Halloween ‘creatures’ make comeback

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

This year’s Harvest Moon Festival downtown included some great memories for the many local residents who remember seeing (or being) one of Judy Geary’s Halloween “creatures.”

With some good-natured prodding from Larry Mengerink of Mengerink’s Source for Sports, Geary refurbished a number of the amazing costumes she began making more than four decades ago for family Halloween celebrations.

Geary began making her unique Halloween creations in 1963 when she was still a teenager. Suffice it to say that the Geary family was big on Halloween, with the family residence on Keplar Street festooned with spooky decorations that included a giant spider operated by ropes that crawled back and forth on the roof of the home.

The celebration, at its peak, included 100 people and 55 unique creature costumes created by Geary, with much of the hand sewing work done by her mother, Mary, while her father, Floyd, provided enthusiasm and moral support. “He was a huge part of it,” Geary said of her dad, who died in 1993. The big Halloween celebration ended a year later, in 1994.

The retired banking employee credited her parents for giving her the support to do the costumes, as well as many other creative endeavors. “They allowed me to do things that most people’s parents wouldn’t allow their kids to do,” Geary said.

The Geary Halloween events were, to all intents, performance art, as we know it today, with Geary providing the often scary and sometimes beautiful costumes (and occasionally both) and local children and adults performing inside them.

Creating the costumes was a multi-step process, Geary said, noting that she would get an idea for a costume and then gather items that would be used to create it – something that could take a couple of years.

The underpinnings for the costumes were old, damaged PAL football uniforms — shoulder pads, etc. — provided by Mengerink over the years, while Geary used all kinds of items to finish them off, using upside down tomato kegs for the taller costumes, while decorating them with worms from the sporting goods department and other items she found in local stores.

But after the costumes were “built,” it was up to the amateur actors inside to complete the process. “I build them the best I can; I give them (the actors) the best I’ve got for them to work with and they bring the rest of it to life,” Geary said. “I can walk out through it (the celebration) and it’s not mine anymore; it belongs to the people who come and the people who play (the creatures).”

It was Mengerink who first brought up the idea of bringing out some of the costumes again for people to enjoy.

“Larry talked to me last year about doing it, but costume pieces and parts were strewn all over then and I didn’t have the time to get things back together,” Geary noted. Although she spends much of her time caring for a myriad of animals she has adopted over the years, Geary said she told Mengerink she would work on getting costumes ready for this year.

“I owe him big time,” Geary said of Mengerink’s providing items for the costumes, adding that she thought she would only get five or six costumes ready, but ended up with around 15, and a number of people who volunteered to get back in them to reprise their former “roles” or create new ones.

Mengerink said seeing the costumes again brought back good memories for him and for those who used to don them during the Geary Halloween celebrations. “I knew everyone would enjoy them,” Mengerink said, adding that many people said they came downtown just to see the costumes. “I can’t thank her enough for doing it.”

Meanwhile, while Geary admits she enjoyed seeing the costumes used again, it’s anybody’s guess whether they’ll be back for next year’s downtown Harvest Moon Festival.

“I’m not doing it for downtown development, I’m not pushing things,” she said. “I want them to just do what they do for the fun of it.”