Days of Our Years

The U.S. calendar industry, blooming as never before, owes its healthy color chiefly to black lace underwear and the Boy Scouts of America. Last week, as calendar makers finished shipping out 1946 calendars, they totted up sales far above any previous year. Despite paper shortages, between 80 and 100 million calendars will decorate U.S. walls and desks next year.

Biggest contributor is the world's biggest calendar company--Brown & Bigelow of St. Paul, Minn, (it sells more than all the rest together). B & B climbed to the top partly by cornering the nation's top commercial artists (Rolf Armstrong, Earl Moran, Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Par-rish), chiefly because of its ruddy-faced, peach-bald president, Charles Allen Ward, 58. Before he joined B & B, he had tried almost as many jobs as it had calendars.

Out of Good Clay. Born in Seattle, Ward went to work at four, left home at 17 to become a sailor, later drove a dogsled and mined gold in Alaska, fought with Pancho Villa in Mexico. In 1920, he found himself in Leavenworth Prison for violating the narcotics law. There his cellmate was Herbert Huse Bigelow (in for income-tax evasion), president of B & B. Bigelow liked Ward, told him: "I'm going to remold you; you're made of good clay." When Bigelow was released eight months later, he asked Ward what job he would like with the company when he got out. "Your job, H.H.," said Ward. Replied H.H.: "All right, if you can earn it."

Ward went to work as a laborer at $25 a week. When Bigelow died in 1933, he left Ward his $3,000,000 estate and the presidency of B & B. Ward reorganized B & B's sales force, cutting it from 700-800 men to 400. He put them all on his own incentive pay plan, warned them they had better be good or get out. Result: B & B salesmen boosted their average salaries to about $7,000 a year. In the last four years, despite paper shortages, B & B, which also makes cigaret lighters, playing cards and leather novelties, has quadrupled its gross to $24,873,000 this year. Still President Ward is not ready to rest.

A Fine Model. No one knows the fickleness of the American public better than the calendar makers. For years Norman Rockwell's Boy Scout pictures (heaviest buyers: funeral homes, church organizations) ran in first place. What the trade calls "the girl group" (heaviest buyers: foundries, garages, barbershops) ran behind. For 1946, the girls have nudged the Boy Scouts out of first place, are also solidly entrenched in fourth place. (Third place: the Dionnes.)

Artist Rolf Armstrong, who gets $12,-ooo a picture for painting B & B's most popular girls, said it was a natural tribute to "the beauty of figure that seems to happen only in the American girl."

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