It’s still around here somewhere. Seems I come across it every few years, or twenty. But can I find it today? No! Too bad, because it’s in color. All I have is this black and white shot made somewhere along the line.

For this and all the rest, click for larger view.

I made the calendar during my salad days. I did it for Anne. It was 1965, she was in school up at UC Santa Barbara and I was in Redondo Beach, between things . . .  though between “what” and “what” I didn’t know. Thus, salad days.*

I was living at a place called simply known by its address, “109.” I’d been to school, learned a trade, worked a job, but now was back to wondering how things would go. Due to lifestyle on the road, my driver’s license had been revoked, limiting my getting around and finding work.  My roommate at 109 called it my “year on the couch.” He said he had an uncle that did that, then got up and became a lawyer.

But I didn’t have any interest in law.

Rather, love.

My heart was with Anne, far away. It would be all through May and half of June before I’d see her again. So I sat down at the kitchen table, made this calendar, and put it in the mail. She loved it, of course. A year later we were married. So it must have worked.

That marriage was 50 years ago next Wednesday . . . which is why I bring it up now.

But there’s more. When we married, that little calendar was one of the few things she brought along. So I got it back. Not that I wanted it back, but there was a time when it came in handy.

It was some three years later and I had been recommended to interview for the job as Art Director at Surfer Magazine. At the time I was fairly new to graphic design, a field I’d discovered and was teaching myself on the side. Any samples of work I had to show were sparse at best. Casting about, I came across the calendar and threw it in the bag. In the end, that was one of the pieces that most caught the publisher John Severson’s attention.

There was a cleverness, he said, a youthfulness, and it had HUMOR!

So, that little labor of love at the kitchen table during my year on the couch at the hang-out called “109” got me two things: a wife, and a job! The job lasted nine years, the marriage, as I said, 50 . . . so far.

All this, and a lot more, is in the new book Our Lives Together, the Early Years.

Here’s the spread with the calendar, along with Anne and a college friend, a year before we were married.

That’s my “tapestry” on the porch of 109, painted on the back of an old rug. The place was sort of a hang out for friends, never locked, and a center for many things, including some very intense ping pong. That’s me with eye on the ball.

At the top is a candid shot of me if there ever was one. It’s symbolic of the period, formative, but still unknown. On the facing page is me (right) and our friend Hugh Claudy, now passed, and his place (below, left) where I also spent a lot of time. It was there I did my first paintings, nailing canvases to his closet door for an easel. But all that’s another story.

With much more in the book.

__________

*Salad Days, from Wikapedia: a Shakespearean idiomatic expression to refer to a youthful time, accompanied by the inexperience, enthusiasm, idealism, innocence, or indiscretion that one associates with a young person.

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Our Lives Together, Available Now

Full of black and white photos, many classic and candid, and with stories to match (also classic), 140 pages. Great entertainment and inspiration. Just $20.

For a taste of other topics, and for ordering info click here.
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