What Do Dogs Playing Poker and Riding an Ass at The County Fair Have in Common?
Cash Coolidge, of course!
Cassius Marcellus “Cash” Coolidge would have been an interesting Medium writing had he lived a century later. His interests were diverse, he was creative with the pen (and brush, and he hustled to make money on his ideas. Two of his creations are remembered. Coolidge is mostly forgotten.
Dogs Playing Poker
The painting ‘A Friend in Need’ is often called ‘Dogs Playing Poker’. It is Coolidge’s most popular work but ‘Dogs Playing Poker’ is actually a series of 18 different paintings. Those dogs who are depicted playing poker, football, baseball, and shooting pool have become iconic today.
Coolidge was 50 years old when he painted the first painting in the ‘Dogs Playing Poker’ series. Perhaps a little too old in his day to be considered an up-and-coming new artist. And the truth was that he was already an accomplished artist by then, including illustrating for local newspapers when he was 20, making quick money as a sketch artist, illustrating several books, and selectively painting portraits.
“Cash” Coolidge was always looking to make a buck. That commercialization may have hurt his reputation as an artist as well. The painting that preceded ‘Dogs Playing Poker’ was of a monkey riding a bicycle with a parrot on the handlebars for the Columbia Bicycle Company of Massachusetts. Brown & Bigelow, a cigar company, commissioned the ‘Dogs Playing Poker Series’ for cigar advertisements for lithographed cigar box covers, inner box lids, posters, and calendars. One piece of trivia is that the dogs are playing poker in only 11 of the 16 paintings.
The first painting of the series, ‘Poker Game’, sold for over $650,000 at 2015 auction. Artistic acclaim may have alluded Coolidge, but he was certainly popular in his day and in the present day. And Cash Coolidge had several other artistic ideas that he would commercialize.
The Ass at the County Fair
Coolidge patented an invention called Comic Foregrounds. Comic Fairgrounds are wood cut-outs, or foregrounds, that have life-sized portraits with holes located where the head should be. Today, we are familiar with these cut-outs at local fairs, carnivals, and tourist traps around the world. ‘Man Riding a Donkey’ and ‘Fat Man in a Bathing Suit’ are two all-time favorites. It was Cash Coolidge who created them and Cash Coolidge who would create a mail order business selling them around the world.
Pharmacist, Banker, Writer and Other Accomplishments
Before he was 20 years old, Coolidge worked in, then bought, his first drugstore. He bought another drugstore before he was 30. In that period, Coolidge also founded his hometown’s first newspaper. He painted street signs and numbers on houses He also acted as superintendent for a school district. Coolidge also received a patent for a device to collect fares from street cars.
By the time he was 30 years old, Coolidge founded the first bank in Antwerp, New York. Coolidge learned mostly from experience and exhibited entrepreneurial boldness. Like his painting and the drug store business, he had little formal training in banking, Instead, he taught himself from the ground up. Cash Coolidge later sold his bank, which still survives today as the Jefferson Bank.
Coolidge was also a distinguished writer. In his late teen, he made extra money teaching penmanship. During his life, Coolidge wrote and illustrated ‘Kash’s Kolumn’ in a regional newspaper, wrote an opera (including designing the set and costumes), and wrote two comedy productions.
Later Life
Cash Coolidge was a bachelor until age 64. At that age, he married twenty-nine-year-old Gertrude Kimmell who was an art student he had employed as a letter painter for his Comic Foreground business. One year later, they had their first and only child. Cash Coolidge lived in the Philadelphia and New York region for nearly all of his 90 years. He traveled outside the region very little. He struggled financially later in life with a young family and as the demand for his Comic Fairgrounds subsided. Always looking make his ideas pay off, he even tried to commercially raise chickens (he failed). He leaned into his writings and paintings to generate most of his income later in his life.
Inspiration
Those dogs playing poker have always provided some hidden inspiration for me even before I knew much about Cash Coolidge. Maybe it is the sports they play. Or maybe the whiskey they always seem to always enjoy. Or those cigars and pipes they often smoke. We do have a lot in common.
I think it is a little deeper than that. One of the greatest aspects of Coolidge’s work is the different facial expressions that each dog has in the situational theme of each painting. Those dogs are really expressing Coolidge’s view of human nature. And a lot about him too. That may be the greatest legacy of any creative writer or painter.
