Posters bring back new life each month

The calendar seems to change more quickly these days.

That’s either another dividend or another side effect of growing older. Take your pick.

Whichever it is, it still requires shifting from one month to another. At our house, that means switching out the calendar that hangs in the kitchen, right beside the door to the family room.

It’s in a simple frame that has been there for years, but the ritual actually began about three decades ago when we were camping in New England.

By my — sometimes fuzzy — reckoning, we were camping at a state park just outside of Camden, Maine, and had wandered with the kids into the maze of gift shops, sucker traps and the rest that make up any town dependent upon summer traffic.

There, amid the plush stuffed toy lobsters, the rubber lobsters that jumped when you squeezed a rubber ball and the T-shirts featuring lobsters, Connie and I discovered Nikki Schumann.

She was an artist and likely a hippy of the truest sort, and she made calendars.

Not just any calendars, mind you. Her first efforts were silk-screened 11 by 14 posters; her later ones were the same dimensions but were lithographically printed.

Nikki, of course, wasn’t in the gift shop where we discovered the calendars. To this day, I couldn’t tell you where her studio was. But we fell in love with the series of 12 posters, one for each month, and bought a set to take back to Indiana.

Back home, that meant buying a serviceable, cheap frame for the 11 by 14 calendar posters. It also meant changing out each one at the end of the month, saying goodbye to Nikki’s artwork for, say, February and embracing her artwork for March.

It was one of those household rituals that we all have and we seldom stop and appreciate.

Trouble is, when the new year rolled around, the calendar had to be retired. The old version was no longer accurate.

But over a period of several years, we managed to search out sources for a Schumann calendar to fill that frame by the door from the kitchen to the family room.

And then, at some point, we had folks over for a party.

Someone admired the Nikki Schumann poster for the month. And someone else said, “We could do something like that.”

And we were off to the races.

Peggy McCarty was the staff visual artist at the Jay County Arts Council (now Arts Place) at that point, and she was at the party. 

Before anyone knew what was happening, a plan had come together: Peggy would create original paintings of Jay County scenes in the right proportions to become 11 by 14 and have space for calendar numbers at the bottom, Sid Austin — a talented amateur photographer as well as principal at General Shanks Elementary School — would photograph each painting, color separations would be made in Marion at Gannett’s facility there, my cousin Carl Ronald would print the posters one color at a time on a Harris press that was already beginning to show its age, the calendars would then be collated and packaged and sold by the arts council as a fundraiser.

Looking back, the whole venture seems so wildly ambitious as to be laughable.

But we did it.

And did it again. And did it again. And did it again.

On and on for several years.

Eventually, Peggy married Jim Chapman, who had been with the Muncie paper and had gone on to be regional editor of The Journal-Gazette in Fort Wayne. No other talent stepped forward, and the calendar project came to an end.

Except it didn’t.

We saved all of ours. We also saved all of the Nikki Schumann posters from Maine. And we picked up a couple of others along the way, folks who were trying to replicate the appeal of the original.

Our theory was that if we held onto enough, we’d be able to match any changes in the calendar. Leap years were no problem. We’d nailed down all the options.

Or most of them. Sometimes things got a little tricky.

Then, last November, visiting our twins and their families in Boston, we wandered into a stationery shop just off Harvard Square. There, to our surprise, we found someone was carrying on the same tradition. New posters to bring new life to the kitchen calendar.

We bought one, of course. It’s not Nikki Schumann. And it’s not the work of our great and dear friend Peggy McCarty. But it brings new life to a new month.