophia on “The Golden Girls.” But when people talk about Pearl, they are more likely to mention her eyesight. I think I remember them using the phrase “blind as a bat” more than once, especially regarding their concern that she is still driving. The thought of Pearl Kallikack operating any motor vehicle scares the neighborhood mothers more than any nightmare Stephen King could dream up. If you don’t believe in miracles, please consider that, as far as I know, she never had an accident — or at least anything that made the news.

On Halloween, you can’t just stand on the Kallikacks’ threshold. You have to come into the house, where the dining room table is loaded with enough sweet treats to give an earthworm diabetes.

And there’s another rule: You can go around the table, grabbing all the treats you want, but only once — no second helpings.

As we promenade around the table, things are peaceful until Pearl erupts. “Hey!” she says to one of my siblings. “You can’t do that! You’ve already been around once!”

“No, Mama!” says Annie, rushing to put out what, for her, is probably the latest of umpteen fires. “He didn’t go around before! This is another boy!”

Pearl calms down, we eventually leave, and another Halloween at the Kallikacks’ is in the books.

Roughing it in black and white

On Sunday mornings one of the cable stations shows episodes of “Batman,” the campy series from the 1960s.

Sometimes I watch the beginning of an episode and feel a mixture of pain and nostalgia. The pain comes from remembering what a doofus I was back then — one of the few people (if that) in the country who didn’t realize that the show was a tongue-in-cheek spoof. Yes, reader, I took it seriously for a while. Then again, I’ve read that Neil Hamilton, who played Commissioner Gordon, also didn’t get the joke. At least he had something of an excuse: His career stretched back to the silent era, when scripts and performances weren’t always subtle, and his over-the-top theatricality added to the show’s fun.

The nostalgia I feel comes from each episode’s intro, when we are informed that “Batman” is “In Color!” This was after ABC and CBS finally caught up with the NBC Peacock, which had ruled the panchromatic roost for ages; for a couple of seasons the two also-rans always trumpeted their shows’ color at the beginning of each show, as if we stupid viewers couldn’t have figured it out for ourselves.

“Batman” was one of the first color programs I ever saw — but not at home.

We still had a black-and-white TV. I think my parents knew that we kids wanted a color set, but there were six of us youngsters, and given the cost of clothing and feeding us, we sensed that for some time to come we were going to have to take CBS’ word that Lucy had red hair.

In an attempt to make us feel better about this, one day Mom brought home a rectangular plastic sheet that was supposed to simulate the joys of color TV if you placed it over the screen of your black-and-white Zenith. The top third of the sheet had a blue hue, the bottom third was green and the middle section had another color — orange, I think. I remember that most of us kids were kind enough to go along with this, at least for a while.

Then, around the mid-1960s, my dad got a membership for a huge store, kind of a pre-Walmart Walmart, with every kind of department you could think of, including toys, electronics and groceries — not to mention the bags of extraordinarily tasty popcorn you could get as you were leaving; the memory still makes my mouth water.

The store’s membership was open to government employees. My father wasn’t a government employee, but his company, an auto-parts warehouse, had government contracts, so he slid through that way.

On Thursday nights, while he and Mom shopped in the grocery department, we kids would hang out in the color TV section, watching “Batman” and other shows. It was a thrill to see all these characters in color; for a little while each week, we got a taste of How The Other Half Lived. And we also learned fairly quickly that these 1960s TVs had a knob you could turn if you wanted to futz with the color. I still remember seeing an ad for Kellogg’s blue cornflakes.

By the time we finally got a color set I was entering college, and although I still lived at home, my academic workload tended to keep me away from the TV.

I now have a 52-inch set that can do all sorts of things; problem is, I’m too dumb to figure out how to make it do all sorts of things. On a good day I could maybe figure out how to plug it in. But the color is sharp and the audio is state-of-the-art, even if some of those Brits on the PBS shows still haven’t learned to speak up.

Of course the manual says nothing about blue cornflakes.

But you can’t have everything.