Halloween 2018

90-Year-Old Halloween Decorations
At Heart Of Ohio Collection

One family has been collecting Halloween art and decorations since the 1920s.
The resulting collection is breathtaking.

LAKEWOOD, OH — When Victoria Orban looks at her walls, covered in every imaginable Halloween decoration, she sees history. She sees family. That's because her exhaustive collection of stickers, faux spider webs, cardboard witches, and other spooky wall-hanging art has been passed from generation to generation in her family.
In the 1920s, in Cleveland, Orban's great-great paternal uncle, Albert Rothacker, and his wife, Elsie, began throwing elaborate Halloween parties. The swinging affairs included matching pumpkins, wall art, and fake skulls, perfect accoutrements for the season. The couple almost assuredly did not know their seasonal ornaments would become family heirlooms.

Those decorations did become precious, passed along to the Rothacker descendants and then their descendants descendants. Now, the oldest pieces are divvied up among the surviving family members. Victoria Orban keeps her great-great aunt's and uncle's spirits alive in her Lakewood house. She also adds her own contemporary decorations to the collection.

"It's so cool to know that here we are, all these decades later, and we're doing something they loved to do," Orban said.
Nearly a century later, Orban carries on her family's partying tradition, throwing shindigs each year and going all out in decorating her house with the same decorations her relatives, Albert and Elsie, used. "The oldest decoration we have is dated 1926," Orban told Patch.
In a serendipitous twist, Albert and Elsie dated each decoration they purchased. They jotted down where it came from and when they acquired it. It was a bookkeeping measure that the early Rothackers passed onto their descendants.

Orban said she and the rest of her family now carefully put the same information on the back of each of their decorations. That means there are decades worth of baubles, trinkets, knickknacks and more catalogued in Orban's collection. And each year, Orban and the other surviving Rothackers cover their walls in those Halloween decorations. When the season is over, those decorations are carefully filed away and stored for posterity.
"We're very careful with some decorations. I use special boxes. Nothing gets folded, everything is stacked. It's like a large puzzle," Orban noted. "I keep everything in corresponding size piles. They're delicately wrapped and in boxes without air. I start with the largest and then do the mediums and the smalls."

The Rothacker decorations are spread around houses in Ohio, Florida, Illinois, and Virginia. Each family member has one or two pieces from Albert and Elsie's 1920s collection. Each family member has also augmented their collection with their own flair.
For instance, Orban's decorations are filled with pieces acquired through her familial grocery store connections. Victoria's father and grandfather both worked in grocery stores.
"Working in grocery business, he would take end cap decorations," she said, before noting that buying things up isn't the only way to get the pieces. "We craft things. We acquire things. For instance, Great Lakes Brewing carries Nosferatu. I cut things out from those cases. Even the CVS in Lakewood gave me some of their signage."
Some of the relatives have had to improvise for Halloween. "One of my cousins, when he was on active development for the Navy, decorated his rack in the submarine," Orban said with fond remembrance.

With two little ones of her own, Orban is already looking to the future of this Halloween tradition.
"This is a long-standing family tradition. Halloween is so near and dear to my heart. As we grow our family, I try to get them involved. Looking at how they view these, it's magical," she said. She added that she's already started grabbing up decorations for them and storing them in a separate place. Her children's collections have already begun in earnest — with decorations dated to 2018.

Who knows where those decorations will eventually end up?

Link to post on Lakewood Patch 

https://patch.com/ohio/lakewood-oh/90-year-old-halloween-decorations-heart-ohio-collection