When I trick or treated back in the early 80s, after collecting all our candy we would take it to the local hospital to get it X-rayed to check if there were any sharp objects in the candy. Obviously today the very idea sound ridiculous, but I clearly remember it. Problem is none of my friends or coworkers had a similar experience. Do you?
While we’re on old Haloween memories, do you also remember running into houses having signs that said they had no candy because they’d donated for some cause? I can’t remember whether they sent money to UNICEF, a school carnival, or a church event.
I never did and I don’t think any of my friends did, but I do remember when ‘they’ used to say that we should.
No, we never did. I remember hearing about people doing it, but I don’t even know anyone who did.
That’s obnoxious as hell. If you don’t want to give out treats for the children in our community, just keep your porch/door/path lights off that night. It’s got nothing to do with “some cause.”
I was a kid in the 80s -neither I or anyone I knew ever had candy X-rayed. My parents checked over the candy, and anything with open or torn wrappers got tossed. Suspiciously, some of the good stuff would also get confiscated…
Wouldn’t it be expensive for a hospital to X-ray a bunch of candy? I’d imagine a setup like the airport would make more sense, where you put the bag on a conveyor belt and it goes through a scanner.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just buy all new candy straight from a store, than to get it X-rayed?
We didn’t have any hospitals within a reasonable distance so no. However, I bet the kids whose parents made them do that got made fun of behind their back a lot if I remember youth culture correctly. I think I would be tempted to make fun of any parents that did that even today even though I love my little snowflakes more than anything.
The 80’s were a dangerous time and you had to choose your battles carefully or you would run out of energy and die. We focused mostly on Satan worshipers who sacrificed animals in the woods and were looking for the ultimate child sacrifice. Nuclear war was about to break out at any time so studying for tests was of questionable utility. Made for TV movies told us that millions of perfectly sane and sober people just woke up homeless one day and never knew what hit them (as opposed to today where that probably can happen). One hit of certain drugs made people insane for life, and millions of kids were randomly abducted annually right in front of their parents by strangers. It was a hellish war-zone I tell you.
Sadly, we didn’t have Snopes back then either to tell people that little kids weren’t being poisoned by Halloween candy in droves at that time but yet it was a firmly established threat from…somewhere back then. I am just glad people don’t fall for that type of fear-mongering propaganda from the mass media anymore.
Nope, no X-rays. We were just told to throw away any candy that wasn’t wrapped properly.
I don’t remember signs saying they gave to charity, but I did get Jack Chick Tracks in my candy bag.
What an idiotic waste of hospital resources.
IIRC, our local hospital offered that service but we never took advantage of it. In fact, when I was about 7 or 8, my mother and all the other Lion’s Club mothers got so freaked out by all the poisoned candy and razor-bladed fruit running rampant in our community :rolleyes: that they organized the first annual Lion’s Club [del]Lame[/del] Halloween party for us kids, with games and free (small) bags of candy and a costume contest.
My sister and I were pissed. Fortunately it only lasted a couple of years before the hysteria passed and we were able to convince our mothers that trick-or-treating wasn’t going to kill us. Plus it yielded a much better candy haul.
Even love itself was a battlefield.
I don’t recall anything about X-rayed candy, but I was past trick-or-treating age by the 80’s. I do remember warnings in school about poisoned candy and razor blades in apples, but it sounded like bullshit to me even as a kid. How were people supposed to be able to get these razor blades into the apples without breaking the skin, or poisoning the candy without disturbing the packaging?
Nope, no X-rayed candy and never found anything questionable. I do seem to recall one community hospital offered to X-ray candy, but I didn’t hear about it again after that year. I imagine no one showed up.
Heh. You’re funny. Now it’s vaccines, GMO/Fs, Mexicans and Socialism. Lecherous gay men seem to be on the way out.
The thing is all of the trick-or-treat apples could have been loaded with razors and it wouldn’t have mattered; no one ate them. You have a bag full of candy, why would you bother with an apple?
I was a child in the 60’s; X-raying candy was not invented yet.
We did get our share of yucky popcorn balls, and apples.
This. I do remember x-raying being supposedly available (this was say, 1980?) but it was highly unlikely that I was going to eat any damn apple I was given when trick-or-treating, regardless. And we t-n-t’d in The Hood – I remember getting a lot of McDonald’s coupons… can you still get those?
It was more like a public service the hospital would provide for free.
I heard of it, but never experienced it.
At least as kids, most of us liked McDonald’s. I’d rather go hungry than eat there now though.
There was the one house who gave out two pencils and a nickel. A nickel. This was in the early 80s. Oh Mrs. K, if you only knew the shit we kids talked about you that year.
I remember hearing announcements on the local TV news that one of the city hospitals was offering this service, but it was just after I was too old for trick-or-treating so I don’t know the details.
My mother would go through our bags and throw out any apples or unwrapped candy, unless we knew specifically who we got it from. Basically if we stopped at a house we knew and got a homemade cookie or something, we would take it over to Mom and tell her, and she’d put it in a separate bag.
I went on the rounds as a kid in the 60s, and my mother always inspected all of our candy. I can’t remember whether or not any hospitals offered Xray services for candy.
When I was a teen, I made popcorn balls, and we put them in paper sacks to hand out to the kids that we knew. My mother typed our name and address and noted that we’d give out candy instead of the popcorn ball if the parents wanted to exchange it. We never had any exchanges, just requests for the recipe. We gave out store candy to kids that we didn’t know.
For my own kid, my husband and I usually chaperoned her route, or she went with some of her cousins, and one of their parents would chaperone the route. And we always inspected the candy, but never got it Xrayed. I never saw any suspicious candy, either.