UP’s 1945 calendar emphasizes the “Your America” campaign that was the theme of a UP-sponsored radio show broadcast on 123 stations nationwide starting in 1945. About half the photos in this calendar show national parks and other scenes that would be featured on future UP color photo menus while the other half showed farms, forests, Hoover Dam, and other scenes intended to promote pride in America’s productivity. Except for the “strategic middle route” slogan, the war in unmentioned.
Click image to download a 19.6-MB PDF of this calendar.
The photos used for March, May, June, September, and November would later find themselves on menu covers. Since January’s photo of Mount Hood was just as attractive, it is possible that a menu was made using that image as well.
According to a former employee of Union Pacific’s public relations office, “The company photographers were very competitive with each other in seeing who would have the most images on the calendar.” Sometimes, the railroad president himself would select the calendar photos.
Those statements may be true, but the company also seemed to suffer from institutional amnesia, as some of the photos were not only used on menus but were repeated on later calendars. In this case, the March photo of Hoover Dam and the November photo of the Columbia River Gorge were both also used on the 1950 calendar. In all, from 1945 to 1964, at least eight photos were used on two different calendars, and a ninth photo was used even though an almost identical photo, in which people in the photo had moved just a couple of feet, had been used on a previous calendar. All eight (plus one of the ninth nearly-matching photos) also appeared on a menu cover as well.
Month | Photo | Menu? |
---|---|---|
January | Mount Hood | |
February | Orange Groves | |
March | Hoover Dam | Yes |
April | Church | |
May | Great White Throne | Yes |
June | Old Faithful | Yes |
July | Wheat Fields | |
August | Cattle | |
September | Teton Cabin | Yes |
October | Sheep | |
November | Columbia River | Yes |
December | Timber |
The 1945 calendar is the first I have in the larger, 12-1/2″x23″ format that would become standard for UP calendars for the most of the next thirty or so years, 1969 being the major exception. With the war still going on, this calendar used an expanded version of the “Strategic Middle Route” slogan that had appeared on the 1943 and 1944 calendars.