He grew up with his younger sister Rena in the District of Columbia, where he attended Episcopal Cathedral School[1] and sang with a church choir in his teens.
[4] After arriving in Los Angeles by the mid-1930s, Calker worked as a session musician, and composed songs including Strings Full of Swing and Dixieland Strut.
Calker was an uncredited composer (along with Michael Michelet and Clarence Wheeler) on Shirley Temple's teen star vehicle, Miss Annie Rooney (1942).
Calker spent the 1950s working on B movies for Eagle-Lion Films, such as Forbidden Jungle (1950), Allied Artists, such as From Hell It Came (1957) and American International Pictures, including Voodoo Woman (1957) and Beyond the Time Barrier and the independent production The Flying Saucer (1960).
He also composed the scores for Rolling Home (1946), Albuquerque (1948), El Paso, and Superman and the Mole Men (1951), which functioned as a pilot for the 1950s television series.