Episode One Hundred - Halloween Blow Molds

Host Gregory Hallows, founder of the Halloween Preservation Society, shares a new series in the Preserve Halloween Archive. 

From the Archives 002 : A Brief History and Impact of Blow Molds

Check out this awesome website we found... Blow-Molded.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:26

There are some things that tell us Halloween has arrived the first cool breeze after a long summer, leaves beginning to gather along the curb, the smell of someone carving a pumpkin, a porch light glowing a little earlier each evening, and then almost without realizing it, you see one standing quietly beneath a maple tree, a smiling pumpkin three feet tall, its orange glow spilling softly across the lawn. A friendly ghost watches from beside the front steps. A black cat waits patiently near the flower bed. Nothing moves, nothing jumps, nothing screams. They simply glow. Warm, steady, welcoming. For generations of Americans, that quiet glow became one of the first unmistakable signs that Halloween had finally returned. Children looked for them from the backseat of the family car. Neighbors compared this year's display with last year's. Some families carefully unpacked the very same decorations every September, year after year, decade after decade. They became part of the neighborhood, part of childhood, part of Halloween itself. Today we call them blow molds, a curious name for something that has come to mean so much. Because these aren't simply hollow pieces of molded plastic, they are porch lights for October, beacons of autumn, guardians of front yards, and for many of us, they still welcome us home. On this episode, we open another drawer inside the Preserve Halloween Archive, not to admire plastic, but to discover how one of Halloween's simplest decorations became one of its most beloved traditions. Welcome back. I'm Gregory Hallows, and this is Preserve Halloween Podcast. Thank you once again for joining me inside the archive, where every artifact has a story. And sometimes that story begins in an artist studio, sometimes inside a factory, sometimes on the front porch of an ordinary American home. And on this episode, our artifact begins in all three places. At first glance, a Halloween blow mold doesn't seem particularly more remarkable. It's lightweight, it's mass-produced, it's made of plastic. You might even pass one at an antique mall without giving it much thought. I would not do that. I would probably buy it. But stop for a moment, really, really look at it. Notice the smile on the pumpkin, the friendly expression on the ghost, the warm glow from the light inside, and then ask yourself, why do so many people smile the instant they see one? Why have collectors spent decades rescuing them from garages, barn lofts, estate sales, and forgotten sheds? Why are families willing to repair cracked plastic, replace faded paint, and search for missing light cords just to see them glow one more October? Because blow molds are doing something much bigger than decorating a yard. They're preserving memories. And on this episode, we will discover how. So before plastic lit the night, this is what happened. Every tradition begins with something simpler. Long before Halloween blow molds appeared on American lawns, people still decorated just differently. In the 19th century, Halloween lived mostly indoors. Parlors became party rooms, crepe paper streamed from ceilings, paper bells, black cats, owls, jack-o'-lantern cutouts, autumn leaves, everything was temporary, and everything was meant to disappear after the celebration ended. I talk about this a lot as paper products. They were not supposed to last. But outside, decoration was much simpler. Real pumpkins, corn shocks, uh bundles of hay, perhaps a lantern hanging near the front door. Nature itself became the decoration, and that made sense. Halloween was still closely tied to the harvest. The season supplied nearly everything families needed. But America was changing. The suburbs were growing, front yards were becoming larger, electricity reached more homes every year, and families began spending more time outside not working. And manufacturers noticed, they began asking a simple question. What if Halloween decorations were not limited to just the inside, to the parlor? What if October could greet visitors before they even reached the front door? And that question would quietly transform American neighborhoods. And one of the reasons why this change came about didn't begin with Halloween at all. It began with plastic. And now today plastic surrounds us, you know, everywhere, but we rarely think about it unless, you know, recycling or something like that. Um, but in the middle of the 20th century, plastic represented possibility. Manufacturers experimented with it constantly. New materials promised lighter products, cheaper production, brighter colors, greater durability. And among these innovations was a manufacturing process known as blow molding. And it that may sound complicated, but it really isn't. So you take a small tube of softened plastic, place it inside a metal mold, force air into it, and this just similar to how a glass blower shapes molten glass. This compressed air pushes the softened plastic outward until it fills every detail of the mold. And when that plastic cools, the mold opens and out comes a hollow figure. Very lightweight, strong, ready to be painted, ready to hold a light bulb, ready to become Halloween. Um so it's difficult to exactly pinpoint the moment when Halloween moved from the front porch to the front yard. Like many of our traditions, this did not happen all at once. One family would add a lighted pumpkin, another would place a ghost on the walkway, and then a neighbor would notice. And the following October, that neighbor would add one of their own. And year after year, one decoration became two, two became five, five became the entire yard. And without anyone announcing it, neighborhoods began changing. The decorations themselves weren't complicated. No motors, no speakers, no synchronized lights, no computer controls, not like a lot of the stuff you see now. Uh these were just molded plastic and a light bulb. And throw in your imagination. And after sunset, the magic happened. These warm orange pumpkins greeted visitors. Ghosts seemed almost friendly beneath the porch lights. Black cats watched quietly from flower beds. Witches stood guard beside front doors. And children walking from house to house didn't see a decoration, they saw a character. And every front yard became another chapter in Halloween's story. So let's let's do our imagine uh portion of the podcast. Let's imagine something. It's late October, 1978, dinner just ended, the dishes are washed, the television is on somewhere inside the house. Outside, the sun has slipped behind the trees, and one by one, porch lights begin to glow. But so do the decorations. There's a pumpkin near the sidewalk, there's a ghost by the front steps, a smiling witch beside the mailbox, and none of these things flash or they don't talk. And the light's not really bright. It's soft, it's steady, it's comforting. And for a child riding through a neighborhood in the backseat of the family station wagon, these glowing figures became landmarks. There's the Johnsons, they have their pumpkin up. Hey, look, the Miller family bought a new ghost. That house always has the best decorations. These conversations happened all across America. And not because these decorations were expensive or hard to get, it's because they were familiar, they were reliable. And every September, maybe earlier, they returned like old friends and without realizing it, these families were creating memories that would last a lifetime. Ask someone today why they love vintage blow molds. Not many will talk about the manufacturers or the plastic or the collecting. They will describe the neighborhood they grew up in, their grandparents' porch, a walk on Halloween night. And that's what nostalgia is. It's not remembering the object itself, it's remembering where the object was and who stood beside you when you saw it, the memories. So as more companies began to embrace blow molding, Halloween changed in a very subtle way, but it was profound. Most outdoor displays disappeared after dark because, you know, not lit up. But a carved pumpkin, you know, it only has so much light, it's very small. Uh paper decorations had to be kept inside, but blow molds were created for nighttime. Every one of them contained at least one simple light socket. Uh, some two, some three. Uh, nothing elaborate, just an ordinary incandescent bulb, but it was enough to transform this hollow plastic into something alive. Manufacturers realized they were not just simply selling decorations, they were changed, they were selling the light, the difference. You know, it's a very different thing to see a lit up uh blow mold. The light changed everything. A pumpkin looked welcoming, a ghost looked mysterious, and these entire neighborhoods would take on this warm glow throughout October. And maybe for the first time, you know, Halloween wasn't just celebrated on October 31st. It became something you lived with all month all month long. Families would switch on these lights right after supper, neighbors would admire them during evening walks, children could count how many pumpkins they could spot glowing while riding by in the car. Halloween became more visible night after night, we week after week, long before trick-or-treating ever began, Halloween was invading the neighborhood. Um so if you're someone like me who collects Halloween blow molds, there's there's a list of companies, right? There's union, there's Empire, General Foam. Um But the thing about blow molds in the history, it's it's not a straight line, it's a family tree. These companies would grow, they would merge, they would close, some would sell their molds, some would purchase designs, they would license artwork, and sometimes a familiar pumpkin would appear under one company name, and then another manufacturer would produce it later that looked almost exactly the same. And this is very confusing. Um, but it's also one of the most fun parts of doing all this and collecting is trying to figure out who made what. Uh, when Union Products ceased producing many of its seasonal decorations, these molds didn't just simp, they didn't vanish. Uh general general foam would make them. Uh others found life under different ownership. Empire's decorations uh did the same thing, they had a similar transition as manufacturing changed and companies evolved. Uh, in some cases, the decoration in your yard may trace its history through multiple manufacturers. Uh, this is a reminder that Halloween tradition often survives because someone chooses to continue it. We we are going to talk about that forever. The company might change, the factory may change, the country where it's made or state where it's made may change, but there will always be smiling pumpkins greeting another generation. And that continuity is part of what uh collectors love and want to preserve. It's not just the plastic, it's the lineage, it's the family tree. Um, and one of the best resources that I have found for understanding the history and learning about blow blow molds is blowmolds.com. I'll put that link in the notes for the podcast so you guys can check it out. But it is an invaluable website for information. Um, I think the website started as just another collector's passion, and it grow it grew into one of the best uh online reference uh points for blow molds. And they don't just have Halloween, they're I believe it's also uh Christmas and some other stuff, but uh collectors can use it to identify manufacturers, compare production years, study the different variations in the colors, they can uh trace company history and learn how these uh familiar decorations evolved as the molds changed hands. And uh it's very similar to a field guide for a bird watcher, I guess. Uh, the more you study, the more you start to notice details that you didn't notice before. And for someone just starting out, these resources will transform you know, feeling like you're just guessing about everything into actual knowledge. So, you know, check out that website. It's it's really, really good. And it's awesome that it's input from the community, and um it's I don't know, it's hard to explain how cool that website is. So um let's let's just do a little brief dive into some of the bigger bigger names in the manufacturers. Um one of the first and most influential was Union Products. This was uh founded in Massachusetts, they became synonymous with molded plastic lawn ornaments. Uh, many people remember Union for their pink flamingos, and collectors know them for something much larger. Every autumn they would fill uh front porches in America with pumpkins and ghosts and witches and black hats and skulls, jack-o'-lanterns. Not because Halloween demanded it, but because families demanded it. Uh, because after World War II, suburban neighborhoods began to expand, and so did the desire to decorate them for holidays. And Union Products understood that people wanted Halloween to greet them before they ever knocked on the front door. They wanted the home to announce October lives here, and then soon other manufacturers joined. Uh, Empire Plastics was another giant in seasonal decorations. Their blow molds introduced generations of children to friendly Halloween characters that remain very highly collectible today. Uh, General Foam Plastics would later continue many of these familiar designs, helping keep these beloved decorations in productions long after earlier manufacturers disappeared. And then you have Carolina Enterprises, and um there's some other regional uh companies. There's not a lot, though, honestly. Um, no, no single one of these companies, you know, owned October, but each one of them helped light it up. And one of those people, it's funny that with blow molds, you know, in other art there's lots of names, and other uh products, there's like names of we talked about in postcards. We had the artist names people knew like instantly. But with blow molds, there's really only one name that stands out or is even known when it comes to collecting blow molds. Um and if you're a Halloween collector, when you get a when you are looking or get a new blow mold or whatever, you don't instantly plug it in, right? You look at it, you check out uh you know it's not even the paint that you check out first. It's not really anything. One of the first things we as collectors do is turn the the blow mold over. Look at the bottom, try to find the marks, try to find out where it was manufactured and by who. Find a production date. Maybe there's a mold number. Maybe some of them have the city and state where they were made. But every once in a while you see the signature. And one of my goals as a collector and a person who loves Halloween is to own every one of this guy's uh designs. Um there on many of I have I I'm gonna take a picture of it for uh probably I think I'm gonna do it for Patreon when I upload this, but I have an original the metal mold or part of the the I it's not a mold actually, it's one of the metal sheets that you use to spray paint on the the color. It's for the mouth and the eyes, but it is a blow mold from I actually own the blow mold that what it was used for. Um it's my big pumpkin, but uh Don Featherstone one of is probably the only name in blow mold history that exists, other than the manufacturer's names, which is very weird to me. Uh, he's the only blow mold designer that I know of that put his own name and signature into uh the mold itself. He didn't stamp them or sign it, you know, whatever. He it's part of the mold. And to me, that's crazy because he's the only one that ever did it. Um and it's cool to see because somebody didn't just design it anonymously, like he he went out of his way to put his name on on the the mold itself, which is just nuts, um, which I love because he was proud of it, and we know the name still, right? So uh Don Featherstone, a lot of people knew him first for uh his the flamingo because he's the one that was what he was mostly known for was the flamingo in the yard that is you know famous. Everybody remembers that. Uh he worked for Union Products, and he was one of the most influential sculptors of molded plastic decorations in American history, and of course, his most famous creation was the pink flamingo. Um, but he spent many, many years shaping the appearance of American holidays Christmas, Easter, patriotic celebrations, and of course, Halloween. Now, I don't know exactly how many featherstone designs there are, but I think it's not very many, maybe 10 or so that I know of. Um, and that's crazy that uh there's only that few Halloween stuff. But uh, if you ever are looking at blow molds, flip it around and see if you see this guy's giant signature on it. I'll I'll try to take a close-up of mine. I think I have three Featherstone uh blow molds, and I I would love to own them all, but they get uh harder and harder to find. Um, so I I might not ever get them all, but that's okay. Um but the thing is the cool thing about these designs was families all across America would place these same designs on their lawn, and children would grow up thinking that's just what Halloween looked like. So these artists produced millions of memories, and that's a crazy legacy, right? Um it's just nuts to think that it's just become part of Halloween, just the the image that we think of. And it's also crazy how much blow molds are sought after, especially some of these old ones. They're they're not easy to get, uh, and they aren't really made as much as they used to be. There are still some like I I have the Cracker Barrel haunted house from this year, and I still feel a little ashamed that I bought it because I really I could have spent that money on an an old blow mold, but it just got me. I walked in, uh we were traveling, and I saw it, and I was like, hey, is this do you have the box or is this the only thing? Is this the only one you have? And they're like, Yeah, that's the only one we got. Didn't come in a box. Like it is what it is. And I said, Hey, can you, you know, hold it behind the counter for me until I eat and I'll think about whether or not to get it. And my wife said, Why don't you just get it? Like, I know you love this stuff. Just just get it. Because you're gonna think about it the whole way home. So she ended up buying it for me, and I bought her for her coffee shop the frog uh with the little witch hat. He looks like he's from uh like a DD frog kind of. Uh if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about. But um so by the 1960s, you could drive through almost any suburban neighborhood in October and you would start recognizing these faces, and not your neighbors' faces, but I mean probably you would recognize pumpkins and ghosts and black cats and witches and skulls and all the things that you think of stereotypically about Halloween. And because manufacturers were sending these same characters into the community across all across the US, something unique started to happen. Uh, shared nostalgia. No matter where you lived, you have a story of your neighborhood pumpkin or your family that was the one that just went all out on decorating. And the thing is, that didn't just happen in your neighborhood, that happened everywhere. And knowing that no matter where you grew up, anywhere in the country, odds are you probably saw uh the same decorations that I did. No matter if you live, you know, on the west coast or up north. I grew up in the south, so we saw the same, we saw the same products, which you know, it just reminds us that Halloween is very, very deeply personal for a lot of us, but it's also shared, it's a shared collective uh memory, and you know, we want to keep it around. So let's let's do another uh let's do another imagination. So close your eyes. Imagine you're walking through a factory in New England. It's August, people are still thinking about beaches and summer vacations, a back-to-school shopping and all that stuff. But inside a factory, it's already Halloween. They've got to manufacture these things, right? Uh, workers would inspect them by hand. Some of them would get bright orange paint, others would wait for the black that you have to spray around the eyes and the mouth. Somebody was putting in the lights, somebody was packing the finished decorations in the boxes, then they had to label them. And these weren't going to museums or to collectors, they were going to hardware stores and department stores and five and dimes all across America. That's where you could get this stuff. Um, and no one really that was making these knew where they would go. They, you know, one might end up in Iowa at a farmhouse, one might end up in Massachusetts, uh, one might end up at the house of a very young family who is celebrating Halloween for the first time ever. And the the crazy thing about manufacturing and and manufacturing traditions really is that the people who create these products hardly ever get to see the memories attached to them and the memories that they're helping make. But year after year, they would do exactly that. And they didn't get you know a ton of recognition, they didn't get any uh you know accolades, they just did it. And decades later, collectors like us are rescuing this work from flea markets, and we're restoring them and replacing the sockets, uh, putting in new lights, the cords, all that stuff, and putting these pumpkins right back onto our porches so the memories continue, right? Which is awesome. So, and the thing that's crazy is uh for decades this rhythm rarely changed. Every autumn factories would produce more uh blow molds, retailers would unpack them, families would add another decoration to their yard, but children started to grow up. But they would buy blow molds of their own because they remember them from their childhood, and we just assumed blow molds would be there all the time. But the problem is even beloved traditions change, manufacturing shifts, consumer tastes evolve, uh retailers would demand lower prices, production would move overseas, companies would continue to merge, some companies struggled and just disappeared altogether. Factories that once produced millions of these seasonal decorations would empty. Sometimes they got thrown away. Uh, sometimes they were rescued. And not everybody noticed this, it just just happened. And one day you walk into the store in October and there's not any blow molds. It's like, what is going on? They just uh they weren't there. But that the thing about nostalgia and and missing something, and uh when an object disappears, what happens? People start to miss it. It might not happen immediately, but sometimes years later, someone cleaning out a garage will find this old blow mold, or somebody will remember the blow mold that their grandma's house had every October. People start searching antique stores, and this is how collectors are born. And it's not because so much they want antiques or I mean maybe now it's different, but people really didn't collect things, I think, for value. Uh they collected the memories that were associated with them, and a lot of that has changed, uh, which is sad. But you know, if you bought a pumpkin in 1975, that pumpkin carries 50 years of history, 50 years of some family's history, and you can't measure that value uh in in monetary really. You measure it in memories, to me. Um so it's just it's crazy how the collector world has changed. Um and there's still collectors out there that that are just they want to find stuff and they they want to share it with the world, and those collectors are awesome. Um, and there's a collector's some collectors I know that bought a blow mold, the mold itself, and then now they manufacture new of the haunted house blow mold. I I have one of the red ones, but I think they've made two or three other colors, which is awesome, and they're not very expensive. Um and if you've never owned one of the haunted house blow molds that everybody loves, this is an affordable way to get your own. And it's the exact mold um from the past, which is cool, and hopefully, you know, more people. I hope there's some more blow mold, like molds themselves out there to be discovered and and and saved. Because I would love to see a lot of this stuff again like newer. Um, but every blow mold, no matter what, is it the fun part about it is they're just mysteries waiting to be solved. Because let's say you find an old blow mold at a flea market, right? You want to identify it, you want to figure out what year it's from, you want to you know get all this information, and once you've done that, the focus shifts to preserving these blow molds. So, how do you do that? Um, one of the biggest things is keep it out of direct sunlight. I know for a lot of us, we live in places so hot that there's even risk of these blow molds melting. Um and it makes the plastic brittle and then they just don't last long. Uh you just have to take care of store them in a cool, dry place, avoid stacking it like heavy stuff on top of them. It's all like simple common sense, right? Uh, you can clean them with soap and water. Don't use chemicals if you can. Um when you need to replace like the light bulb, put in something new. They still you can still buy uh the lights at Christmas time, is usually when you can find them, but they sell the the lights for the blow molds, I think at Walmart and you know, just mainstream box stores. Um so because what our what our goal is with all this stuff, we don't want to erase the age of it. That's impossible. What do we want to do is help the decoration survive for another generation so someone else can discover these and see these, and um they might become the caretaker after you're around. So if you are in an antique mall and you pass by Halloween blow mold, you know, maybe it's your job to preserve it, maybe it's your job to save it. Um the thing is every generation inherits pieces of Halloween or or buys them or adds them to a collection. Sometimes their traditions, sometimes their story, sometimes their objects, like these blow molds. Uh something that has spent decades quietly standing watch over countless trick-or-treaters deserves to be preserved. And the question isn't whether these decorations matter, the question is what happens next. If you find one in an antique store, will it spend another 20 years there or five years or 10 years before somebody uh maybe discards it because they think it's worthless? Or will you rescue it? Will you clean it? Will you repair it? Will you replace the bulb? Will you set it outside on the porch again? Every collector answers these questions differently. Some will build these humongous displays and collect everything they can get their hands on. Others only collect a few pieces that mean you know a lot to them, or it's based on you know this the room they have. Some people only collect the super rarest examples of everything ever made, and some just want what they had when they were a kid. Like they just pour over pictures and find the exact blow molds that were in the pictures of them as you know, kids dressed up. There's no wrong answer. Um, every decoration that we preserve, every blow mold we preserve is another piece of Halloween that survives. Um, so somebody's gonna open an old cardboard box in the garage, the tape's yellow, the corners are worn, across the top, written in a fading black marker, it just says Halloween. You open it up, wrapped inside in an old newspaper, is a pumpkin smiling back at you. Maybe looks a little dull, maybe the cords tangled, maybe the bulb is missing, and all you can do is smile. Wondering, you know, where did that thing go? You might have forgotten where it was or mislabeled the box or just got you know put away in in and not really known what to do with. You can restore that memory just by putting it back out. Um you may put it out and a kid walks by and looks, you know, at their parents and just is excited and points at it, and they don't realize that decoration is older than their parents themselves, probably. They don't know where it was made, they don't know anything about union products, they don't know Empire, they don't know Don Featherstone. None of that matters to them. All that matters in that moment is that decoration was doing exactly what it was created to do, it is making Halloween feel like Halloween. And these traditions survive not because uh they're written in books, even though some that's that's part of it. Um most of these things survive essentially because someone takes the time to plug them back in or share them or just not throw them away. Um, so why does this object deserve to be preserved? That's the essential question of every podcast. It's not because blow molds are collectible now, although there are a lot that are. Um, some of them have become valuable, some are not. Um, they belong in the archive because they changed the way America experienced Halloween. They greeted you outside on the curb at the front door before you even step foot in the house. These blow molds greeted you with Halloween. They transformed neighborhoods into glowing celebrations of our favorite holiday. They welcomed trick-or-treaters, they inspired children, they created traditions and connected generations of people and proved that something as ordinary as molded plastic can become a part of a family's history. And that's why they deserve a permanent place inside the Preserve Halloween archive. Not because they're made of plastic, they're made of memories. If you've never owned a Halloween blow mold, go find one. Visit an antique mall, walk slow, pay attention, look for that orange. But you don't have to buy the most expensive blow mold. There is go to stores now. There, there are some places that are putting out blow molds that are new. Um, just just pick out something that catches your eye. Um, and who cares how much it's worth, honestly. Um if you're buying an old one, a more important question is who owned this before me? Whose memories am I choosing to take on myself and protect? Um, and then look at it. See who made it, look at a look at a manufacturer's date. Maybe you find one of those Don Featherstone uh molds, and then take it home, put it out every Halloween, put it out forever, as long as you possibly can, and make memories for other people in your neighborhood. Um and someone else eventually might inherit it from you, and thanks to your care, it'll still be glowing, right? Uh so if you want to learn more about blow molds, Mark Ledenbach has a wonderful book called Halloween Blow Molds, a collector's guide. Uh Mark Ledenbach is an essential part of um I have quite wait, let me see. I know I have a few of his books. Uh, I think mine is just collectibles in general. I'll need to look up this Halloween blow molds book. Um there's honest, you can I think you can look up the US patent and trademark records and find blow mold information. Uh lots of collectors of blow molds all over the internet. It's uh it's super easy to find um information and other people who love this stuff as much as you. It's just a simple search. Um, so as we close this drawer, the pumpkin still glows, the ghost still waits patiently beside the porch. Another October has come, another generation has admired these things, another memory has been made, and that is the true legacy of the Halloween blow mold. It's not the plastic, it's not the paint, it is the legacy of continuing to do what they have always done, and that is reminding us that Halloween has come home to us. So, thank you for stopping by. I look forward to your next visit. Until next time, stay strange, stay curious, stay spooky, and always preserve Halloween.