The Slice: When a coveted reporter’s notebook comes in handy

Report your trick-or-treat headcount via phone message or email tonight and I’ll post the results on The Slice Blog dark and early Tuesday morning.

Be sure to tell me the neighborhood where you live.

Let’s move on.

Let’s hope she is better at math than history or geography: Ted Redman’s wife was in a bank branch conducting a bit of business. The teller noticed Joan’s English accent and asked about her connection to the sceptered isle.

Joan said something about feeling cut off from her home country on the far side of the Atlantic.

Then the teller told Joan she could always head back East and visit the part of her native land here on this continent.

Huh?

“After some questioning it was revealed that the girl thought that New England was some entity on the East Coast that is part of England.”

This may make you crave one: When Charlie Greenwood reads the usual advice about not handing out homemade treats on Halloween, he remembers what his mother used to do.

“On Halloween, she would get out the deep fat fryer and start making doughnuts and hand them to the kids as they came to the door. They wouldn’t even make it into the bag. When you’re handed a hot doughnut what are you going to do? Gobble it down immediately.”

It was a different time.

Kids today: “A few years ago on Halloween night we had the usual trick-or-treaters and the activity was almost at a halt, which was good as we were almost out of candy,” wrote Zeno Keeling. “The doorbell rang and when I answered there stood four teenagers. I would guess about seventh or eighth graders. I gave each a couple of candies but ran out when I came to the fourth. I apologized and said that we had run out of candy. Just as though it had been planned, they spoke almost in unison, ‘You want some of ours?’

“When I hear people speak of teenagers in a deprecating manner I am always reminded of these four and am forced to think they they are a pretty good group.”

Lines on your resume that nobody else has: Jim Richardson delivered the Spokane Daily Chronicle in Smelterville back around 1971. He had 33 customers.

Today’s Slice question: What do Spokane area women want that’s different from what women everywhere want?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Karen Botker doesn’t look at the list of ingredients in a store-bought pumpkin pie because she already feels guilty enough about not having made it herself.