Calder holds jobs with an automotive engineer named Tracy in Rutherford, New Jersey, and with New York Edison Company as a draftsman. (Calder 1966, 48-49)

Fall: Calder joins the staff of Lumber, St. Louis, Missouri. He stays for nine months. (Calder 1966, 48-50)

Summer: Calder works for Nicholas Hill, a hydraulics engineer, coloring maps for a water-supply project in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The efficiency engineers--Miller, Franklyn, and Basset--hire Calder to do fieldwork for the Truscon Steel Company in Youngstown, Ohio. (Calder 1966, 49-50)

Spring: Calder attends night classes in drawing with Clinton Balmer at the New York Public School on Forty-second Street. (Calder 1966, 51)

June: Serving on the HF Alexander as a fireman in the boiler room, Calder sails from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. During the voyage, off Guatemala, he awakes on deck to a brilliant rising sun and a setting full moon on opposite horizons. (Calder 1966, 53-55)

Mid-June: Arriving in San Francisco, Calder takes a lumber schooner to Willapa Harbor, Washington, where he catches the bus for Aberdeen and meets his sister Peggy and her husband, Kenneth Hayes. Calder finds a job as a timekeeper for a logging camp in Independence, Washington. I was supposed to make out paychecks for people. I also had to scale the logs as they were loaded on the flatcars. (Calder 1966, 55-56)

Summer: Inspired by the logging camp landscape, Calder writes home and asks for paints and brushes. (Calder 1966, 57-58)

Spring: With the help of Stirling's introduction, Calder seeks employment with an engineer in Canada. I went to Vancouver and called on him, and we had quite a talk about what career I should follow. He advised me to do what I really wanted to do--he himself often wished he had been an architect. So, I decided to become a painter. (Calder 1966, 59)

Summer: Calder writes the Kellogg Company and suggests they modify their cereal packaging, putting the wax paper on the inside rather than on the outside of the boxes. The company adopts his suggestion and sends him a note of thanks along with a case of Corn Flakes. (Hayes 1977, 76)

October-December: Calder begins classes at The Art Students League of New York, studying Life and Pictorial Composition with John Sloan from October to December, and Portrait Painting with George Luks from October to November. (Calder 1966, 59-61, 66-67; ASL, registration records)