Halloween Countdown - Day 9

Today's post begins with a different kind of Halloween music. This country music classic reached #10 on the Billboard charts in 1974.

Our postcard is another nicely embossed 1909 issue featuring the work of Ellen H. Clapsaddle. She was the nation's leading postcard artist around the turn of the 20th century. She moved to Germany to enhance her career by working more closely with her engravers and printers. When war broke out Clapsaddle lost everything and had no way to return to the United States. After the war's end in 1918 she was found wandering as a pauper. Her American benefactors returned with her but she never recovered from the war's emotional damage and died penniless in 1934.

And here is a fitting poem about Halloween by Carl Sandburg from his Chicago Poems, 1916.

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o’-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.