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Self-Employment (not by choice)

Posted on February 4, 2016December 16, 2017 By Ann Thompson

As I wrote previ­ously, I was very happy working for Butte, Herrero and Hyde — very fine and fun fellows. That year from April 1964 to April 1965, before they dissolved their part­ner­ship, was the only time in my art career that I was employed full time. This is my sketch of them in 1964. It is graphite pencil on tracing paper.

BH&H-sketch

For the rest of my career I was a free-lance artist, never again on a pay roll.
At the break-up of their part­ner­ship, BH&H’s book­keeper advised me of the require­ments needed for invoicing, tax records and the like.
I was 23 years old and I was busy — as I continued assisting Bruce Butte, Lowell Herrero and Bill Hyde as they set up their indi­vidual studios. Easiest, was working for Bill, because he had let me rent space in his very large third floor studio at 728 Mont­gomery Street.
By 1966 it was time for me to design a proper busi­ness card and printed invoices for my now estab­lished busi­ness: Ann Thompson Graphic Design.
More bits of income came from small design jobs from my contacts at Shell Chem­ical— they knew me from when I assisted BH&H on the Shell Chem­ical calendars.
Some smaller San Fran­cisco adver­tising agen­cies also called me for illus­tra­tion and/or design.
In November, Richard L. Burns with Edward S. Kellogg Co. was new to the Belli Building. Previ­ously, he had put the ​“smile” on the PSA commuter airplanes and, when working in New York, he created the successful ​“Fruit of the Loom” campaign.
Richard had many clients. He gave me the widest variety of assign­ments where I could perfect many styles. Knowing that ​“I had to start some­where” — I always said ​“Yes”, no matter the kind of client, car-dealers to candy-makers. (Many of these were his smaller clients and yet he was still taking a risk with me since I had little expe­ri­ence.) In all, he gave me 154 assign­ments from 1965 to the end of 1968.
The last time that I heard from Richard was when he called me in late 1968, telling me that he suffered from a detached retina. I didn’t hear from him after that. I, at that time, was getting a lot more assign­ments from all around town and was plan­ning to move to the Wharf­side Building (next to Aquatic Park) in the Fisherman’s Wharf area.
In all the following years, I wondered what had happened to Richard.

Recently, I thought to look up his name on Google. Nothing. I have found another way to search. Typing a name and opening ​“Images”. Then I search for a face that I would recog­nize. —This time, I was looking for an ​“older” Richard Burns. There he was! It was his smile that was so recog­niz­able. His story from all those years until now is too much for me to relay other than to say that he died from a massive stroke — but he lived — and recov­ered — showing remark­able courage and determination.When we last spoke, Richard Burns was off to Wash­ington D.C., furthering his drive to help stroke victims. His incred­ible story is told on his website: Live or Die Burns

From his website, I found his phone number and I left a message. On August 11, 2015, Richard returned my call. It had been 47 years since we last talked. Remem­bering those days, I began digging into my files of jobs trying to deter­mine credits on each. I came upon my full list from 1965 to 2003 — here are a total of 3,447 assign­ments!— I thank Richard Burns, who was there when I got started.
Here are just some samples that show the variety of styles needed for some of Richard’s clients.

1-PSA-Color-Book-1965
1‑PSA-Color-Book-1965
2-MFM-MFF-1965
2‑MFM-MFF-1965
3-REDWOOD-Lincoln_Mercury 1965
3‑REDWOOD-Lincoln_Mercury 1965 
4-REDWOOD-One-col-ad
4‑REDWOOD-One-col-ad
5-DAILEY-Chevrolet-1966
5‑DAILEY-Chevrolet-1966
6-DAILEY-Campaign
6‑DAILEY-Campaign
7-ANNABELLE-1966
7‑ANNABELLE-1966
8-GB-RAMBLER-1966
8‑GB-RAMBLER-1966
9-SID-LEE-1966
9‑SID-LEE-1966
10-SID-LEE-Layout
10-SID-LEE-Layout 
11-Holiday-Magic-poster-1967
11-Holiday-Magic-poster-1967 
12-Reno-Tahoe-Guest-Club-1967
12-Reno-Tahoe-Guest-Club-1967 
13-Brother-Buzz-1968
13-Brother-Buzz-1968 

1 PSA–Pacific South­west Airlines (1949−1986) Children’s Coloring Book, 12-27-1965
2 MATEO FREEZER MEATS / MARIN FROZEN FOODS, Direct mail, holiday sales and greeting card, 12−29−65. A steer wearing a ​“Santa” outfit — selling cuts of beef !
3 REDWOOD Lincoln/Mercury, Mercury Comet – Direct mail, 1 – 1‑1966
4 REDWOOD Lincoln/Mercury. Full one-column news­paper ad, 4 – 6‑1966 This was very unusual. I was to hand-letter and illus­trate this very narrow one column news­paper ad.
5 DAILEY Chevrolet, an auto dealer in Liver­more, CA. Layout for Outdoor Board, 1 – 4‑1966 This was my first ​“big” job, an outdoor board! This tight layout was accepted and my finished art (with the then popular Cooper Black type font) followed the layout, exactly.
6 DAILEY Chevrolet- Campaign, 1966 A lot of other assign­ments came from the initial concept.
7 ANNABELLE CANDY CO., Sell-sheet showing TV time-slots of commer­cials, 1966 Many ads followed this and also included an initial design of a ​“Sweet” ANNABELLE doll and a story­board. I don’t know if these two ideas were ever completed.
8 GOLDEN BAY RAMBLER, Logo and stationery for a San Rafael car deal­er­ship, 9-15-1966
9 SID LEE Announce­ment and Grand-Opening Invi­ta­tion. 10-20-1966
10 SID LEE-Concept. This is the simple layout on 14”x17” layout paper that I presented to Sidney Lesser Lee who was opening his new office high in the Wells Fargo Building on Mont­gomery Street. A photo of the view from his window was to show as the ribbon was cut and the card was opened.
11 HOLIDAY MAGIC Poster, Prelim­i­nary concepts for a presen­ta­tion, 7-20-1967 There were other designers that were already working for this account. Years later, I found out that fellow-Geezer, Dick Moore, was working with photog­ra­pher, Dominic Belmonte, on that same account (located in San Rafael). The Holiday Magic entre­pre­neur, William Penn Patrick, became news — for polit­ical and other reasons. Holiday Magic was found by the US Federal govern­ment, to be fraud­u­lent. Artists were seldom aware of the char­acter of persons bene­fiting from their creative efforts.
12 RENO-TAHOE GUEST CLUB- News­paper ad, 11 – 3‑1967 From Richard Burns: ​“Reno-Tahoe Travel” was the outgrowth of the ​“TSA” – a safety program for highway travel in the winter from the lowlands (ex: San Fran­cisco and Los Angeles) to South Lake Tahoe (Harvey’s & Harrah’s). The other casino client was a ​“mafia” casino in Vegas, I can’t remember the name.”
13 The Latham Foundation-BROTHER BUZZ. Direct mail brochure, 10-11-1968 From Richard Burns: ​“Latham Foun­da­tion (Brother Buzz) gave me work when no one else would (*)…ended up being a chil­dren’s TV program around the world, 20 million weekly viewers.“ (*After his extreme stroke — as described above — with its heavy toll of speech and motor hand­i­caps, most of Richard’s clients dropped him.)

14-(March)1968
14  This photo shows me as I learned the neces­sity of working at night, March 1968

Ann

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