Baby Boomer Memory: Halloween’s Only Friendly Ghost
Ghosts are scary. It's a plain and simple fact of life. As sure as the sun is going to come up in the east tomorrow, all ghosts have one thing in common: They're scary.
Well, all of them except one.
There's Casper. He's not scary at all. In fact, he's friendly! Pleasant and personable, you might say.
All of us Baby Boomer's grew up with Casper, the Friendly Ghost. It's fair to say that quite a number of us teetered and tottered from house-to-house on Halloween trick-or-treating as Casper. Now, it might just have been an old sheet that Mom cut a couple of eye holes in, or it might be just the hard plastic mask, but no matter...doggone it, we were Casper, and not only that, we were friendly!
Oh I know, I know, there was a 'Casper' movie that came out in the mid 1990's as well. But I'm talking about the Casper we grew up with, the one who lived in Saturday Morning cartoonland along with Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, the Jetsons and so many more.
Unbeknownst to me (and many things are unbeknownst to me), Casper was actually 'born' back in the 1930's. A few decades later I remember getting Casper comic books (remember those three-packs of comics in clear plastic wrapper?) and the next thing you knew the friendly apparition was on TV.
And of course, while he was a friendly little fella, do you remember his Uncles? There was Fatso, Stretch and Stinky!
So while every other ghost was scary, weird, creepy, angry, odd, ugly and just plain persnickity, Casper was friendly. Congenial, you might say.
Happy Halloween!