Kindly Witch And Haunted Houses

from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune September 24, 1973

The same invaluable tool which makes pdf documents great to use, their search ability, is what also exposes it as fraught with errors. Simply typing "Gundella the witch" in a Google Archives search isn't enough for these fickle search engines and document readers because sometimes -- hell, even half the time -- Gundella is skipped over in the text of articles that I find while manually browsing that the search function passed over. I don't know if it's because it's so uncommon a name (There was also a French woman born around 1036 [which the article states: she is no longer alive!] who was married to an admiral and had a son named Gilbert that pops up in many searches.) or due to the fact that many of the scans are barely legible and the typeface is horrid but those are the difficulties of searching databases. All right, I'm getting too worked up over a lady's professional "stage" name and the folly of my pinning it down to dates and events.

This article by Helen Griffith in her Around The Town column from the September 24, 1973 edition of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune relates to a previous post about Gundella's Halloween fundraiser for Joanne Berkowitz, a little girl who had an orthodontic deformity and needed extensive surgery to correct the issues. The benefit, appropriately held at a banquet hall called Tombstone Hollow, raised $807 of the $1,500 needed and a second fundraiser was planned to cover the difference.

The sent invitation and a sample of the menu are as follows:

"You're invited to attend

A party that's the living end

There'll be ghosts and goblins there

Hideous things beyond compare

You MUST wear a costume... make it a dilly

Be it ugly, or gorgeous, or just plain silly

Follow the map to where 'X' marks the spot

Be there promptly at nine on the dot

Our menu will be a thing of delight

Although it may haunt you for many a night

We'll howl and we'll dance till the break of day

At the rooster's crow we'll ride away

When the sun comes up not a one will be seen

Except a tongue-tied frog saying HALLOWEEN!"

And notables from the menu:

-Bat's Blood Soup (tomato soup)
-Bandaged Lady Fingers (hot dogs in crescent rolls)
-Liver Head (carved liver sausage in the shape of a head!)
-Cheese Head
-Scrambled Brain Sandwiches (hamburger and onion)
-Rattle Snake Burgers
-Soylent Green
-Vampire's Delight (punch)