Halloween Craze: the Story of A Childhood Memory Blown to Incredible Proportions

By Pauline Masson

10 photos – scroll through

The Halloween craze that we enjoy in Pacific started in 1990 when a 36-year-old  Pacific High School English teacher decided to buy himself a souvenir of a favorite childhood memory.

Dan McClain went to Target and bought himself an eight-foot tall inflatable witch. He set it up on his front lawn at South Payne Street and Indian Pride Drive. When he hooked it up to electricity it lit up and bobbed about, to the delight of the neighborhood kids.

It was everything a boy who grew up in the inner city could have dreamed. Every Halloween in the North St. Louis neighborhood where he grew up behavior rules for pre-teens boys went out the window. Young boys had the run of the neighborhood. And in the PHS teacher’s memory boys had more fun in one evening than they had all year.

“We took our pillow cases and went to every house,” Dan recalled. “But not just the houses. There was a corner tavern on almost every corner. We would go into every tavern, go up to the tables and tell our jokes. If the patrons were in a good mood they’d toss us nickel. But if they were in a really good mood, we might get a quarter. I mean it was a great night for a group of boys.”

The 1990 Halloween witch in the yard was such a success that the following year Dan went back to Target and bought an inflatable creature that he could best describe as as a ghoulie monster. 

The lighted show on the lawn was going so well that December he went back to Target and bought an inflatable Santa Claus, which he set up in the center of the lawn.

The following October he found himself back at Target looking for more interesting inflatables. Target happened to have two inflatable purple and black spiders that cost of $29.99 each. He bought both and would have bought more but two was all they had.

“There just weren’t that many inflatables on the market back then,” Dan said. 

That would change, as Pacific residents of the past couple of decades can attest. The following year, in 1992, he found the inflatable spiders that he liked so well in a catalogue and bought a dozen. For Christmas that year he bought an inflatable Mrs. Claus, a snow man, a reindeer and his favorite inflatable of all time, a 20-foot tall nutcracker.

“It was the most wonderful thing you ever saw,” Dan said. “But it only lasted one season. It was so tall that wouldn’t stay inflated and kept toppling over.”

And so it went. The variety of inflatables on the market grew and the inflatable menagerie in Dan’s yard grew apace.

Spurred on by the neighborhood acceptance of Halloween and Christmas displays Dan went looking for inflatables that signified St. Patrick’s Day, July fourth and Thanksgiving 

By the time he retired from teaching the Halloween show in his yard had all the panache of a special effect movie.  There were witches, ghosts, dragons, black cats, spiders, warlocks, skeletons, mummies, vampires and the grim reaper.

At the very front of the yard, along the sidewalk, the giant spiders were the first to begin to pulse and take life at dusk. At around 6 p.m. and it was time for the city of ghosts and goblins to come alive.

One by one they shook their parachute-like skin and raised themselves to their full height, full of light and personality. There were so many things it was hard for the eye to take them all in.

This year in 2021, Halloween is still Dan’s favorite holiday. His collection of inflatables totals 275 lighted holiday inflatables, including 120 Halloween (80 in the yard), 70 Christmas, 25 Easter and 20 each for St. Patrick’s Day, July fourth and Thanksgiving.

He keeps them all stored in color coded plastic tubs and stacked in the garage in the order in which they will be displayed: green for St. Patrick’s day; paisley pink, blue and yellow for Easter; Red for July Fourth; brown for Thanksgiving, and blue for Christmas. Those five take up one wall. The entire opposite wall is taken up with the orange and purple tubs that hold the Halloween inflatables.

On he day before the display is to go live, Dan takes down the tubs and with the help of young Matt Gray lays each inflatable where he wants it to stand.

On Saturday morning the display crew shows up – Tim Richardson, his sons Ryan and Colton, Jerry Eversmeyer and his son Joey, Dan’s former students Luke Keifall and Mitch Duncan, Greg Rulon and his crew of Tuffy and Jose, Ben King and Sam Brocato. It takes four hours to hook up the entire lot.

One celebrity crew member Frank Rogan, a volunteer from 1990, shows up for the pizza feed that the volunteer party enjoys.

“He always makes sure he hooks up at least one figure so he is still part of the crew,” Dan said.

The day after the holiday, the entire crew shows up, dismantles the display, stores the inflatables in their tubs and stacks them in the garage.

Traditionally, on Halloween night Kathy Richardson and Julie George arrive to hand out candy to trick or treaters. But this year, because Halloween is on Sunday, and the downtown Pacific Monsterfest is on Saturday, the McClain candy give-away has been expanded.

“We’ll be open for business for two days, both Saturday and Sunday,” Dan said. “Kathy and Julie insisted on it. They said Monsterfest in on Saturday. Some of the revelers will come here after they leave downtown.”