My bad, I read that wrong. For some reason, the holder’s name is the one under, not the one above. Relnhold was a dead end; the real artist was “Prank” (Frank) Hoffman. His works was copyrighted under Brown & Bigelow who maintain an online portfolio of their pictures. I’m guessing it might well be one of these:
http://bandbmall.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=WAW&Category_Code=_Hoffman
Good find! The pic doesn’t seem to be one of those in that portfolio but it looks like his sort of subject matter - horses, cowboys or frontiersmen.
This is about the best I can do with the pic in Photoshop - there simply isn’t the detail there and it seems to have been compressed using the “steamroller” JPG setting. Earl - is that definitely the best version of the pic on Facebook? Often if you click on them you get a larger version or the option to download the original - this looks poor enough quality to be a thumbnail.
That’s as good as it gets. Remember that under normal circumstances, facebook loads only a fraction of the original image. What I posted was a crop of the calendar from an image of a lunch room full of students from the full-sized facebook download–but that was the facebook copy, not the original, which probably might give a little more detail.
The image owner has the “don’t call me, I’ll call you” facebook options in place, so I’ve tried contacting him thru third parties (people on his friends list) explaining why I wanted an original emailed copy, but they didn’t get a response from him.
But I’m satisfied at this point with September 1953.
Based on the size of the fonts used in similar calendars I’ve found online, I think it looks more like April than September. Compare my enlargement with this calendar for December 1954. The word “September” is even longer than “December”, but the month name looks considerably shorter on the calendar in question, while the year looks a similar length (making the overall text block shorter and closer to the centre).
Is Easter Monday a public holiday in the US? Easter in 1958 fell on April 6, so the “holiday shading” (if that’s not just an artifact) would fall on April 7.
Hmm, I’ve looked it up and it seems Easter Monday was a public holiday in North Carolina at that time, but not South Carolina. Still a possibility though - a calendar might show public holidays that aren’t observed everywhere.
Easter Monday usually isn’t a public holiday in the US. I’ve never heard of celebrating it until I went to Europe. That said, like you found, there may be regional differences. I agree that the length of the month name doesn’t quite reconcile with the length of the year.
That said, it sounds like April 1958 is too late a possibility, given the age given of a student in the photo.
The public holiday shading might be a red herring. Some of the similar calendars I found had all sorts of funny shading and other symbols (phases of the moon, odd coloured rectangles) that could be responsible for the apparent difference in shade, given the quality of the photo. So it could be April 1952.
Back in the 1950s, Good Friday would have been a more likely holiday. I’m OK with the possibility of the month splotch’s incongruous length being the result of a compression artifact and “scale-down” (again, referring to the facebook copy containing only a fraction of the original image).
I agree that it could be a red herring. Like I said in my initial post, I’m not completely confident that shading is present on the Monday in the calendar–that might be wishful thinking. At the very least, it seems we got it down to two possibilities, which impresses me, given the quality of the evidence.
Fair enough. I think I care more about this than you by now ( 
) but I still think if it was a “long” month name like September, then there would be a lot less black space before and after.
Edit: as for the public holiday shading or not, it seems to me that the first Saturday looks at least as “shaded” as the first Monday.
I want to know what the painting is, too. This thread reminds me of a similar one on another forum where someone was trying to identify a postage stamp in a rather fuzzy screen grab from a movie!
Another point in evidence for April: The clothing. The averager high temperature in April is about eight degrees cooler than the average high in September. Some of the kids are wearing jackets.
I was trying to figure out whether the clothes would clue me in on the month, but I couldn’t figure out what anyone was wearing, the photo quality is so poor. If they are wearing jackets, that does point to April being a better possibility.
I just realized that I’ve been making references to the original pic, and not just the calendar portion. I’ve since uploaded the entire pic into the same album. But the calendar is not any better in quality in this one since it’s the source of the calendar snip.
Yeah, looking at what everyone is wearing in the bigger picture does make me suspect April as a better contender. Here’s some historical weather from Columbia, SC. That’s a date in April 1952. Now, there were a couple dates towards the end of September 1953 (like the 26th) where the highs were in the upper 60s, so that might be jacket weather down there, I don’t know.
So. . . over a year later, I get a response from the person who posted the photo. He sent me an original scan, which did have slightly better quality. Not crystal clear, but still better than the facebook download, with enough detail to confirm that the date is indeed. . . April 1952
Thanks, everyone for the responses.
(For those just tuning in, it was a school cafeteria, with a calendar at the back wall. Sorry, but I didn’t realize I had deleted the photo in the OP.)
I remember this thread. We pretty much nailed it, huh? Well at least narrowed it down to two possible months out of 120, one of which was correct. 
Woohoo!!
Whoa - blast from the past! I remember this thread, because I was utterly astonished that anyone could get any sort of details from that (apologies) God-awful blurry tiny-ass calendar in that picture.
Nicely done on the update - it’s impressive to know many of you were actually right. Impressive eyes.
Thanks for the update, and good on pulykamell, who nailed it in his very first guess, in post 3.
Please post the pic again, Earl, since the OP link is now dead.
