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Date: 12/27/2022
HADLEY – For the 11th straight year, the Hadley Scenic Calendars have returned to benefit the Hopkins Academy music program.
It’s a tradition that started in the fall of 2011, with the first calendar marking the days of 2012. It began after Linda Hannum, owner of Look Up Photos, attended a Hadley Mother’s Club vendor fair where she remembers people selling tchotchkes.
“All of a sudden, I hear this band playing. I go into the cafetorium and there’s this fully, perfectly instrumented band,” Hannum said.
She saw flutes, oboes, a bassoon, various saxophones, tubas and more instruments conducted by the former band director and International Polka Association Hall-of-Famer Eddie Forman.
“[Forman] was a very fierce band director,” Hannum said. “The whole town has always had an intense sense of pride about the music program. Especially because it’s, what, 160 kids in the entire high school and they’re going to all these festivals and getting first place.”
Hannum’s two sons graduated from Hopkins Academy, and she says she has been around music her whole life. She felt inspired to start this fundraiser to help the music programs travel, perform, purchase equipment and cover other costs.
The photos in the calendar all come from around Hadley, and all profits go toward the music program after covering the production costs. Calendars cost $15 and are sold at local businesses around Hadley, as well as online at LookUpPhotos.com. In the first year alone, just under $2,000 was raised for the school. Hannum says around $23,000 in total has gone to the music programs from the Scenic Calendar since it began.
“It’s morphed a little bit,” Hannum said. “At first, it was just the kids taking orders and then a couple of little local stores said, ‘Hey, we’ll put them out for sale for you,’ and that has kind of blossomed into a bigger community support where we now have, I think, maybe 14 locations that are all Hadley businesses, all small.”
Those businesses include the North Hadley Sugar Shack, Barstow’s Farm, Four Seasons Wine and Liquor, Easthampton Savings Bank and Aegis Physical Therapy.
“The whole idea of all of these locations is obviously to help bring people into the door,” Hannum said. “How many of us sit at home and shop from our phones? When people are ordering creamer on Amazon, it’s like, ‘What?’ The Sugar Shack has the freshest, most amazing – their egg nog is ridiculous. [Flayvors of] Cook Farm and Mill Valley Milk Store, for these businesses to survive, they need people to walk through the door.”
She continued, “It now gets to the point where the last week in November, I can’t even go into any store in Hadley because people are like, ‘When are the calendars coming back? Linda, are you doing another project?’”
Hannum says she gets orders from all around the United States in what she calls a unique way to stay connected, with former residents getting updated photos from around Hadley. She says keeping that record of Hadley is just one benefit of the calendars, as the landscape changes with more corporate and local businesses coming to the area.
“It’s also a great win-win because it’s so hard to keep music alive in schools now because is it quote-unquote ‘necessary’? Well, imagine a world without it,” Hannum said.
Hannum said the project will eventually need to evolve, and maybe become more hands-on for the high schoolers. She said in a recent discussion with them, they talked about the idea of starting a photo club that she would help lead and the kids could become the photographers.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m 63 years old. I’m not going to do this forever, I can’t. Someone needs to take this over,” Hannum said. “...Every single picture in this calendar I took with my iPhone.”
To Hannum, music is more than just the sound we hear. It can provide an outlet, an escape for kids that haven’t found one or are seeking for something to feel a part of. And in a time with endless distractions and challenges of retaining the student’s attention throughout the school day, Hannum referenced the “Anyone, anyone?” scene from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”
“I think it’s huge,” Hannum said. “We all know the kid that falls between the cracks, that there just doesn’t seem to be something for them. They’re not athletically inclined, they’re not going to be on the yearbook staff, they’re shy or whatever. But you can sit in a band and you’re playing your own part, but it’s part of something so much bigger. So you feel this sense of contribution.”
“How do you get kids to be here now? Well if you’re in the band and you’re playing this piece of music, you can’t be anywhere else,” Hannum closed.