Bet you can't guess who said this and when

Read this and see if you can tell who said it and when, then scroll down to the footnote for the answer:

"We used to get into the real spirit of Halloween, you know, the spooky, scary stuff. We'd find some old haunted house and go prowling around for some ghosts and stuff... I'm afraid Halloween is different nowadays; all the wonderful spooky hobgoblin atmosphere - that's all changed. Can't help feeling a little sad seeing the joys of your childhood disappearing in a changing world. Halloween just isn't exciting anymore."[1]

One of the wonderful things about radio time travel is discovering how much we are alike across generations. Halloweens past were very much like today and entailed jack-o-lanterns, trick-or-treat, parties, ghosts, pranks, haunted houses, and a very palpable nostalgia.

Halloween has changed dramatically even since I was child into more of an adult-oriented observance, with commensurate objections from some conservative religious quarters. (I understand it's now the third-larges retail event of the year, just behind Christmas and Mother's Day.)

I come from very fundamentalist roots, but there was no need when I was a boy to raise a fuss over pleasant little mythologies. Ghosts and goblins were tolerated as benign diversions.[2]

Listen to some Halloween Old Time Radio here:
http://www.oldtimeradiofans.com/halloween-old-time-radio-shows.php ➚

[1]
That was Ozzie speaking on Ozzie and Harriet, October 31, 1948. You can hear that epiose at the link above.

If Ozzie was 30 when that was written and broadcast (just guessing), then this 1948 episode refers to collective memories from perhaps 20 years earlier. In fact, Ozzie makes a joke comparing 1948's Halloween with "1925 Chicago," by which he means Prohibition and tommy guns and flappers. The audience laughs because they know the benign Halloween pranks of 1948 are no different from those of 1925.

Holiday episodes from the 40s-50s are often very reflective and nostalgic with a knowing nod to their naiveté.

Are old-timey movies and TV and radio shows naive? Sure. The subjects are tame by most standards, the problems created and solved in 1/2 hour (nothing new there), the jokes easily accessible by all ages, very little to offend. But they had problems like we do, of all sorts, they just dealt with them differently. There's a lot of good that comes from publicly addressing social issues in movies and TV, but but it doesn't always solve them. Much of that will always happen behind closed doors, in the privacy of the home, regardless of how much public scrutiny there is.

[2]

And the magical myths of Christmas were embraced. My mom remembers her pastor when she was little dressing up as Santa for the children. My Grandma Grandy (Ethel Grandy, my mom's mom), believed in Santa until she was 11 years old; on Christmas Eve, her father would actually get on the roof, stomp around and jingle sleigh bells. 

Remember, that was in the day when horses and sleighs and bells were commonplace, and the nearest neighbor might be acres away. There are still homes and families like that, but the simple times that sustained a little girl's belief in Santa until she was 11, those days are gone.