Automotive Calendars: The Ephemera That Keeps On Giving

It probably comes as no secret to those who read my periodic articles here on CC that I have a tendency to save stuff. By stuff I am not talking about money, seeds, or lost dogs; although in fact, I do a pretty good job of saving two out of the three things on that list. You can figure out which one is number three.

I could add ephemera to that list and then there’d be three out of four that I’m pretty good at. Ephemera describes items that were created with the intent of only being useful for a short time before being cast aside. At this point, you’re thinking “1987 Yugo” and of course you’d be right. But really, if anyone had ever produced a Yugo calendar, that would be the kind of ephemera that I’m talking about. I was reminded of my fondness for ephemera a while ago when I found myself explaining the concept of “advertising calendar” to someone who (it should obvious) was born in the 21st century.

The particular calendar in question was this spiffy one sporting 12 glorious full color photos of antique tractors. I had scooped up this gem during a visit to a local auto parts store and naturally found a place to hang it once I got home. And of course, once it was hanging I got the opportunity to explain what it was. Not exactly what, as that would only be necessary for people born in the last dozen years, and from what I can tell they’re as hopeless with “calendar” as they are about that round thing with the two pointy bits and the numbers 1 – 12 on it. Actually, the question was more about “Why?“. Why would anyone possibly care about this awkward paper grid that takes up space and needs to be manually manipulated in order to offer even minimal performance?

I guess it’s one of those things that you’d have to have been there – there being the 20th century or before – in order to appreciate.  Well, I was there, and I appreciate. And I’ve saved quite a few of these things over the years because they’re attractive and they remind me of things.

As I thought about the function of this rather quotidian device, I started to wonder just how far back does the “automotive calendar” in particular go.  Have they had these things as long as there have been commercial efforts to sell cars?  Let’s find out.

Image from The Old Car Manual Project. All 12 months and the rest of this 1939 Chevrolet dealer calendar is posted there.

Three Types of Automotive Calendars: First, the Ones with Cars

Let’s establish the lay of the land for automotive calendars. There seem to be three types of these calendars from back in the day.  One is the calendar that might have been distributed by a local company selling products of interest to the automotive industry or automotive consumers. These would be items given for free to customers and that featured the producer’s range of products. An example of which is what’s seen in the above example from 1939. This is essentially a brochure for 1939 Chevrolets laid out as 12 pictures over the year.

Going back further in time, the oldest brand-specific car calendar I could find online is this Ford Model T example from what would appear to be 1918. I say “appear” since there’s a chance that this may not be an original artifact from 107 years ago. It could be an advertisement that has had a calendar stuck onto it in an attempt to create something more interesting than a simple advertising poster. Or, it could be that originally the actual calendar pages hung below the illustration (not covering up part of the image, which seems strange) and a modern hand has conveniently re-arranged things to make it all fit in a frame. Original calendars given their rip off a page and throw it away nature seem to be some of the most ephemeral of all ephemera. So it’s hard to tell nowadays what is an authentic survivor and what might be a full or partial fabrication.

Second, the Ones with Original Artwork

The second type is a calendar that carries some type of original artwork that brings to mind the manufacturer’s product.  Often the point is to show the product – such as tires – in use.

This Firestone Tire calendar from 1911 is one of the earliest I’ve been able to locate. It’s no doubt similar to calendars produced by other tire companies such as Michelin. As we’ve discussed before, Michelin was big on advertising and promotion from its earliest days in the late 19th century.

1916 advertising painting by Albert Fernand-Renault.

 

Yeah, still pretty creepy. This particular illustration reminds me of Princess Leia and Jabba the Hutt in a good mood. Nevertheless, Michelin surely must have made calendars, although I have yet to find any of the old ones online.

The relative obscurity of very old calendars underscores their nature as ephemera. Promotional calendars were not items meant to be saved, and true to that point, most were simply tossed like yesterday’s newspaper once their initial use was completed. And why not? They were free to the user, and no doubt next year’s calendar would be as easily obtainable as this now finished year’s. Toss it and move on.

The illustration is of a Chinese emperor (possibly Emperor Wu from the Tang Dynasty, 560 – 578 AD) being visited by a cloud-full of female figures. Gas station owners in China in the 1920s were apparently into some different kind of stuff than their American and European counterparts at that time.

 

That’s fine, I get that.  Although what if no one saved these things?  Then we wouldn’t be able to marvel at this 1923 Socony calendar from China. In the early 20th century Socony – literally an acronym for “Standard Oil Company of New York – had extensive oil exploration operations in China and also retail sales of kerosene for lighting. As a consumer product with dealers all over a huge country, Socony’s China operations naturally turned to promotional materials such as calendars for spreading its good word.

In the early 1930s Socony would merge with the Vacuum Oil Company – founded in Rochester, NY just after the Civil War – to form the Standard-Vacuum Oil Company which took charge of Vacuum’s registered trademarks of Mobil, Pegasus, and Gargoyle. Ultimately Standard-Vacuum made the pretty reasonable (in my opinion) choice to change its name to Mobil.

Note the gargoyle. In the early years, the red gargoyle was a much a symbol of Mobil as pegasus later was.

 

This didn’t happen before Vacuum’s U.S. operations had produced an excellent set of calendars. The above example, from 1924, features pin-up art from an unknown artist. This painting, consistent with the Odalisque and the orientalism craze of the 19th and early 20th century was probably already a bit old and nostalgic even in 1924.

Then again, a little nostalgia and a little sex have long been an attractive advertising recipe. This gas station calendar was likely just racy enough to offer a bit of a thrill to Gomer and Goober‘s dads down at the fillin’ station.  Yes, I know it’s kind of jarring to think about pin up art in Mayberry or the fact that Gomer and Goober did not arise from Chaos, the primordial void, but instead had parents (and let’s just wager that they weren’t nuclear physicists since those kind of fancy folk then as now stayed closer to Raleigh never getting much closer than Mount Pilot); but such are the cold hard facts of life. Best to face up to them – all of them – sooner or later.

Third: The Ones You’ve Been Waiting For

The turn to pin up art brings us to a discussion of what is essentially the third type of automotive calendar.

I chose this one for the station wagon. For a larger array of these 1950s – 1960s NAPA calendars, visit Just a Car Guy‘s blog, where this image comes from.

 

But first, we need to talk about Dogs Playing Poker.

You may be familiar with this famous painting, or one of its many variations, from spending time staring at it from across the bar in some old men’s dive bar. I personally fell in love with it at the Tic-Toc Lounge.

Painting “Tic Toc Lounge”, Copyright 2025 by Jeffrey L. Neumann. Check out Neumann’s website/gallery as he’s a fantastic artist who focuses on subjects such as mid-century American roadside attractions and old cars…subjects dear to many readers’ hearts. Newspaper ad from the Springfield (Massachusetts) Morning Union, 12/31/1965.

 

By the time I got to the Tic-Toc in Springfield – a regular destination when I was in college and a great place to stop for a couple of drinks before loading Amtrak-arriving visitors into the LeSabre and making the drive back up 91 to Amherst – live entertainment (at least the paid kind) was long gone. Still, the neon was great, the bourbon arrived frequently and was served in those small glasses that I like, and of course there were the dogs playing poker.

(There were also pickled eggs, looking like specimens from the Mütter Museum, but there was no way I was going to touch those.)

I was probably too young and naive at the time to know that the Tic-Toc’s canine masterpiece wasn’t an original.  Not that I really cared, I just thought that it was cool and funky.  It was substantially yellowed; but then again so was everything else inside the Tic-Toc given its endless marination in cigarette smoke.

What I didn’t know is that Dogs Playing Poker was the work of New York artist Cassius “Kash” Coolidge and that it was originally created in 1903. The actual title of the iconic painting is “A Friend in Need” and it was part of a series of 16 oil paintings that Coolidge produced for the Brown & Bigelow publishing company. Brown & Bigelow specialized (actually, they still exist!) in publishing advertising calendars that utilized commissioned artwork. The company also licensed the art for any number of other purposes. Aside from calendar art, Coolidge’s work was reproduced in various sizes for use in a variety of settings. Dive bars ended up (for reasons unknown…and you probably have enough other things to do today that you’d rather I not try to figure those out and report upon them here) being one of those settings.

Coolidge’s work was fantastically popular in its time, and many would argue that it remains so to this day. It largely established publisher Brown & Bigelow as the dominant force in promotional publishing, which itself was a part of an increasingly important and absolutely booming component of the American economy. An often-quoted business statistic is that between 1880 and 1920, the nation’s expenditures on advertising grew from $200 million annually to nearly $3 billion annually (see Daniel Pope’s The Making of Modern Advertising, pg. 22 – 23).  Between 1900 and 1920, the U.S. Census reported that the number of individuals employed as “Advertising Agents and Salesmen” roughly doubled from 12,000 in 1900 to 25,000 in 1920 (Historical Statistics of the United States Colonial Times to 1970, pg. 142).  That’s a lot of people out there pushing Dogs Playing Poker – and as we shall soon see, other art as calendars from companies such as Louis F. Dow and Gerlach-Barklow.

Things Come in Threes, Naturally

This brings us to another “three things”. 1) There were most certainly quite a few Dogs Playing Poker calendars produced in the early 20th Century (99% of which are lost to history). 2) If you were a Brown & Bigelow customer you could choose between something with dogs or something with a naked woman (by either Rolf Armstrong, or Gil Elvgren, two of Brown & Bigelow’s stable of pinup artists) to advertise your product. 3) You now know the origin and importance of Dogs Playing Poker.

A salesman’s sample of a Brown & Bigelow calendar with artwork by Gil Elvgren.

 

Not to mention the dogs’ somewhat more risque competitors for the automotive customer’s attention.

This example illustrates how artwork was applied somewhat generically to calendars. I suspect that this eBay offering is also a modern fabrication (like possibly the 1918 Model T example earlier) since it does not indicate a specific Phillips 66 location and instead references the general purpose Highway 66 nostalgia fixation. I think that this is supposed to evoke something and is not an actual something. The Gil Elvgren artwork is real.

 

Most of these companies were founded in the early 20th century and most had become defunct by the 1970s. As noted earlier, Brown & Bigelow soldiers on, although it doesn’t currently offer calendars.

Today…

The practice of creating commercial calendars is still alive, albeit in rather diminished form. Nowadays, the old calendar companies that still exist have been subsumed by more modern “promotional products” producers.  To the extent that there is such a thing as a “major” producer of paper calendars here in the U.S. it appears that Ashgrove Marketing and Hotline Products fit that bill.  Ashgrove turns out to be the producer of the Antique Tractors calendar pictured earlier in this post.  It also produces the current line of NAPA calendars.

Hotline has the rights to some (perhaps all) of the old Brown & Bigelow library of artwork. Hotline seems to be part of the Koozie Group, which originally was part of BiC, selling pens as promotional products. All of these places seem to be held by various venture firms and we should not be surprised if any of them end up being turned into entities that sell AI-described energy drinks and cannabis vapes in the near future. A quick browse of Hotline’s site indicates that aside from an extensive collection of Norman Rockwell art (Brown & Bigelow had the rights to much of Norman Rockwell’s images) much of the calendar artwork leans toward photos of cute cats and sunsets with Jack Handey/Steward Smalley-esque affirmations. Such I guess are modern tastes.

Today’s advertising calendar market does not seem to be anywhere as rich a place for the licensing of original artwork en mass as it was in the past. One exception to this is the Landin Calendarios company of San Antonio. Landin is the producer of what’s been said to be the West’s most popular calendar, featuring the artwork of Jesus Helguera. Helguera, who has been dead since 1971, has had his work printed on untold numbers of Landin-produced calendars hanging in bars, restaurants, etc. throughout the Southwest.

I used to work with a fellow who had an impressive array of Helguera calendars – also mostly from Tucson’s Hotel Congress – displayed in his office. You can order these calendars online and have an office just like Mike’s…although I suggest visiting the hotel in Tucson and buying them directly. It’s worth the trip.

 

It also hangs in Massachusetts, where I’ve saved and continue to admire several pieces of Helguera ephemera. Helguera’s work echoes much of the calendar pinup art from the glory days of advertising calendars with its emphasis on attractive models, animals, humorous situations, and of course vehicles.

Chickens! Squirrels! Trucks! Oh yeah, and lovely ladies. Cuídame Virgencita, Jesus Helguera, 1962.

 

I feel that Helguera’s work sometimes recalls that of American artist Art Frahm, who is the creator of the lede image in this post.  Frahm is probably best known for his pinup art – originally produced as calendar art – featuring ladies who have suffered catastrophic and ill-timed undergarment failures (usually while carrying groceries and with a small pet dog in tow).

Why is she holding that branch of…some plant. This would make much more sense if it were celery and we could see her ankles.

 

But Frahm produced other series as well (licensed to the Joseph C. Hoover and Sons publishing company).  He did a lot of work for the Boy Scouts of America (just like Norman Rockwell) and produced several other series of works that did not feature women with their underwear around their ankles. Notable of this non-pinup work was his traveling hobo series and his safety series, of which the above is an example (as is the lede image).

Curiously…if you flip back to the pinup art (I’ll give you a second to do that), you’ll see that aside from more modest clothing and a lack of visible underwear, the two series sometimes share much in common. The pet dog, the side-glancing (nearly leering) cop, and often a grown up lady. In the above example, she’s very nearly carrying celery; although it seems actually to be some other plant. Frahm often included vehicles in his pictures, although their precise make and model were usually unclear.  I don’t entirely recognize the make of the school bus in the above. Likewise the truck in the opening image.

All this is in contrast to modern calendars which mostly rely upon photographs and when they’re about cars they are really about cars. Often, the cars are “classics” (such as in the NAPA calendar, above) or with somewhat surprising frequency, tractors.

This means that I now have two 2025 calendars about antique tractors.

Not that tractors haven’t always been a calendar artwork subject. I suspect though that back in 1919, tractor calendars were basically intended to serve an audience that had a vested interest in tractors. Like farmers.

NAPA still seems to have sufficient faith in the promotional calendar business such that there’s a whole page on their website devoted to promotional materials that various NAPA stores can order. My closest local NAPA had only ordered calendars, and then only “Tractors” and “Classics”. As for calendars depicting original, commissioned/licensed art they seem to only have a series called “Junkyard”. Junkyard features the art of Dale Klee who apparently specializes in painting cars and junkyards.  Mr. Klee is clearly talented, but I for one would like to see a junkyard calendar featuring photographs (yes, that’s a shout out to CC’s own Jim Klein).

In our current reality everyone carries anything that’s important to them in their pockets on a little screen.  That’s where you have your photos, favorite artwork, your calendar, your clock. And as they say, does anybody really know what time it is, does anybody really care? Probably not, since it seems that simply knowing the time or date is less important than being told of what’s due at a specific time or date…something that the devices are quite good at.

This calendar used some stock artwork, but was clearly created specifically to promote Hupmobile. The imagery is unusual in that it seems to be saying that the Hupmobile serves American families in 1924 just as the horse served Native American families in 1724. If that’s what this means, then that’s a surprisingly progressive tone to strike in 1924.

 

What’s lost in all of that of course is the linearity of seeing one day lined up with the next in such a way that you have a visual reminder of where you’ve been and where you’re going. The Hupmobile calendar showed its users the entire current month along with the previous and the following months. It places “today” squarely in context. Not so with my iPhone calendar that mostly shows today but is quite visually unappealing (commonly referred to as “uncluttered”) in so far as showing any span of time other than the here and now. The same effect holds true with Google/Apple maps (gps) versus an analog map. Which is why those things are great (generally) at getting you somewhere, but really terrible at helping you understand the greater context of how you got there, where you are, and what might be ahead.

To me, today, and where I am, is largely relevant within the context and importance of a bigger picture of where I have been and where I might be going. This holds true philosophically as well as literally. It does seem a bit ironic that this notion of contextualization – at least so far as time and space goes – could be driven by something as ephemeral as ephemera. But so it goes.

Something to think about since we could all use more context, no?

Not to mention stock pin up artwork and dogs playing poker.