Above is the Kresge's department store ad that ran in the Lorain Journal on October 20, 1954.
Apparently, it's pretty early in the mass-produced Halloween costume era – or at least Kresge's wasn't carrying any licensed characters that year. There's no Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, etc. Instead we get some generic costumes: clown, devil, skeleton, panda, rabbit, witch, monkey, pirate, red fox (not the comedian), gypsy, frog, dragon, kangaroo, and lion.
What – no cowboy?
There are two fairy tale types: Cinderella, and Red Riding Hood. Walt Disney's Cinderella had come out in 1950, so it might have been a licensed costume – but I doubt it.
I've tried to figure out who or what 'Jocko' was. I think he's supposed to be an organ grinder's monkey.
Since children's TV shows at that time consisted largely of outer space adventure series, there is one spaceman costume: Planet Patrol. There wasn't a childrens TV show with that name (at that time, anyway) so I'm guessing it's a knockoff of Space Patrol, a show that ran from 1950 to 1955.
Here's what the costume looked like, courtesy of the Halloween Museum website. It's pretty close to what is depicted in the ad.
4 comments:
Can't say we ever had store-bought costumes. One thing for sure... Your winter coat had to fit over top of it.
Candy? Anything, with sugar was my favorite. Our dentist was on our usual Hallowe'en run. He gave out the stickiest, most sugary candy of anybody we visited. Drumming up business, I suppose.
I still have some of his fillings!
I was down in my parents basement the other day and I found 2 old Star Wars Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker costumes from the late "70s from when I was a kid.I didn't open them up as I was looking for something else.But I bet they are as brittle as toffy candy.I'll have to check them out the next time I'm over there.
I don't remember what I wore on Halloween back in the 50s, but I imagine it was one of those store-bought costumes, which had to fit over layers of insulation. It seems to me that we endured freezing rain on most Halloweens, but that's probably just selective memory.
In my yout, I.e., the 50s, Halloween costumes were homemade affairs. One year, I decided to go as the "Headless Explorer" because I didn't have one of Washington Irving 's horses, but I did have a plastic pith helmet, some shirt cardboard to serve as a neck and pedestal for the helmet (colored with red drips for that severed head effect) and an old shirt which I could button over my head and poke peepholes into for navigational purposes.
All this is a long way of saying that I didn't like nor want Chunky candy in my stash of collected treats. Why? 'Cause the "chunk " in Chunky was a bunch of nuts (not peanuts which would have been OK) but bitter walnuts and pecans and, God forbid, raisins.
Plus, , lengthwise, Chunkys were short and cost a whole nickel.
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