Photography by Francis Scheidegger, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri
Just as the May Co.’s Christmas windows have gone the way of the pterodactyl, so has the practice of community-wide window painting for Halloween. Our Instagrammy 21st-century aesthetics leave no room for weird, clumsy freehand artwork on central business district shopfronts. And teenagers painting the windows, with their drippy paintbrushes trailing white and orange paint all over those precious Vitrolite tiles? Zut alors! But in 1952, no one freaked about that kind of stuff, as this photo proves. It doesn’t matter that the bats on the front of this jeweler’s shop are almost all head and no wings. Or that the witch is riding a pitchfork. Or that one of the ghosts sort of resembles Florida. The rest of the window murals were equally and wonderfully strange: ghouls playing poker; a ghost performing a matrimonial ceremony between a pumpkin and a witch; a night scene in the country where four ghosts circle-danced as a skeleton played a hoedown on a fiddle and a big-nosed moon peeked over a hill like Kilroy. Alas, we say. A world that dictates that all ghosts must resemble perfect smoke puffs, rather than Florida—or Idaho, as the case may be—is a world infinitely more boring, and one where our poor, cramped imaginations suffer as they’re curbed in the name of curation.
