Floyd Riggs's $21 Kalamazoo

An archtop Gibson on a workingman's budget

__________________________________________

             ©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

This gutsy little archtop is one of 14 instruments once owned by Floyd A. Riggs (1923-2001), who was raised in St. Marys WV (pop. 2,201 in 1940).
     
One of eight kids in the family and all of 14 years old when he acquired it, Riggs spent a hefty $21 on this guitar when it was new in 1937. Riggs played this archtop sunburst 'Zoo for the rest of his life.

     
During World War II Riggs served in the U.S. Army. In 1947 he wed Lucy Dearth of St. Marys and relocated 23 miles to Parkersburg WV (pop. 30,103 in 1950).
     
Most of his adult life, however, Floyd Riggs resided in Vienna WV, a small town along the Ohio River (pop. 9,381 in 1960). Located five miles north of Parkersburg, today it is hemmed in by suburban tract houses and shopping centers that have sprouted there.

Riggs was "a versatile picker, but he did not sing"

As an adult Riggs labored 25 years in the purchasing department of Borg Warner, a large chemical company in Washington WV, eight miles west of Parkersburg. During this time he was a member of Parkersburg Masonic Lodge #169, Wayside United Methodist Church in Vienna and a local Musician's Union.

At night and on weekends, however, he loved to played guitar, mandolin and banjo. He played at a variety of social events, local jamborees and the grange, friends recalled.
     
"Floyd played pop songs of the day on the guitar, but he also played tenor banjo and mandolin, " said Richard Powell, an instrument dealer in Belmont WV, also a small Ohio River town.
     
"He owned 14 instruments, but I only got three to sell from the estate when he passed — this 1937 Kalamazoo KG-21, a Gibson A-0 mandolin and a 1936 Kalamazoo mandolin."

Powell said he and Riggs were occasional friends, musically speaking. "I remember we played music together at a bluegrass festival sometime in the 1970s," Powell said in November 2004 at a guitar show near Philadelphia when I acquired the Riggs KG-21 guitar from him for $850.

     
"He kept all his instruments in immaculate condition," recalled Powell as he pointed to the pristine KG-21. "He was a versatile picker, but he did not sing."

Gibson sales literature in mid-1930s
displayed Kalamazoo KG-21 archtop.

Gibson's budget brands

During the Depression years Gibson Inc. of Kalamazoo MI made several lines of low-cost guitars, mandolins and banjos. Rather than sully their distinguished brand, Gibson made budget-priced instruments under other names, including Kalamazoo, Kel Kroydon, Hayden, Cromwell and Recording King.

     
Offered by music-instrument distributors, retailers and mail-order houses, the budget editions were all well-made items with minor cosmetic changes. None had an adjustable truss rod in the neck — a patented and costly feature Gibson first used in 1923. And tops on the budget flattops were ladder-braced, not X-braced, which used more labor and material.
     
More important to Depression-era musicians, however, retail prices for this second tier of instruments were less than Gibson-branded equivalents. For instance, between 1936 and 1942 prices for a Kalamazoo KG-21 ranged from $17.50 to $21, or two-thirds of the cost for the Gibson L-30, a fully-configured counterpart to the KG-21.

In either case, the spruce top and mahogany neck each have the iconic Gibson sunburst, the lustrous two-tone finish applied by the same workmen's hands at the Gibson factory.

FON dates KG-21 to 1937
The Riggs archtop's FON (324 C 53) is stamped on the interior surface of the back and visible through the treble-side f-hole. It is identified in period shipping ledgers as a 1937 KG-21 in Spann's Guide to Gibson 1902-1941 (2011 - Centerstream Publg.)
     
This instrument has a steam-bent and pressed spruce top that is supported by an H-brace. Its solid one-piece mahogany back was also steam-bent and pressed into shape. It has a beautiful dark finish.

The guitar sports a 19-fret rosewood fingerboard, mid-sized V-shaped mahogany neck, its original tuners and an elevated Bakelite pickguard.

     
A new bone nut replaced the original ebony one. On top is a silk-screened Kalamazoo logo on the rooftop peghead.

Brighter, deeper, louder than
its full-priced counterpart
The 14-3/8-inch lower-bout width and 4½-in. body depth of the KG-21 match the physical dimensions of a Gibson L-30 archtop. Despite the material differences (the KG-21 was mahogany bodied, while the L-30 was maple-bodied), today the sound of the budget-priced unit is brighter, deeper and louder — all hallmarks of the old-timey sound prized by contemporary musicians.
     

Ken Lelen and the Riggs 1937
KG-21, Oct 2011, at Overlook
Community in Charlton, Mass.
Songs performed on the Riggs
archtop included "Heartaches"
(© 1931) and "On A Slow Boat
To China" (© 1948).

Indeed, Vermont luthier Jake Wildwood described the sound of a mid-1930s Kalamazoo KG-21 he restored in 2013 as follows:

     
"The tone of this guitar is just what I like to hear: punchy, loud and gutsy, with a good creamy worth to its focused, mid-heavy tone," he said.

"These guitars make great backing-chord instruments in smaller swing and jazz groups, but also fit the bill for country, hillbilly and blues groups."

Ken Lelen and Riggs 1937 KG-21, April 2006, at
Cape May Village, Wilmington OH. Period songs
played on the Riggs archtop included "Somebody
Else Is Taking My Place" (© 1937), "The Glory Of
Love" (© 1936), and "We'll Meet Again" (© 1939).

_____________________________

©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

Hank Peterson’s Kay Kraft

$19.95 archtop from Spiegel's 1937 mail-order catalog

__________________________________________

             ©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

In April 1937, a month before graduating from high school in Saguache CO, Hank Peterson bought this Kay Kraft Style A guitar from the mail-order catalog of Spiegel Co. of Chicago.
     
Shipped in a soft case, later discarded, Hank spent $19.95 for this unusual mahogany-bodied, spruce-topped six-string. A round-hole archtop with adjustable neck, it had full-body a sunburst finish, pearloid headstock, 26-in. scale and gold leaf decals on pickguard and lower bouts.
     
Hank's guitar cost was big for 1937, but not as much as C.F. Martin’s cheapest spruce and mahogany archtop. A golden brown R-18 grand concert cost $55.
     
His guitar expense seemed large if you knew the price of other goods in the summer of 1937. For instance, Saliba's, a local grocery in Hank’s hometown, offered T-bone steaks for 30¢ a pound, pork chops at 40¢ a pound and hamburger for 20¢ a pound. Hart Mercantile offered men's work shoes ("sturdy build") at $1.98 and men's dress shirts at 88¢ each.

Jimmie Rodgers tunes and cowboy and western songs

Clarence Henry Peterson (1920 – 2010) was a self-taught musician. He learned to play guitar, ukulele and violin as a young man. Back in the day he liked to play guitar and sing Jimmie Rodgers hits, cowboy songs and some pop tunes.

     
“I got a chord book,” he said in November 2007 at a Vintage Music Concert for residents of Friendship Village in Dublin OH outside Columbus. The 353-unit retiree facility sits on the Scioto River near the corporate home of the Wendy's hamburger chain.

     
“Most of the sheet music of the day had [fingerings for] guitar and uke chords over the words,” Peterson said when he showed me his guitar after the concert. “That’s how I learned to play.”

     
Prior to owning this Kay Kraft he played “a cheap old guitar,” he recalled. “I can’t remember what I did with it, though I probably sold it for a song.”
     
He taught himself to play violin after he found one “hanging on a wall in a filling station while traveling out West." He later played the ukulele with friends at college. “We sang to the girls,” he said with a smile.

     
Besides the songs of Jimmie Rodgers ("The Singing Brakeman"), Hank liked cowboy ballads. “I liked those cowboy and western songs and thought I’d like to do that and ultimately learned a lot of them,” Peterson said. “Today, you can hum one of those old songs and I probably still know it.”

Clarence or Hank, but not Henry

As a youth Peterson traveled 50 miles round-trip every day to attend his high school. He was a popular student and elected president of his senior class of 13 students in October 1936. Just before Christmas of that year, he had a lead role in a romantic comedy. Two months later, in February 1937, he sang a character part in an operetta the school put on.

     
He was raised on his parent’s cattle ranch in Saguache County (1930 pop. 6,250) CO. Pronounced “sa-watch,” Saguache is a phonetic spelling of an Indian term for “water at the blue earth,” so named for dark clay found in the northern part of San Luis Valley west of Pueblo.

     
Throughout Peterson's youth he was called Clarence, not his middle name Henry, which he told me he did not like. Hank was thrust upon him sometime after graduation when he worked as a ranch hand and mechanic and October 1942 when he was inducted in the U.S. Army.

     
Following a three-year stint in the military during WW II as a mechanic in Austria, Hank studied mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He later moved to Columbus to marry Naomi Burk Peterson (1914 – 2002), his college sweetheart, and finish college at Ohio State University in Columbus. Before I met him, Hank had worked as a patent agent and lived his entire adult life in Upper Arlington, an affluent suburb of Columbus.

Buying Peterson's 70-year-old guitar

For an hour or so after my Friendship Village concert, Hank and I talked about life, travel, careers, old songs and old guitars. When I expressed interest in his guitar, he said that at 87 he'd decided it was time to let it go.
     
So, after some dickering, Hank said he'd sell his vintage Kay Kraft guitar to me. It cost $500 — more than I wanted to pay and less than what he thought it was worth.
     
The guitar was manufactured by Kay Musical Instruments of Chicago. It once had a blue and silver interior label visible in the sound hole. Most of it, however, was gone when I got the instrument.
     
The guitar has a lustrous tobacco sunburst finish on its spruce top, mahogany back and mahogany neck. A key design feature are decals on the lower bouts. They incorporate gold leaf vines with Indian heads that face each other on each side of the tailpiece. A similar decoration extends to the black pickguard.

   

Unlike other vintage arch tops, this guitar’s top and back are not carved. They were steam-bent into shape. Years ago it was an inexpensive way to make an arch. In addition, the guitar top is ladder-braced, not X-braced or fan-braced like other acoustics.
     
Peterson’s Kay Kraft was one of three round-hole archtop models offered during the late 1930s. Style A had back and sides of mahogany. Style B had back and sides of maple. Style C had back and sides of rosewood.
     
Guitar experts say Style A is the most common in today's vintage markets. Style C is the most desirable, while Style B is most rare.
     
The neck joint incorporates a patented sliding mechanism that sits between the neck joint and body (see photo below). It allows the player to adjust the height of the guitar's action. The highest set allows the player to turn the instrument into a slide guitar, while lower settings allow standard play.

     
To do this you loosen the strings and loosen a large wing nut found inside the body on the neck block. Then you tilt the neck to the desired angle, or set, re-tighten the wing nut and then re-tighten the strings.
     
It may sound simple, but the process is tedious. First, you make an adjustment to the neck, then tighten the strings. It is a pain if you have to check and re-check the neck angle a few times before you’re happy with the final set.

Round-hole archtop guitar
Hank's guitar was similar in most ways, including price, to the Venetian-shaped, round-hole archtop guitars (see catalog listing below) offered by Kay from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s. After that time, the firm adopted simpler, less expensive guitar designs.

     
Tonally, a round-hole archtop doesn't fit any mold because it's not like an F-hole archtop and it's not like a flat top. Its tonal character "straddles the line between nuanced lo-fi cool and cheap chic," according to luthier-dealer Mark Stutman of Folkway Music in Waterloo, Ontario.
     
Still, a round-hole archtop like Hank's offers period-music players the best of both worlds. It is a guitar with the punch, quickness and midrange of an archtop and the woody fatness of a flat top.
     
"It has a prominent muted warmth in the lower mids, chunky-toned upper mids, and a peanut-butter smooth response," Stutman said.

Page 33 in the Spiegel mail-order catalog of Christmas 1934 offered an
early iteration of Kay Kraft's round-hole archtop guitar at a base price of
$19.95. It had the pearlette headpiece, sunburst finish, gold leaf decals
on the lower bouts and pickguard, and Venetian-shaped body it offered
from the late-1920s through the mid-1930s. For the holidays Spiegel cut
the sale price by $2.

Selling Peterson's 70-year-old guitar
After only a few months I decided to sell the Peterson guitar. It wasn’t very loud and it didn’t hold up well to my flatpicking style.
     
By that time I began to realize few elderly audiences cared to see, hear or learn about vintage guitars — even beautiful, unusual period instruments with provenance like Hank's. Less talk, more music, they told me. Like concert-goers at today's rock and folk tribute shows, I found they just wanted to bathe in the nostalgic glow of familiar old songs.

     
So, in January 2008 Hank’s guitar was listed with Neil Harpe’s Stella Guitars (now defunct) in Annapolis MD. He recognized the Peterson guitar as a late 1930s Kay Kraft, a round-hole archtop with a conventional-shaped guitar body in excellent condition.
     
In his listing Harpe drew attention to the fact that the original owner had purchased the guitar at age 17 from the Spiegel catalog in May 1937. He took some photographs, valued the instrument at $1,800, and offered it for sale on his website with the new hard shell case I'd acquired for it.
     
In his listing Harpe identified most of the instrument’s all-original attributes:

     •  sunburst arched top

     •  gold leaf designs
     •  pearloid headstock

     •  mahogany back and sides

     •  15-inch lower bout width

     •  26-inch scale

     •  1¾-inch nut width

     •  patented Kay adjustable neck.

     
This transaction was a consignment sale. So, when it sold at $1,695 in June 2008, Harpe earned $339 — a 20% commission — not the 25% commission he heatedly demanded. Nevertheless, my net was a modest $836 — $1,356 minus the original investment of $500.
     
So now the Peterson Kay Kraft round-hole archtop guitar is once again out in the world — ready for cowboy and western songs.

                         _______________________________________________

                           ©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

Every concert poster has a story to tell
     When words and pictures tell stories,
     posters can put people in their seats.

   _________________________________________

      ©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved

Colorful poster combines odd shape,
unusual size (5½ x 17 in.) with mix of
typefaces in knock-out to attract an
audience for When Love Was Nifty,
22 May 2016, Chandler Center for
the Arts, Randolph VT.

Sometimes, all people ever know about an upcoming concert at a small venue is what is printed on the poster.

People only glance at a poster for a second, two if you're lucky. So, venue operators inevitably try to raise visibility of a poster by splashing across multiple sites. Distribution seems to work, they say, so quantity is important.

But a poster must attract interest and inform people if it is to amplify excitement for a show. If content is fuzzy, dense or scant, anticipation for a show is quashed, no matter how many places a poster is found.

Despite the inroads of social media and digital promotion, program people at small venues still rely on concert posters to tell their story. Now, many are producing their own posters to promote Vintage Music Concerts at public libraries, museums, life care communities, local senior centers, small theaters and acoustic music clubs.

Budgets for labor, production and materials are tight, they say. But well-designed posters with arresting graphics, clever art, bold colors, unusual shapes and concise venue data can put people in their seats.

With such successes in mind, here we present several good and decent posters as well as a few less-than-stellar examples we've seen in the last decade. The overall goal is to provide for your consideration numerous examples for a range of design, format and clarity.

Providing posters for concert clients
Venue managers and program directors have relied on me to produce event posters for most of the 1,700+ concerts I've performed since 1999. They were printed on 8½ x 11-inch white card stock with a single four-color photo, program description and venue data (name, date, time, room, etc.).

Activity coordinators and resident service directors at several life care centers expressed gratitude for these promotional materials. We saved them the time and labor needed to produce their own posters, they said.

A few program

Dark and moody, this 5½ x 8 in. red and black poster was

produced by the resident's program committee at Willow

Valley Manor North senior complex, Lancaster PA, for the
19 Jan 2010 show. Audience was invited to hear "ragtime
 + jazz + swing with whistling guest MATT KOCH.”

Koch doesn't whistle. Never did. He played upright bass

for the concert, where almost half of the 250-unit facility
enjoyed a 70-minute show. We asked, but no one would
fess up to creating the myth of the "whistling guest."

people and resident groups have always designed and printed their own posters. Their posters typically follow a design format proscribed by the venue's management or activity people, they said. In my view, this regimen can produce less than spectacular results.

Still, I'm satisfied the event posters I've offered over the years to clients at small venues filled some gaps in their promotional plans, staff levels and budgets. Speaking selfishly, I know the posters helped attract audiences to my concerts because I've always asked people how they heard about my concerts.

Posters for private concerts
Continuing care, life care and assisted living communities for retired individuals typically display posters in several places for a week prior to a concert. Prime locations include: bulletin boards, post offices, elevators, libraries, bathroom doors, sandwich boards in lobbies, and picture frames on concierge desks.

At larger senior villages —

The resident-run committee poster offers

scant concert info & misleading program
data (Memory Lane — really?) for the 9 Aug
2012 Vintage Music Concert at the Lakes,
350-unit residential complex at the Willow
Valley community in Willow Street PA.

those with two, three or more apartment towers and hundreds of residents — event posters are often found on a bulletin board in each lobby or elevator bank.

A quick, one-off version of a poster is often mailed as an insert to a facility's in-house newsletter. Occasionally, it is sent to families of residents. And some marketing directors mail posters with concert invitations to their list of resident prospects.

Although marketing types usually manage websites at retirement facilities, some will post info and photo for an upcoming, all-resident concert. Once in a while they'll add a copy of the poster as well. 

Posters for public concerts
Music venues, arts & culture centers, libraries, municipal senior centers, social clubs and other venues use posters as well. Often they're quite elaborate, since the posters are expected to attract multiple audiences or acknowledge multiple sources of underwriting.

Most posters are displayed on-site or mailed to members. Some are found in retail windows or school bulletin boards. Some send posters to corporate and institutional sponsors who may broadcast them to their members and staff.

This performer-supplied, four-color bookmark

 (2¼ x 7¼ in.) promoted an In The Mood concert

on 26 Sept 2016 at the library in Hinesburg VT.

Petite versions of a poster seem to
work for public libraries and music clubs. Libraries, for instance, like to distribute colorful bookmarks to patrons at the front desk, while municipal senior centers like to offer counter cards at information tables.

Some groups like to send posters with printed press releases. This combo can draw attention of local media outlets.

Posters in a digital format are also sent to social media sites. Though heavy with images and vapor-thin on content, such promo materials tend to reinforce what recipients already know of a venue. Unless an event is held when a) nothing else is scheduled, b) it stirs controversy, or c) it's meant for mall rats and 20-somethings, social media sites rarely build audiences intended for senior adults.

Finally, almost everyone likes low-cost postcards, a low-key way to promote an event. They are especially attractive if corporate funders assist with postcard distribution by offering their mailing lists, postage, mailroom and volunteer labor.

Elements of effective posters
Few venues have large budgets or graphic designers on staff to produce masterpieces. At the same time, there are no hard or fast rules in poster design. What works in one location is awful in another.

Unusual sizes, shapes and colors can quickly draw attention to a poster. But the words free, tickets going fast and live will grab the eye even faster.

Try to minimize word count to what people can read in a few seconds. The more words you cut, the more the remaining content is read. At the same time, cryptic messages or insufficient number of words will lead potential audiences to scratch their heads about what's offered at your event.

Over the years we've found posters with these elements work well:

     •   site, date, time, performer and program précis — essential
     •   venue phone, website, email and ticket prices — secondary
     •   performer's pedigree and underwriter identity — tertiary
     •   simple layouts and one good-sized performer photo
     •   minimize type colors — use additional colors sparingly
     •   maximize key details with L A R G E  or BOLD type
                                                                             

To promote Vintage Music Concert by Ken Lelen Combo,
25 Sept 2010, this 24 x 34 in. poster was produced by the
Warren NJ public library as a 36 x 34-in. sandwich board
for the walkway at its front entrance.

Posters made in standard
sizes (8½ x 11-inch and 11 x 14-inch) fit in most locations. Posters in large formats (18 x 24-inch or larger) seem to work well in retail window displays, sandwich boards and billboards.

Rare, medium and well-done posters
In the last decade we've collected two or three dozen concert posters. Some are too big to scan, but most are memorable for their color, graphics or shape. However, many are too dull to show at all.

Still, here we present a few styles, formats and designs for your review. Most are notable for possessing one or two design ideas that appealed to their audiences.

Tune in to Radio Ramblers
These two posters, each bathed in one dominant color, publicize a Vintage Music Concert on the same theme — Radio Ramblers. The program regales audiences with song renditions as well as stories of the singers, stars and shows from radio's heyday — 1930s and 1940s.

By coincidence, each poster employed a table radio as design motif. And each provided its audiences with the same performer-supplied program data.

For a summer Sunday concert on 7 Aug 2016 at Oak Crest,

a large retirement facility in Parkville MD near Baltimore, a

resident-run program committee produced this 8½ x 11 in.

poster. The Radio Ramblers concert attracted 125 people.

Activity staff at Shannondell, a large retirement community in Audubon PA

near Philadelphia, produced this 8½ x 11 in. poster for a 17 July 2015 Radio

Ramblers concert. Held at Ashcroft, a 200-unit independent living building,

more than one quarter of its residents attended the concert.

We love the smashed-in speaker screen and missing volume dial.

Quick and dirty design ideas

Though most program directors at retirement communities invited me to send my posters for their upcoming concerts, more than a few never used what I sent. The rest made their own.

Some said they never received what I sent or, like the resident life director at Springmoor in Raleigh NC, said nothing by not replying to email and phone inquiries. Ironically, on the night of the concert the resident life assistant at Springmoor found the missing posters as well as my unreturned performance contract in her desk drawer.

When forced to make their own posters, program managers I've met wait until the last minute to think about the job. Others just hand the task to an assistant, who typically has meager design skills.

Of those who made their own concert posters, the resulting products reflect quick and dirty work. In my view, this means design quality is hit and miss.

So, as these next six posters reveal, some staff-made posters can generate a good impression for an audience. Some reflect the staff's minimal time, negligible design skills and token efforts.

Produced by part-time staff at a public library
in Hinesburg VT, this poster employed a dark
background, clear knock-out typeface, choice
words (note the "free evening") and attractive
vintage photograph to inform and entice local
residents to visit its 26 Sept 2016 concert.

Produced by the activity staff for OceanView, a
seniors property in Falmouth ME near Portland,
poster draws the eye in an oval-shaped picture
and concise account of the Folk Song Boomers
concert program. Though well-attended, only a
few octogenarians at the 25 Sept 2015 concert
recognized 1960s songs, so the applause was,
um, polite.    

Produced in-house for a public library in

Burlington MA, this poster promoted the

26 March 2015 concert by putting info in

discrete areas: sponsor at top; performer

& program in the middle; date & venue at
 the bottom.

Last-minute poster by an activity person who never
attended any concerts yet carped about the fee she
paid. It offers boilerplate from my website, yet omits
mention of a concert program so folks at Wellington,
a retirement spot in Philly's western suburbs, would
have an idea of what to expect.

For the record, the 9 Oct 2014 Juke Joint Jive
program offered pop songs of bobby soxers,
jitter buggers, drugstore cowboys, stagedoor
johnnies and lindy hoppers of the '30s & '40s.
A good time was had by all. 

This is a bare-bones effort by the activity staff at

Calvary Homes retirement center in Lancaster PA,

who waited till the last minute to produce posters.

The work reminds me of an aphorism attributed to

writer-comedian-movie producer Woody Allen that

"80% of success is showing up." Guess we should
be glad as well that I showed up for the concert.

Another anemic effort at poster-making — this one by the
resident engagement director at Residence at Otter Creek

Creek, a retirement facility in Middlebury VT, for a 25 Sept
2016 concert. I'm impressed. Somebody actually scoured
the web for a photo of me playing.

Shannondell's poster designs inform and invite

Over the past eight years I've performed numerous times at Shannondell, a large retirement community with several concert venues in Audubon PA west of Philadelphia. The five-person activity staff, one of whom is host at each concert, produces a poster for every event. Results are first-rate and respectful of the audience, as the examples offered here illuminate.

Though I've delivered nearly 20 concerts at Shannondell, the staff's posters do not assume people in the audience already know what I do — sing vintage songs and play vintage guitars — so they tell them each time. In addition, the posters offer a graphic representation and info on the concert theme, which is different for every performance.

Every poster uses blocks of type to tell audiences about the performer and the concert theme. What's more, clever graphic ideas and color are employed to play off the theme. The result is Shannondell audiences are informed and invited to their concerts.

On 28 April 2016 we presented a

concert of Broadway Mementos,

songs from the Great White Way

that became great American hits,

to an audience of 85 residents in
Shannondell's Ashcroft Theater.

Our 2 Nov 2015 program, When
Love Was Nifty, offered the hits
from 1945-1954 — years before
Elvis & his rowdy friends came

along—to about 85 folks in the
Shannondell Bradford Theater.

On 14 July 2014 we presented an
early version of Hollywood Song
Souvenirs  —  selected hits from
the best American comedies and
dramas — for about 65 people in
Shannondell's Bradford Theater.

On 3 Nov 2014 we played Speak
Easy Jazz— music of the 1920s
loved by flappers & doughboys
with clever lyrics & catchy tunes
for the audience of 50 people in
Shannondell's Bradford Theater.

What not to do in poster design

With the examples above I hope you've found poster ideas you can use for your next event and I hope you enjoyed our modest discussion on poster design. You probably already know some posters work better than others to inform and draw an audience.

Most do, but not all. That's why I saved the worst poster for the end, since it's an egregious example and personally offensive. Indeed, it was unnecessarily disrespectful of the audience and the performer.

The poster's creator was a social director at Pomperaug Woods, a retirement village in Southbury CT. She did not want to use a poster I sent for the 26 March 2012 concert. Called A Fine Romance, the event featured love songs popular from 1940 to 1956 that were favored by the generation that rationed its romance and deferred its affairs "for the duration."

Instead, the social director produced her own poster (shown here) just before the event. When I noticed it hanging on a wall near the theater, I told her the poster said nothing about the concert program so people would know what to expect. Oh, by the way, my name was spelled wrong.

"Don't worry," she said with disingenuous aplomb. "Nobody reads these things, anyway."

She also did not, when asked twice before the concert and once afterward, produce the check for my concert fee. Later, after the concert was finished and the room had emptied, I discovered it tucked under a microphone stand as I packed my guitars and sound equipment to leave.

I've never heard from this person again. Still, I got the message, loud and clear, just like words and pictures on a billboard.

R E F E R E N C E S

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          Burlington Public Library, Burlington MA               www.burlington.org/departments/library

          Calvary Homes, Lancaster PA                              www.calvaryhomes.org

          Chandler Center for the Arts, Randolph VT          www.chandler-arts.org

          Carpenter-Carse Library, Hinesburg VT                http://carpentercarse.org

          Oak Crest, Parkville MD                                        www.ericksonliving.com/oak-crest

          OceanView, Falmouth ME                                     www.oceanviewrc.com

          Pomperaug Woods, Southbury CT                        www.pomperaugwoods.com

          Residence at Otter Creek, Middlebury VT             http://residenceottercreek.com

          Shannondell at Valley Forge, Audubon PA            www.shannondell.com

          Springmoor                                                            http://springmoor.org

          Warren Public Library, Warren NJ                         www.somerset.lib.nj.us/warren.htm

          Wellington, West Chester PA                                www.wellingtonretirement.com
          Willow Valley Communities, Lancaster PA            www.willowvalleycommunities.org

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©  2016 — Kenneth Lelen — All Rights Reserved