Pin-up art by Earl MacPherson

Edgar Earl MacPherson was born on August 3, 1910, in Oklahoma. He moved to Los Angeles after high school, got a job painting movie posters for a downtown theatre, and took evening art classes at the Chouinard School of Art. In 1929, he set up shop at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, painting portraits of wealthy guests. McPherson's smashing success with the Artist's Sketch Pad was followed by another triumph: his two deck set of playing cards for Brown & Bigelow, called Win, Lose, or Draw, received a total of 168,000 orders in four months. His diary-style calendar, Something to Remember, was his last success before he went off to war in 1944.

Discharged in 1946, after teaching plane decoy recognition to Navy pilots, he settled on a four-acre ranch in Del Mar, California. He also hooked up once again with Shaw-Barton and began the first of nine consecutive years of MacPherson Sketch Book calendars for them. In 1954, Shaw-Barton published a book called Hunting With MacPherson, a parody with pin-up girls dressed as various hunting birds; the same year, the artist. wrote and designed a best-selling how-to book entitled Pin-Up Art for the Waiter Faster Company.

In 1951, MacPherson was stricken with polio, and his assistant, Jerry Thompson, took over the Sketch Book calendar series under the name T N. Thompson. In the early 1950s, MacPherson had his own television show in Arizona; about 1960, he moved to Tahiti and then travelled widely in the South Pacific. He died in December 1993.