The trick-or-treaters scamper up the steps for their goodies, all of them dressed as firefighters or police. This week’s seasonal cover on The New Yorker is as pointed as candy corn and just as sweet.

What better Halloween costumes than those honoring our “local heroes” as depicted by cover designer Peter de Seve?

As a child, I never remember donning any such outfit; I only wore ghost sheets or devil suits or witch’s masks and hats – something scary that made me look like a monster. Year after year, when playmates would sprinkle glitter in their hair and skip through the neighborhood as a fairy princess or ballerina, I’d drag chains around my feet, limping along as Frankenstein or a skeleton or a one-eyed hunchback.

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, I was in my prime as a trick-or-treater and loved Halloween when I could scare myself – and anyone else – silly. Seems I went around for months quoting James Whitcomb Riley’s “An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out.”

In between Halloweens, I watched in horror – slinking down in my seat and covering my eyes – every science fiction movie about space invaders or blobs that ate Chicago. The three-dimensional movies, when we wore colored glasses, were the scariest of all, though short-lived in popularity.

The thing was, those childhood experiences revolved around fiction, and we knew it. Aliens from Mars were not going to land spaceships in our back yards. Dracula was not real; Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were.

Hobgoblins didn’t exist, so we really weren’t frightened. We just pretended to be.

Yet in school back then, there were truly scary films, those showing the effects of fallout from nuclear explosions: a mushroom cloud followed by winds more terrific than tornadoes, and a final scene showing parched land and scorched trees.

In the early days of the Cold War, we students were led in drills, practicing for an emergency we assumed would never come. The threat was real, we were told, as teachers described from government pamphlets how long someone could live in a fallout shelter or – in our case – storm cellar; how long the contamination outside would last.

But I wonder how “real” the possibility of nuclear war appeared to us youngsters, 8 or 10 years old at the time, when Saturday matinee newsreels bored us into leaving our seats for the popcorn and candy counter, only to return as the next scary show began. I wonder if perhaps we considered it all fiction.

Today’s youngsters, on the other hand, know the raw difference between real and imaginary. They have learned fact can be far more terrifying than fiction.

They can’t hide from newsreels, and they need no Three-D glasses.

And, unfortunately, they can’t pretend on Halloween there’s really no such thing as the bogeyman.