Solid O.R.T. in Seymour, Indiana - 1912 - N&W Calendars, Stone Printing

[NW Mailing List]

Dr. Schear (I can never get anything past that Sly Ole Fox) wrote me off-list concerning the photo, and asked, Which Railroad?

It seems there were two railroads in Seymour, the B&O and the Suh'thin. When the image file came to me, it was identified as having been made on the lordly B&O. I had that information built into the JPG file name, but the N&W List's robot applied some other name to the file, so you did not see "B&O" when you clicked on the link.

What caught my eye was the N&W Kalendarium on the wall. In my childhood (1940s, 1950s,) those things were ubiquitous in towns the railroad passed through. They came in a tightly wound-up roll (not more than 1.5 inch dia.,) wrapped in green paper, and were bound across the top with a thin piece of steel, painted in gloss red paint (probably a lacquer) and crimped across the top of the stack of the 12 paper sheets.

What always raised my curiosity was the color of the "red" ink. It was, to use a nice Latin word, invarius. That is, the shade never drifted from year to year. My guess is that the color was some standard "process color" in the printing trade, and Stone Printing & Manufacturing Company (printers of the calendar, located right next door to the N&W General office Building on North Jefferson Street) no doubt bought it in 55 gallon drums.

Even as a backward little street urchin, I wondered how much money the railroad budgeted for the calendar each year.

A lot of folks were saddened when the railroad discontinued yearly distribution of these lovely calendars. Somehow the townsfolks knew that "this will be the last one."  (My mother's father had been a bookkeeper for the Nolan Company, the plumbing suppy house. He died in 1929, but Nolan continued sending my mother their yearly calendar until she moved away from Roanoke in 1996. That kind of "employee loyalty" is a completely alien concept in today's world ! )

So, my question still stands: When were these calendars introduced by the railroad, and when were they discontinued ?

Now, here is a BONUS QUESTION, likely only answerable by a certain well-connected party who contributes all manner of abstruse and recondite insider information to this List. (I will not mention his name, but his initials are K.M.) -- Who was the Stone family who ran Stone Printing for decades upon end and did all the railroad's printing, and what was their relationship to the railroad, other than commercial ?

We were all privileged to have seen the Great Railroad Show before the curtain fell forever...

-- abram burnett
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