Taking a look back in time

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"Girl in the Blue Dress" will be one of the portraits to be featured in the Feb. 28 show sponsored by the Plainfield Area Historical Society. | submitted photo

If you go

What: Free Barklow presentation, sponsored by the Plainfield Historical Society

When: 7 p.m. Feb. 28

Where: Plainfield Township Building, 22525 W. Lockport St. Plainfield.

Information: The Plainfield Historical Society can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/plainfieldhistoricalsociety and on Twitter @OldPlainfield.

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Updated: March 18, 2012 8:12AM

PLAINFIELD — If your family has lived in the Joliet area for a generation or two, chances are your family tree may have sprouted a calendar kid or a pin-up girl.

Tim and Michelle Smith, Plainfield historians who authored the book “Joliet’s Gerlach Barklow Calendar Company,” will deliver the local low-down on the calendar company the salesman from Red Oak, Iowa, built into one of the country’s major marketing machines.

“If Barklow saw a pretty girl working in his plant or a cute kid playing on the sidewalk, he would ask them to model for calendar paintings,” Smith said. “Lots of people in the area know someone who was on one of the calendars.”

One of them was Lois Delander, the 16-year-old 1927 Miss America from Joliet who was featured on many Gerlach Barklow calendars. Another was the 90-year-old Joliet man who recently sought out the Smiths after spending decades looking for a copy of the calendar picture he posed for as a boy.

“It was the Depression and the calendar cost a quarter or 50 cents, so he couldn’t afford to buy it at the time,” Smith said.

When Smith found the print, which shows the boy fishing, the elderly gent still remembered how his mother had wanted him to change his torn trousers, but the artist insisted he be immortalized in his holey pants.

When Barklow first set up shop in Joliet in 1907, he drafted his business plan on a kitchen table because he couldn’t afford desk. He died a millionaire in 1933.

In the early 1900s, before the advent of radio and television, calendars were a significant form of advertising, Smith explained.

“The local milk company would order calendars that would hang on the living room wall as art all year long,” he said. “That was a powerful advertisement.”

When Barklow began turning out calendars in his factory on the corner of Richard and Washington streets in Joliet, there was no way to mass produce colored prints.

After artists created an original scene, rows and rows of local ladies worked in the plant virtually coloring (hand tinting) in the calendar images.

The Gerlach Barklow Co. was one of the first to hire women artists. In the early years, the company forced two of its most well-known female artists — Zula Kenyon and Adelaide Hiebel — not to sign their feminine first names on their prints.

“It was thought at the time that no one would buy a calendar that had been designed by a female artist,” Smith said.

Barklow’s sister company, Volland Books, housed in the same building in Joliet, was the first to publish “Raggedy Ann” books. Barklow often paid local children who posed for prints with Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls.

The Smiths, longtime collectors of the calendar company prints, memorabilia and original artworks, make the historical society and Early American Illustration Convention circuit with presentations on the Gerlach Barklow artists and the calendar company.

At the Feb. 28 program, they will show some of the pastels and paintings that became the attractive and iconic calendars of the Gerlach Barklow Company.