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The Story

by Michael Ryerson (photographer)

It began 25 years ago this coming March. I was putting together a neighborhood newspaper in my home in Portland. At around 5 or 6 in the morning, I heard someone shut the front door upstairs and come clomping down the steps.

As I looked up, I saw a pair of heavy work boots and bare legs, then an overcoat and a bearded face with a funny looking hat on the top of it. It was my friend and neighbor, Bud Clark.

The first words out of his month were, "Are you ready to go?" "Go where?" I asked. "To go flashing," he replied. "Did you forget what we were talking about last night?" I finally remembered that I had agreed to take a photo of him exposing himself to a nude statue on the downtown bus mall (Norman J. Taylor’s statue, titled "Kvinneakt", which means nude woman in Norwegian). The idea had seemed very funny the night before, but for some reason the humor went away in my sleep.

Bud was very active on the Venereal Disease Action Council, and he wanted to make a poster drawing attention to their cause. The Council had produced a T-shirt to promote awareness in the high schools, which at the time had an alarmingly high level of this problem. It was titled "Zap the Clap," which was on the T-shirt he was wearing (under the overcoat).

We arrived downtown at daybreak. It was a Sunday morning, and there was hardly any traffic. Bud quickly struck a few poses, and I snapped five frames of him flashing the statue. He defended himself by saying it looked like the nude was flashing him. Before we left, we took a couple of shots of Bud in his short pants and the "Zap the Clap" T-shirt.

 Once back to my basement I developed the film, and we had a good laugh imagining one of the shots as a poster. Several captions came to mind but we really couldn’t settle on anything. One I remember was, "Expose yourself to the arts."

We both agreed that we should run the photo in our neighborhood paper (The Neighbor) and let the readers name it. We offered a $25 prize to the person who came up with the line we would eventually use.

Several hundred people responded with some very funny and clever entries. My favorite is still, "Wanna buy a watch?" We also got a few angry letters from women who were offended by our joke.

Three readers submitted "Expose yourself to art," and it seemed like a natural for a poster to promote the arts.
Nothing was done with our idea for several months because nobody was willing to invest $500 to get a couple of thousand copies printed.

I approached the board of the Northwest District Association with a proposal that would allow them 50% of any profits that I might make off the idea. They had a good laugh too.

One board member Penny Davis offered me the money, and insisted I just pay her back when I could. I accepted her kind offer and immediately had the poster printed.

Now the real challenge: How would I sell this thing? By chance, the Neighborfair was coming up the next weekend and I was already committed to being there. A good place to test it.

I bought two bags of rubber bands and took the posters to the waterfront, where the event was being held. With some borrowed masking tap, I hung a copy from the edge of a folding table. (Hardly an adequate marketing approach for this kind of fine-art-print.) The price was $1.00.

The first lady bought two copies one for her and one for the dog who damaged the sample. I knew I had a hit. For the rest of the day the dollars keep pouring in. I sold 800 copies, enough to pay Penny back and still have over $300 in profit.

I then mailed the remaining copies, along with a PRICE LIST, to poster shops and art galleries around the county to see how big the market might be. Bang! I had a winner. Orders for thousands came in.

The Neighbor newspaper, my main livelihood at the time, was hurting financially. In the next five years we sold over 250,000 copies of the poster, and they made their way all around the world. The profits were a real shot in the arm for our publication. We also marketed post cards, note cards and T-shirts. I always wanted to see how the image would have sold on shower curtains as well. The bottom line was, Penny Davis kept neighborhood journalism alive in Northwest Portland.

During those years the poster was being copied by every rip-off distributor around the country. One buyer in New York alerted me that a guy named Johnny Palacino was printing his own and selling thousands on the East Coast.

I naively jumped on a plane to New York to seek out this dishonest individual and politely advised him to stop stealing from me. I found Johnny in Manhattan, and I gave him a call to try and hook up with him. He informed me that I had the wrong Johnny Palacino and that I better go home. He kept printing his own copies and I left him alone. He was pretty nice about it though. I realize now that I could have been walking on the bottom of the Hudson River wearing cement loafers.

Lara Sydney, owner of Lara Sydney Framing, located at 12th and NW Holt was a teenager in the 1980's and assisted in the rolling and shipping of the thousands of posters that where shipped to the Galleries and poster retailers around the country.  (The framing for the "expose yourself to art print" on display was courtesy of Lara Sydney Framing).

In 1983 Bud told me that he was planning to run for mayor of Portland. My first thought was I hope that poster doesn’t damage his chances. The next May he was elected and the incumbent Frank Ivance had only referred to "The Flasher" in a last-ditch effort when he trailed in the polls.

Time, Newsweek, Playboy and every major city newspaper picked up on the story. Bud even appeared on the Johnny Carson Show with the poster. A barkeep/flasher becoming a mayor was big news.

At first slighted by all the attention the poster was receiving, a show was arranged showing some of Norman Taylor’s (the sculptor) works here in Portland. We became friends and he gave me copies of many renderings he made while planning the statue. It was originally to be a male. That wouldn’t have worked well for the poster.

The poster continued to sell, and Bud sold signed copies to help pay off his campaign debt. The operator of a curio shop on Cape Cod refused to let him sign his tattered copy in the summer of 1984, though. He knew this curious-looking fellow claiming to be the man in the poster—and further he thought the mayor-elect of Portland was wacko.