A collage of portions of select Dairy Barn illustrations. Complete illustrations and explanations appear throughout the post below.
Here’s one of my first illustrations from 2011, my first year as volunteer wrangler. It was July, we were a month away from the fair and still needed 40 more volunteers. The old Life magazine photo of a dairy farming family from the 1940s was a recurring theme in the illustrations, as I put many words in their mouths over five years.In five years of creating visual enticements to recruit volunteers to serve ice cream for a fundraiser, you’d think you’d run out of dairy-related puns.
But here’s the scoop: You just keep churning them out. You cannot be cowed. You milk it for all it’s worth. You keep calm and dairy on.
Creating these graphics was not something I envisioned myself doing when I took on the role of coordinating high school students and their parents to volunteer at the Iowa State Fair to staff the Dairy Barn, serving ice cream and shakes to fairgoers.
I served as coordinator when my sons were in Urbandale High School Band and this was the group’s major annual fundraiser. The job was sometimes referred to as the “volunteer wrangler” because like a Wild West rodeo cowboy lassoing the stray dogie, the goal was to round up 25 people per shift, two shifts per day, working from about 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., over the course of the 11-day fair. That’s 550 total volunteer spots. While most people volunteered for multiple spots, it still required 200 to 300 band family members to fully staff the operation.
We started signing up people around May 1 for the mid-August fair. About half the sign-ups were complete by Memorial Day. Sign-ups slowed to a trickle once school was out, though picked up after the Fourth of July and were nearly complete by the start of the fair, though shift rosters constantly changed and required attention and stray-dogie wrangling, even throughout the fair.
Selling ice cream in seven-hour, often uninterrupted shifts, scooping, stooping, blending, lifting, running or just being on one’s feet all day, was not a fun thing to do. Most people hated it. Many people volunteered for the good of the cause. But for others, it was a harder sell. My goal was to try to create an atmosphere of lightness and fun around the experience to entice them to volunteer.
OK, it was propaganda pure and simple. The work was hard, but it wasn’t that terrible—because after all, it wasn’t a coal mine, it was ice cream.
My primary means of communicating with potential volunteers was email. But since I found repeated emails, asking, begging, pleading for volunteers quickly became tiresome and easy to ignore, I wanted the emails to catch people’s attention and perhaps even be something to look forward to. So I added these illustrations. At the very least, it was fun for me and kept me engaged enough to continue volunteer wrangling for five years. Most were pretty well-received, even though they were often full of dairy puns and often, the humor was kinda cheesy.
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Here are a sample of the illustrations that I sent in emails, posted on band room walls, handed out prior to band concerts and/or included in social media posts:
Nearly spotless
Here is the illustration as we neared sign-up completion in 2011, having already filled 549 of the 550 volunteer spots.
‘Uncle’ Sam
A pre-Fourth of July illustration in 2012 evoking our volunteers’ patriotic spirit.
Scream
A 2012 illustration based combining Edvard Munch’s famous painting and a 1920s novelty song.
Occupy
In 2012, this illustration played off the then-current international Occupy movement that involved thousands protesting social and financial injustice by occupying parks, streets, highways and businesses.
Keep calm
In 2013, the illustration paid homage (a.k.a “ripped off”) the old World War II, stiff-upper-lip British poster “Keep Calm and Carry On,” which was resurgent at the time.
We can!
Wartime posters were great fodder to motivate people to sign up for Dairy Barn, such as this one from World War II.
Push
Encouraging people to sign up for volunteer spots at the Dairy Barn and getting them to hold those spots was a constant uphill battle, like the story of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. So I made a poster that reflected that struggle.
Moooving pictures
In 2014, I put together a promotional video to let volunteers know that sign-ups were beginning. It was played to a captive audience at the spring high school band concert. Usually, I spoke at the concert, which was usually awkward and pathetic as I asked people to begin signing up to volunteer. I made the video to avoid the personal appearance. Yet, I actually got more response and more sign-ups from the in-person appearances over the year I did the movie. I think people really took pity on me personally and signed up. So I only did the film once.
It’s up to moo—er, you ...
In 2014, one of the incentives for volunteering at the Dairy Barn was to earn money to defray costs for the band’s planned trip to New York the following year. Our Statue of Liberty cow hoisting a two-scoop torch of ice cream was a constant reminder that year of the benefits of signing up.
Quill you please sign up?
In 2014, at the Fourth of July, I again appealed to potential volunteers’ sense of patriotism in this poster with the signers of the Declaration of Independence in their required Dairy Barn attire—bill caps, cow-spotted aprons and name tags.
Thomas Jefferson here presents not the Declaration of Independence to John Hancock for his approval, but a dish of Dairy Barn ice cream. All are wearing Dairy Barn name tags except for Hancock, whose signature is so large it requires three name tags, stuck on the side of his chair.
Hancock is at his iMac desktop computer, logged in to the Dairy Barn sign-up page to provide needed information for his volunteer shifts.
Hats are a health code requirement at the Dairy Barn and at the time, people were encouraged to wear their own, which provided an interesting hodgepodge, as it did in this scene.
John Adams wears the hat of the New England Patriots.
The “YOLO” hat Jefferson wears was popular in 2014 as a youthful declaration of taking life-threatening risks—“you only live once,” went the motto. Jefferson in 1776 was putting his young life at huge risk by rebelling against England, essentially committing treason and punishment by death. “We must, indeed, all hang together,” Benjamin Franklin said before signing the Declaration of Independence, “or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
Franklin here wears the hat of the NHL hockey franchise from Tampa. It’s the Lightning, an homage to Franklin’s kite-in-a-storm electricity experiments.
Hancock is wearing the SWAG cap backwards because so confidently and cockily signing his name so big on the Declaration of Independence is equivalent today to wearing your SWAG hat backwards.
A boulder message
In 2015, this poster brings back the ice cream boulder theme, this time as our Indiana-Jones cow runs Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-like from the strawberry ice cream boulder as he clutches his stolen idols—the ice cream scoop and the shake blender.
Shark week
During the summer, a heavily promoted cable network ties all its programming to sharks because … well, because sharks. Not to be outdone, in 2015, I declared a week in July to be Dairy Barn Shark Week because … well, because sharks. Our Dairy Barn shark, Mack, has on his cow-spotted apron, has his ice cream scoop and oddly, is wearing a cap from his West Side rival gang.
Thanks
Our dairy family from the 1940s was back for one last appearance in this pre-fair thank you to volunteers in 2015.
Sunset
This thank you was sent out at the end of the 2015 Iowa State Fair, my final farewell as Dairy Barn volunteer wrangler. In ghostly silhouette, a cowboy with lasso swung above his head and fully extended, ready to release, glides off into the sunset atop a dairy cow.