Cambridge City Council Feared Trick-Filled Treats

It wasn’t just typical seasonal ambiance that left a tinge of terror in the air on Halloween 1982. Fears of razor-filled apples and needle-studded candy bars left parents and city officials concerned that children would be in for more tricks than treats as they went door-to-door that night.

After seven victims fell prey to the “Tylenol Killer,” who added cyanide to eight bottles of the medication in the Chicago area, the nation witnessed an outbreak of copy-cat attacks throughout the month of October. Other tampering incidents affected household products such as Visine eye drops and orange juice—but the biggest concern as the month came to a close was the seasonal staple: candy.

In response to fears of Halloween candy tampering, nine Massachusetts towns threatened a blanket ban on trick or treating.

Then-mayor Alfred E. Vellucci strongly supported regulating Halloween festivities, despite objections that such rules were potentially alarmist and would be difficult to enforce.

“This is the time in the century when kids aren’t safe in the streets anymore,” he told The Crimson shortly before the city council trick or treat debate. “The old people in the city would be doing the kids a favor.”

The original City Council proposal, introduced by former Councillor Walter J. Sullivan, urged the body to ban trick or treating. The remaining eight council members, however, did not vote to pass the resolution until it was scaled back to just encourage “parents to closely supervise their children.” The Boston City Council had passed a similar resolution earlier that week.

At the council meeting, Sullivan, who proposed that local schools host parties to replace traditional trick or treating pursuits, stressed that the need for protective regulations was not based solely on the recent Tylenol attacks. He argued that the outbreak of product tampering would plant similar ideas “in a sick person’s mind” during Halloween, and noted that trick-filled treats had been a problem in years past, citing an incident of someone who “put stuff in candy bars” in North Cambridge 30 years earlier.

After the amended resolution passed, Vellucci organized volunteer “trick or treat patrols,” staffed by Cambridge and Harvard police, local teachers and concerned citizens, to safeguard the streets of Cambridge.

According to local political analyst Glenn S. Koocher ’71, the 1982 push to regulate holiday festivities is in keeping with the “typical pandering” of the city council, which he recently said is governed by a “control mentality” with “no logic or fairness to it.”

He added, however, that “everybody was concerned about packages that weren’t packed securely after the Tylenol problem.”

Though there were no reported incidents of candy contamination in Cambridge on Halloween that year, a Crimson poll of Harvard professors residing in Cambridge found that few neighborhood children participated in the night’s events.

—Staff writer Nicole G. White can be reached at nwhite@fas.harvard.edu.