In 1930, bands of marauding Geralds, Leonards and Melvins prowled Toronto’s streets on Halloween night. The township engineer was the victim of a “concerted” cucumber attack on his front door. And despite it all, the old-timers lamented the pranks just weren’t what they used to be.

Nowadays, Halloween is commercialized and sanitized, with Aidan, Ava and Sophia sweetly dressed as characters from Frozen, receiving compliments and candy just for showing up. But in old Toronto, Halloween was a night when the protestant town went wild. In 1930, the pranks were a disappointment to many.

“The rest of the tricks played in the township were of a more or less harmless nature. Garage doors taken off, fences moved to the tune of jangling door bells and tick-tacks. No property damage was reported,” the Star reported.

In Whitby, the veranda furniture hanging from telephone poles was rookie stuff. The “old-timers” weren’t impressed. A “score of years ago,” they said, “some of the young blades filled the college canon with gun powder and wet bread, discharging it in the early hours of the morning.”

In Orillia, even the police were complaining.

“We thought there’d be some excitement in town,” Const. George Bell said. “But there wasn’t even a good practical joker at work on the streets. Halloween isn’t what it used to be by a long shot.”

In the early part of the 20th century, Halloween in Toronto was celebrated in polite society with “charmingly arranged” tea parties decorated with autumn leaves, pumpkins and favours. Children would escape into the streets with pea shooters to ring doorbells and hurl peas and beans at the shades “drawn darkly against the world.” They wanted sweets, nuts and “other good things.”

A 1913 article from the Daily Republic called the door ringing tradition “as old as the ages” and something that children have taken as one of their “granted rights.”

“It is said that in the American boy there is an innate desire to be noisy … he has been found in the traditions of Halloween he has free scope to exercise his ingenuity, and that this is the time when nothing that he does will draw the ire of police.”

Until 1900, they noted, children were happy to just display a Jack-o-lantern. “Then came the big movement toward noise making, which reached its culminating point in 1905. In this year every street had its children’s parade.”

The Star ran a piece in 1913 about some of the classic animal tricks of the past — like that time a “number of cows” were driven “from the market into the old City Hall, where they were left to their own devices.” Then there was the leader of a group of well-to-do young fellows who couldn’t go out for Halloween pranks so they left a young pig in his bedroom late at night.

“Never did you hear such a bedlam as that raised by the squealing of the pig and the cries of the suddenly awakened staid couple,” the story noted.

University students were particularly renowned. In the ’80s — and that’s the 1880s — students used to fight with police and throw flour on patrons of the city’s theatres from the upper galleries. They painted the university steward’s cow to look like a zebra and one year marooned the poor beast in the university tower.

“There was a relaxing of the rules on Halloween and everybody knew it,” Toronto police historian Jack Webster told the Star’s Mitch Potter in 1999, talking about a Halloween riot in 1945.

“You couldn’t arrest everybody — you wouldn’t have any place to put them. So indiscretions, just a general hell-raising, were everywhere. In the country, they'd knock over outhouses and torch barns. In the city, it was general hooliganism, from throwing eggs to pranks and mischief, like dismantling wagons and putting them back together on the roof of somebody's shed.

“These days, any night can be trouble. Back then, Halloween was the trouble night.”

In the Star archives, the term “trick or treat” doesn’t appear until 1948 — in a cooking column by Marjorie Elwood. “We do enjoy these annual visits of the small ones who are strictly of the neighbourhood,” she writes, recommending readers make frozen fruit suckers as a “shell out” treat for Halloween parties at home.

By the 1940s, it appears as though Halloween had become more of a sanctioned activity — parents and teachers had caught up with a few tricks of their own.

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In 1947, schools hosted Halloween parties.

“We were first in the city to organize a Halloween party for the children 20 years ago and the idea is getting louder and bigger than ever as you can both see and hear,” said Bill Hambly, an “Old boy” who organized the party at Dufferin School.

“Storekeepers heaved many a sigh of relief as they attended to customers without being harassed by the cries of ‘Shell out, shell out!’” the Star noted.

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