This old Halloween postcard shows the silhouette of a retro witch and black cat flying an old propeller airplane across a red moon in an orange sky. The little cat is very dapper with a bow tie as he gazes down at the ground while the witch is hurling them through the air in what was a modern “contraption” in the early 1900s. The cat was probably wishing for the conventional broom stick.
The card wishes “Greetings for Halloween” and was quite modern in its day … or night, evoking the feelings of people for the new invention of the “aeroplane”.
Published by the Sam Gabriel Co. circa 1907 – 1915. This postcard is one of the Halloween Series No. 122. The 122 series consisted of a few postcards that all had embossed black silhouette figures on yellow or orange backgrounds with red or yellow accents and borders. And all have the words “Greetings for Halloween”.
Postcards in the Retro Halloween Series 122:
If you look closely you can see that the shapes of the letters in the words on the postcards are all the same. This suggests that the words were drawn once and placed on the postcards as the design allowed. There is only a very small difference between the tall postcards and the wide ones. On the tall postcards the tail of the first “L” hangs past the tail of the second. And on the wide cards the first “L” is shorter. Also, the “G” on the wide postcards is a bit taller and squarer than on the tall ones and the “E”s all seem a bit more embellished than the straighter ones on the tall cards.
I find it interesting that the cat in the airplane and in the automobile has a bow-tie and jacket and the witch has a long ribbon on her hat.
