's former college fraternity brothers, Lloyd Thompson (a photography enthusiast who was interested in film technology), joined the fledgling Calvin Company as vice-president.
DuPont, Goodyear, Caterpillar Tractor Company, General Mills, Southwestern Bell, and Westinghouse had all joined Calvin's client list by the end of the 1930s.
World War II proved a gold mine for the Calvin Company, which prospered by making dozens of safety and training films for the Navy and Air Force, as well as numerous morale-boosting shorts sponsored by the likes of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Navy had wanted him to move the Calvin operations to Washington, but F. O. had resisted, wishing the setup to remain in Kansas City, a town he liked to work and live in.
The work for the armed forces during the war established a good name and reputation for the Calvin Company, and the firm continued to produce films for the U.S. government for years afterward.
The company's regular staff had grown to sixty persons, and they had moved into their newest and biggest headquarters, a seven-story fireproof brick building at the corner of Truman Road and Troost Avenue, just east of downtown Kansas City.
The New Center Building, as it was called, had been built in 1907 and had originally housed two large movie theaters on its first floor, and the Calvin Company converted them into two huge sound stages for film production, said to be the largest between New York and Los Angeles.
Following World War II, there was a tremendous boom in production of industrial and educational films in the U.S., and the Calvin Company was in line to be the leading producer in the field.
There were annual Christmas parties and Fourth of July picnics, as well as a long-lived tradition on payday of employees visiting a nearby pub and betting their paychecks on shuffleboard bowling.
During this time, they were turning out some 18 million feet of film a year ("or enough to make one 16-millimeter strip stretching from Key West to Seattle and part way back," as one contemporary local newspaper put it).
However, it did serve as an important venue for the Kansas City arts, consistently employing many local actors and actresses, many of whom earned their main income in other fields such as radio and television announcing.
They included Art Ellison, Shelby Storck, James Lantz, Bill Yearout, Murray Nolte, Twila Pollard, Henry Effertz, Bob Kerr, Keith Painton, Ken Heady, Leonard Belove, Stan Levitt, Harriet Levitt, Ralph Seeley, Harvey Levine, James Assad, Al Christy, and Sid Cutright.
William Frawley, John Carradine, Jane Darwell, Morey Amsterdam, Arte Johnson, Judy Carne, James Whitmore, and E.G. Marshall all starred in Calvin offerings.
Calvin could also sometimes call on former local people such as Harry Truman, Walter Cronkite, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Cameron Swayze to turn in appearances.
[2] This moderately successful teenage exploitation film, produced by area-based movie theater exhibitor Elmer Rhoden Jr., led to Altman's successful career in movies and television, and also led to a second feature film produced by Rhoden Jr. and concerned with troubled youth, The Cool and the Crazy, shot in Kansas City in 1958.
During the 1970s, Calvin briefly attempted to catch a part of the videotape market, but the company was more suited to the 16 mm film format which it had originally pioneered forty years earlier, and the idea of shifting to video was soon abandoned.
Also available for free viewing and downloading at Prelinger are eleven reels of outtakes and stock footage found in the Calvin Company's vaults, some of which derives from the production of The Your Name Here Story.