Calendars

Port Townsend, today. This is the time of year when folk begin scrambling around looking for a calendar or two for next year - the year of the Tiger. Well, you're right, the Year of the Tiger won't start 'till what - February?

I can remember when my late wife and I used to hit Powell’s Books in Portland Oregon every Christmas. They had an entire floor dedicated to calendars. We’d end up with one for every room and a bunch for Christmas presents.

As kids, my buddies and I would take the bus to downtown Seattle, and hit all the travel agencies and railroad ticket offices up on 5^th Avenue. Northern Pacific occasionally issued a poster size railroad calendar. I had four of them at one time. Who knows were they ended up!

Pan American World Airways and American Airlines had pictures of aircraft landing in exotic places we could only dream of visiting. And they were great calendars too.

I have a few Kinsey calendars featuring geared locomotives in the Great Pacific Northwest. To image that fellow tramping through the woods with his wet plate camera! Like a National Geographic Magazine, one never considers throwing away a Kinsey calendar.

The absolute worst calendars were the Rexall Drug Store and Bartell Drug Store calendars, with pictures of pills, wheel chairs and bunion appliances.

The calendars that got prime posting sites in our home were the Foss Tug & Barge and Puget Sound Tug & Barge calendars. They competed every year, with solid offerings. And both featured the squiggly lines of the tide tables with precise phases of the moon.

Share with the rest of the audience your calendar story in the “Comments” below!

So here at Oil-Electric, we thought we’d give you an early Christmas present. It will become an instant collector’s item, because we’ve never done it before, and I don’t plan on doing it again! Click on the calendar icon at the top of the page for your Collector’s Edition 2010 Electric-Book calendar.

Notice! It is a high-resolution .pdf file, set to print at 300 dpi, so load your photo quality glossy paper. The file size is 1,147K so it may take a moment or two to down load, but your patience will be rewarded!