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halloween

The Halloween Ephemera Factory: An Empire Built on Orange Crepe Paper

The giant Halloween ephemera factory in Framingham, Mass., for many years churned out crepe paper and cut-outs that collectors go crazy for today.

Thousands worked for the Dennison Manufacturing Co., making Halloween costumes, pumpkin-themed party invitations, die-cut ghosts and orange-and-black table decorations.

Halloween ephemera from the 1920 Bogie book.

The company got its start in 1844 making paper jewelry boxes. Later it made merchandise tags. But the serious Halloween ephemera collector knows Dennison for producing oh-so-desirable Halloween party items from 1909 to the 1940s.

Dennison also made Bogie Books, retro-Halloween versions of Martha Stewart’s Living magazine. The Bogie Books showed the reader how to throw a successful Halloween party for adults. They included menus, ideas for games and many, many suggestions for decorations and costumes. All, of course, supplied by the Dennison Manufacturing Co.

Today, collectors use the Bogie Books as bibles of Halloween ephemera.

Dennison Discovers Halloween

Halloween began to take off as a holiday in the late 19^th century. Though trick-or-treating started in the 1920s, it didn’t really become ubiquitous until the 1950s.

Adult Halloween parties were then all the rage, and you could make a lot of money selling Halloween-themed costumes and decorations.

The Dennison factory in Framingham, which churned out tons of Halloween ephemera

The Dennison Manufacturing Co. saw the gold in Halloween ephemera. The 53-year-old company moved to Framingham in 1897 and rocketed to success, according to the Framingham Historical Society. Its factory made so many merchandise tags it gave Framingham the nickname ‘Tag City.’

By the turn of the century, Dennison employed 3,000 people, or about a third of the town’s population. They called its 16-acre campus ‘the Gold Coast.’

In 1909, Dennison started to make Halloween party items, timing the trend perfectly. Dennison became one of the two premier American companies selling Halloween ephemera. The other was the Beistle Company of Shippensburg, Pa.

Today, legions of collectors pay hundreds of dollars for vintage Halloween ephemera made by the two companies. For example, in 1928 Dennison sold a six-section paper table decoration called Hobgoblinville. It charged the then-steep price of $2.00, or about $28 in 2017. Recently it sold for $838.

Unfortunately for Framingham’s workforce, Dennison merged and moved to Pasadena, Calif. The name changed to Avery Dennison Corp.

Halloween Ephemera

Detail from the cover of the 1920 Bogie Book

Collectors especially appreciate the Dennison Bogie Books. “One thing I truly thank Dennison for was their nearly always annual publication of their Halloween Bogie Books,” wrote collector Mark Ledenbach.

Dennison used them as sales and marketing tools, but the collector finds them invaluable for determining the manufacture date of items.

Ledenbach manages a web site for the serious collector of vintage Halloween ephemera. He could barely contain his joy when he came upon an original 1915 Bogie Book with envelope. “OK, WOW!” he wrote. “For avid Halloween paper ephemera collectors, seeing this listing should cause your hearts to race and your sphincters to seize. Seeing this quality listing amongst so much eBay dreck made my day.”

The Bogie Book

The Bogie Book tells us a lot about 20^th century social life before World War II, especially for the upwardly mobile city dweller.

The 1920 book (click here to read it) gives party advice for simple menus, alcohol-free drinks and dancing or cards. Games and decorations seem childlike by today’s standards.

For example, the Bogie Book recommends a lively home party:

When your guests arrive the door should swing open and the hall should be entirely dark, except for a few very faint green lights that may be followed to the dressing rooms.

If your guests are not in costume, the hostess, dressed as a witch, should give each one a hat, a necktie or some other dress accessory to wear.

The business girl’s Halloween party, with H 175 lunch set

For a business girl’s Halloween party, the Bogie Book advises her to carefully prepare her decorations in advance. Crepe paper and cutouts decorate the chandelier and windows. Dennison thoughtfully supplies Lunch Sets (H 175 is featured above) for the table. Doughnuts, oranges or apples may be served ‘dressed up,’ while the menu includes fruit cocktail, chicken patties, potato chips, ice cream, individual cakes and coffee.

Perhaps the strikingly innocent entertainment explains the appeal of the era’s Halloween ephemera.

Fortune-Telling

Fortune-telling games played a big part in the evening festivities, according to the Bogie Book.

“The customs and superstitions that belong to this weird night are almost all connected in some way with future wedded bliss or material welfare,” instructed the 1920 Bogie Book. “Do not fail, therefore, at some time during the evening to have your guests bob for apples in a tub of water, peel apples in one continuous piece and throw the peelings over their left shoulders so that they may fall on the floor to form the initials of the future mate.”

Black cat cutouts

Halloween ephemera plays a big part in the party games. For example, in the game ‘The Witch’s Cats,’ ‘Cat Cut-outs H 35’ should be hidden about the room.

There should be one extra man (or possible there will be an extra girl). Announce that the witch has lost her nine cats and if one of them can be found by the person without a partner it will bring him good luck and he may dance with anyone he wishes. The deposed partner may in turn hunt for a black cat and so get another partner. If the party is large several people may hunt for cats at the same time, and so the cutting in will become quite lively.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Salem Witch Trials, or Still Raking It In After All These Years

People still can’t seem to get enough of the Salem witch trials, which remain a mainstay of popular culture more than three centuries after they started.

“Witchcraft at Salem Village,” in Pioneers in the Settlement of America, Vol. 1, by William A. Crafts

Writers and artists used the Salem witch trials to show why government persecutes the innocent, how the ignorant masses are manipulated or why people get caught up in hysteria. Or sometimes they just used the trials to entertain.

For more than a century, tourists to Salem, The Witch City, have been buying witch souvenirs and visiting witch houses.

A Salem gift shop

Why the continued fascination with the Salem witch trials? One reason is that a lot of people have ancestors involved in the hysteria. In addition to the 20 people tried and executed, magistrates indicted 200 people for witchcraft. The scope of the hysteria led to a multitude of descendants.

Salem Witch Trials in Literature

In 1953, playwright Arthur Miller visited Salem, Mass. He said he felt like the only person interested in the witch trials. He got that so wrong.

Almost as soon as the Salem witch hysteria subsided, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to justify killing 20 people. The Rev. Cotton Mather explained the devil used witchcraft to persecute the Puritan settlers. Five years after the trials, Judge Samuel Sewall wrote a confession apologizing for his role in them.

In 1820, Maine writer John Neal wrote the novel Rachel Dyer, one of the first about the trials.

In the two centuries since, hundreds if not thousands of plays, long poems and novels have grappled with the Salem witch trials.

Today, Amazon.com lists more than 600 available titles about the witch trials. They range from the erotic adventures of the Salem Snack Witch Trials to the scholarly Salem Possessed. The Social Origin of Witchcraft.. And they include the historical romance Salem’s Daughter, featuring the ravishingly beautiful Bristol Adams.

The trials turned up in two Harry Potter novels. And they appear on recordings, in television programs (yes, Bewitched!), in comic books, in video games and in cartoons (Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost).In 2002,Kirstie Alley and Shirley MacLaine starred in the film, The Salem Witch Trials.

Even Spider-Man tangled with the witch trials after he traveled to Salem to battle his nemesis Dr. Doom, who had help from Cotton Mather.

Descendants

Salem Witch House

In 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne published a short story, Young Goodman Brown, set during the witch trials. Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was a judge in the trials. Hawthorne added the ‘w’ to distance himself from his ancestor.

In 2008, the black metal band Ceremonial Castings recorded an album called Salem 1692. Two members of the band are also direct descendants of Hathorne. And Neil Peterson, bass guitarist for the band Curious Yello, is a descendent of Alice Parker, hanged as a witch.

A 1993 Disney film, Hocus Pocus, starred Sarah Jessica Parker as a witch hanged in Salem but returned in the 20th century. Parker later found out her 10th great-grandmother, Esther Elwell, was arrested for witchcraft but never tried.

Similarly, actor Tom Felton plays Draco Malfoy in the film adaptations of the Harry Potter novels. He is related to John Proctor, who was hanged after his trial.

Still Deadly After All These Years

Stories about the Salem witch trials spawned spin-offs on top of spin-offs.

In the 1930s, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft set many of his stories in Arkham, Mass., a fictional town founded by Salem witch trial refugees. His story The Dreams in the Witch House later became a play, two novels by Graham Masterton, a cable television show and a British horror film, Curse of the Crimson Altar.

In his play The Crucible, Miller used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for the persecution of alleged Communists by the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Miller himself was cited in contempt of Congress for refusing to name people he thought belonged to the Communist Party.

The Crucible was made into an opera and two films, one adapted by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

Art and Tchotchkes

During the colonial revival, photographs of the houses of the trials’ main players became popular reproductions. Rebecca Nurse, a respected grandmother hanged as a witch, lived in the house pictured below. It illustrated the 1892 book, Witchcraft Illustrated by Henrietta D. Kimball.

Today, the Rebecca Nurse Homestead is one of Salem’s many historic attractions that people can visit in the summer (for a fee, of course).

Also throughout the 19^th century, many artists illustrated the witch trials in paintings and in books.

“Witchcraft at Salem Village,” pictured at the top of the story, is one of the most famous depictions of the Salem witch trials.

Today, the Witch City attracts wiccan gatherings, Halloween celebrants and tourists to its creepy and comical witch museums. History lovers can also see the long-running playlet, Cry Innocent . Or they can take historic walking tours describing what happened and where.

In 1890, a Salem jeweler named Daniel Low began selling souvenir sterling “Witch” spoons to tourists.

Available through TeePublic.

Tourists can still buy witch spoons and other affordable mementos of the witch hysteria. They have a broad selection of shot glasses, refrigerator magnets, floating witch pens, Christmas tree ornaments, T-shirts, bumper stickers, tote bags and hoodies.

Photos: Salem Witch House By SalemPuritan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37921126; Rebecca Nurse house CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17061487

This story about the Salem witch trials was updated in 2023.

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Pope Night, or Colonial New England’s Version of Halloween

George Washington called Boston’s annual Pope Night celebration “ridiculous and childish.” But the working-class celebrants, especially the young men, loved the wild partying in the streets. It was the biggest holiday of the year (after all, the Puritans had banned Christmas).

Celebrated on November 5, Pope Night was an American version of England’s Guy Fawkes Day, and it was decidedly anti-Catholic. Fawkes, a Catholic partisan, had tried to blow up Parliament.

Plymouth, Mass., celebrated the first recorded Pope Night in 1623 when sailors lit a bonfire. The fire blazed out of control and burned down several nearby homes. That was so much fun the other seacoast towns took up the celebration. Pope Night spread to Marblehead, Newburyport and Salem in Massachusetts, Portsmouth in New Hampshire and New London in Connecticut. The festivities generally featured fires, drinking and mockery of elites and authorities.

Boston’s Pope Night

In Boston, the night started with two parades, one in the North End and one in the South End. Both featured an outsized effigy of the Pope, the devil or a hated political figure. Costumed revelers pulled the figure through the streets in a decorated cart, much like Mardi Gras.

Detail from a 1788 broadside showing Pope Night in Boston

The parades ended with the two sides meeting and brawling. The winning side would take the cart, the money and the effigies of the loser, then burn the effigies in a bonfire and spend the money on a feast. The North Enders would do it on Boston Common, the South Enders on Copps Hill. People were killed or maimed in the fighting, and the town only had a handful of constables who couldn’t control the mob.

In America, as in England, the holiday had political overtones: Americans had been fighting the Catholic French for decades. Anti-Catholic sentiment got a boost in 1774 when the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act. It guaranteed the free practice of the Catholic religion in Canada and granted the Ohio territory to Canada.

1777 map by William McFadden showing how Quebec encroached on the American colonies.

But Pope Night had further historical importance. The civic groups that staged the parades and the partying provided the structure and the leadership for resistance to the Stamp Act. In 1765, the Loyal Nine (predecessors to the Sons of Liberty) arranged the union of the North and South end mobs. The joined gang rioted against the Stamp Act, forcing stamp collector Andrew Oliver to resign and ransacking the mansion of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson.

Attack on Hutchinson’s house

Kissing the Devil

In 1821, a 70-year-old man recalled for the Boston Advertiser the carriages hauling the Pope. He called it “a large stage erected on wheels,” upon which a gorgeously attired Pope sat before a table scattered with playing cards. Nancy Dawson, a “female figure in an attitude of dancing,” stood behind him. The float also included an effigy of Admiral Byng, a British naval officer shot for refusing to fight, and a hideous devil covered with tar and feathers. Boys wearing dresses and trousers covered with tar and feathers danced around the Pope and kissed the devil.

In 1749, the Boston Gazette printed a notice about the “Pope’s Night Disaster.”

Last Monday, the 6th Instant, at Night, some of the Pope’s Attendance had some Supper as well as Money given ’em at a House in Town, one of the Company happen’d to swallow a Silver Spoon with his Victuals, marked IHS. Whoever it was is desired to return it when it comes to Hand, or if offer’d to any Body for Sale, ’tis desired it may be stop’d, and Notice given to the Printer.

In late 1775, Continental Army Commander-in-Chief George Washington wanted to win the support of French-Canadian Catholics as his army prepared to invade Canada. He also wanted to keep the colonies — including Catholic Maryland — united. Meanwhile, Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin were in France, persuading the French to support the American cause.

George Washington by John Trumbull

Then headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Washington put a stop to Pope Night. He called it ‘that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope.’ He called it improper ‘ at a time when we are soliciting, and have really obtained the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada.’

…[I]nstead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our brethren, as to them we are indebted for every happy success over the common enemy in Canada.

Death of Pope Night

Pope Night returned in 1776 and 1777, but then the French arrived to aid the Americans in the war. Pope Night came to an end. Even the revelers realized it would have been unseemly to mock the religion of the king who sent the money, men and arms that won the American Revolution.

The British surrendering to French and American forces at Yorktown. Painting by John Trumbull.

Pope Night died a richly deserved death — sort of. Two features lingered: bonfires and dressed-up boys going door-to-door. As the writer in 1821 recalled,

…boys in petticoats…swarmed in the streets and ran from house to house with little Popes in their hands, on pieces of board and shingle, the heads of which were carved out of small potatoes.

The boys asked for coins as they rang handbells and sang a song. It went,

Don’t you hear my little bell
Go chink, chink, chink?
Please to give me a little money
To buy my Pope some drink.

The tradition evolved into ‘Pork Night.’ Eventually it moved up a few days and became what we now know as Halloween.

If you enjoyed this story about Pope Night, you may also want to read about Christmas in New England here.

With thanks to Nutfield Genealogy and Boston 1775 This story was updated in 2023.

Map image: By William, 1750?-1836 — Engraver Faden – digitalgallery.nypl.org, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55159836.

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The Great Brinks Robbery of 1950: Not Quite the Perfect Crime

The Great Brinks Robbery was the biggest armed robbery in U.S. history at the time. Thieves vanished after stealing $2.7 million, leaving few clues. It was almost the perfect crime. Almost.

A detective examines the Brinks vault after the theft. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

It happened on Jan. 17, 1950 at the Brinks Armored Car depot in Boston’s North End. The gang of 11 that stole the money after two years of meticulous planning almost got away with it. They failed because they fell out over the division of the spoils. Police arrested all of them five days before the statute of limitations ended.

The Brinks Robbery

The idea for the heist came from Joseph ‘Big Joe’ McGinniss, but career criminal Anthony ‘Fats’ Pino. McGinness masterminded the crime. Pino also recruited a gang to watch the depot for 18 months to figure out when it held the most money.

The gang stole plans for the depot’s alarm system, and then returned them undetected. They also removed the cylinders from locks, one by one, and had a locksmith duplicate the keys. Planning for the Brinks robbery took two years and included six failed attempts.

North Terminal Garage, site of the Great Brinks Robbery

The gang wore outfits similar to Brinks uniforms – Navy pea coats and chauffeur’s caps – and rubber Halloween masks. At 6:55 p.m. on Jan. 17, 1950, seven of the gang members entered the counting room. They surprised the five employees and bound and gagged them face down on the floor.

The thieves cleaned out everything except the General Electric payroll. It took them only 35 minutes to load 14 canvas bags with a half ton of cash, coins, checks, securities and money orders. Two of the gang members waited outside in the getaway truck.

3 Clues

They left but three clues: a chauffeur’s cap, the adhesive tape used to gag the Brinks employees and the rope used to tie them up. No one was hurt. The thieves divided up some of the loot and promised each other they wouldn’t touch the money for six years so the statute of limitations would run out. Then they split up to establish alibis.

The tampered lock at the Brink’s building. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

They almost made it. Investigators had few leads and little solid evidence. Law enforcement officers interviewed hundreds of people who lived and worked near the Brinks depot and questioned known criminals. According to the FBI, “in the hours immediately following the robbery, the underworld began to feel the heat of the investigation.”

Police picked up and questioned well-known Boston hoodlums. From Boston, the FBI quickly spread the pressure to other cities.

“Veteran criminals throughout the United States found their activities during mid-January the subject of official inquiry,” the FBI reported.

The robbers’ truck was found cut to pieces in Stoughton, Mass., but it didn’t offer many clues. The FBI was flooded with unhelpful tips.

The Rat

One gang member blew it for all of them. Joseph ‘Specs’ O’Keefe left his loot with another member when he served a prison sentence for a different crime. While behind bars, he wrote angry letters to his cohorts demanding money and suggesting he might talk.

When O’Keefe got out of prison, Fats Pino sent a hit man to kill him. The hit man shot at O’Keefe with a machine gun in the Dorchester section of Boston. O’Keefe escaped with minor wounds and made a deal with the FBI to testify against the gang. All eight were caught and convicted. Two died before they were tried.

Police recovered only $58,000 of the $2.7 million stolen. The crime inspired at least four movies and two books, including The Story of the Great Brink’s Robbery, as Told by the FBI.

This story was updated in 2023.

Images: North Terminal Garage By Tim Pierce – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6572977.

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32 of New England’s Best Historical Halloween Events

[jpshare]You can stuff your face with candy on Halloween, or you can stuff your face with candy and do something interesting on Halloween. The New England Historical Society has 32 ideas for you (Click here to download).

We looked long and hard to find Halloween events for history lovers, and we came up with some good ones. We chose the best walking tours in New England’s biggest cities. We went off the beaten path to find fascinating presentations of local history with a Halloween spin. We cut through the crowds in Salem, Mass., to bring you the best interpretations of the Witch City’s storied past.

On Massachusetts’ South Shore, we learned the John Alden House (yes, that John Alden), is open for a house tour on Oct. 19. The house has been in the same family since John Alden was granted the property in 1620, and the house still doesn’t have plumbing, electrical or a modern kitchen.

In Portland, the oldest house on the peninsula is open for a visit. It was the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the author of “Haunted Houses.” In Western Massachusetts, author Edith Wharton’s mansion is the setting for a ghost tour. Vampires are definitely hip this year, with several scholarly presentations about New England’s 19th century vampire panic (hint: it had to do with tuberculosis).

Entire historic villages are open for All Hallow’s Eve, from Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire to the Falmouth Museums on the Green on Cape Cod.

Halloween history can be as recent as the last century. The Steel Yard in Providence will stage its annual iron pouring, a technique that goes back to the Iron Age but dwindled in America with the loss of manufacturing.

For all you history lovers out there, the New England Historical Society has found something for you this October. Click here for your guide to the 32 best historical Halloween events in New England.

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Zombies on Broadway Nearly Kills a Career

Movie poster for the Brown and Carney compedy duo film Zombies on Broadway.

The only thing scary about the 1945 film Zombies on Broadway was what it almost did to the career of Wally Brown, a Malden, Mass., native.

Movie poster for the Brown and Carney comedy duo film Zombies on Broadway.

Zombies on Broadway was supposed to be so bad it was good, but it was just … bad. (Unless you like that kind of thing.) The plot involved a comedy team looking for a real zombie to promote a Broadway nightclub called “The Zombie Hut.” With Bela Lugosi trying to turn a beautiful nightclub singer (of course) into a zombie. In the Caribbean.

“No laughing matter,” wrote one critic. “Any film in which a monkey gets the best jokes is in serious trouble indeed,” wrote another. He described the comedy team as “a subpar Abbott and Costello.

Brown was actually a very funny stand-up comedian. Audiences loved his routine. He’d launch breathlessly into a sentence on one subject and then suddenly change subjects, mid-word, never finishing a thought.

Post-Zombies on Broadway

RKO had actually signed Brown and former vaudevillian Alan Carney to emulate the wildly popular Abbott and Costello. RKO had decided Brown looked like Lou Costello and Carney like Bud Abbott, so they signed them to a contract. Their first effort together was a moneymaker. Though they weren’t very funny together, audiences also liked Zombies on Broadway well enough for it to turn a profit.

It was the sequel that caused RKO to drop Brown and Carney’s contract. Called Genius at Work, it also featured Lugosi, it was awful and it bombed.

Brown and Carney went their separate ways, Brown picking up supporting roles in film and television. They were reunited in Walt Disney’s Absent-Minded Professor. They were to appear together again in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but Wally Brown died suddenly before the movie was made.

We are indebted to Comedy-horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914-2008 by Bruce G. Hallenbeck and Military Comedy Films: A Critical Survey and Filmography of Hollywood Releases Since 1918 by Hal Erickson for information in this post.

This story updated in 2022.

Image: By The poster art can or could be obtained from RKO Radio Pictures., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9757318

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