Woolworth's Halloween Ad 1961

For all you Baby Boomers out there, here's an ad that ran in the Lorain Journal on Thursday, October 26, 1961, a few days before Halloween – exactly 50 years ago today. (Give it a click so you can read it.)

It's funny seeing Halloween costumes in the ad that I know that we had. I've mentioned before in this blog that we had quite a stash of those lightweight masks with eye holes (and small mouth slits) that had an elastic band that kept it on your head. Inevitably the mask would crack where the hole for the elastic band was, and the durned thing wouldn't stay on your head.

We definitely had the Fred Flintstone and Huckleberry Hound masks. I'm sure we had the matching outfits too, but I don't remember them too well – probably because we often wore a coat over the whole thing if it was a chilly night.

Amazingly, you can still find these vintage costumes on Ebay once in a while.

Here's a bunch of vintage Hanna-Barbera masks currently on Ebay. They were found in the basement of a long-closed department store.

Huck and Peter Potamus seemed to have fared the best in terms of being faithful to their appearance in the cartoons. Yogi Bear and Top Cat are hilariously off-model color-wise!