Halloween Throwback – How Grand Junction Rolled in the 70’s
Halloween is coming up soon. Check out the photos below and do a little time traveling. This is how Grand Junction used to roll back in the 1970's.
Take a look back about 50 years or so with these Bob Grant photos. The image above would be Halloween 1971. This holiday event was held at the Mesa County Libraries central branch in downtown Grand Junction.
Halloween 2020 is just around the corner, and it looks to be an all new ballgame. For those who weren't living in Grand Junction in the 1970's, I'm here to tell you, things were completely different. Halloween was "it." This holiday was the Super Bowl of festivities.
Seriously, Halloween was a big deal in Grand Junction. According to population.us, Grand Junction proper boasted a total of 20,170 residents in 1970. It was a much bigger world back then.
If you were a kid in the 1970's, chances are you wore your Halloween costume to school on the holiday. You probably trick-or-treated in packs of six or seven kids. If you were really little, your mom took you door to door to get treats. You would then come home, devour all of your candy that evening, and then spend the rest of the night throwing up.
Costumes were entirely different, too. If you were lucky, you had a homemade costume. If you weren't one of the lucky few, you went to either Woolco or Kmart in Grand Junction, where you would find aisle after aisle of Halloween costumes.
That's the way the holiday unfolded up until 1982. In October of that year, seven people died when bottles of Tylenol had been laced with potassium cyanide. That put a scare, a legitimate scare, into everyone. Halloween 1982 all but disappeared, at least in Grand Junction.
Looking back to last Halloween, I don't recall if my house had any trick-or-treaters or not. I did, however, get to play an awesome Halloween party at a local fraternal organization. They did it up right. The event was awesome, the costumes were amazing, and everyone had a great time. In comparison, though, it seems as though the holiday has lost tremendous steam.
Here's looking forward to a fun Halloween 2020. I'm not entirely sure how it's going to unfold. Hopefully, you'll find a festive way to enjoy the holiday. While social distancing will undoubtedly put a damper on things, hopefully, at least in spirit, lousy pun intended, Halloween will remain the same.