Perhaps trying to avoid the debacle of the 1968 calendar, Great Northern put a painting on its 1969 edition. For 1970, it went back to a photograph, but company executives admonished the local official who arranged the photo shoot, Tom Kotnour, not to “screw anything up.”
Click image to download a 0.9-MB PDF of this calendar.
To his great chagrin, when the calendars were printed it turned out he had left the rear door open on the lead locomotive in the photo. That’s something that could easily be fixed in Photoshop today, but in those days it meant a black spot on the otherwise blue-and-white F45 locomotive. This was almost a career-ending mistake for Kotnour, but he went on to become president of a couple of regional railroads.
The photo itself is credited to Bob Harr of the Hedrich-Blessing photo studio, which took most of Great Northern’s professional photos. Although it is a photo, parts of it look heavily retouched to me. That suggests they could have retouched the locomotive, but if the story is accurate, no one noticed the error until the calendars were printed.