A greeting that keeps on giving Jonesboro artist gets request from California woman for 25-year-old card

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A cat and a mouse have made an unexpected reappearance in Marilyn Dowling’s life. A quarter-century ago, Dowling designed a Christmas card showing the two creatures exchanging gifts.

Inside, the message reads: “and in the magic of that holiday moment, they realized how very colorless their lives would be without each other … May your holidays be filled with joy.”

But it’s the words on the back that make the card special this season: “Copyright Marilyn Dowling and Alaina Snipper.”

Now a sign painter living in Jonesboro, Dowling drew the pen-and-ink picture in 1978. Then Snipper, a business partner, provided the coloring.

It wasn’t even one of their better cards, Dowling said of the creations during four years when she and some friends ran a greeting card company. They were living on a commune in western Massachusetts called Renaissance. The card company also was called Renaissance.

But someone long ago and far away thought the card was wonderful enough to save all these years.

Lawyer Ann Cunningham of Laguna Beach, Calif., had bought the card some 20 years ago and kept a copy.

With a holiday greetings list this year that included about 40 judges and 100 prosecutors from Los Angeles to San Diego, the defense attorney wanted to find the perfect card – even if she had to call every Marilyn Dowling she found on the Internet, one by one.

Cunningham found the right Marilyn Dowling on her fourth call around the country.

Dowling then made some calls of her own to the Renaissance company, which is still in business in southern Maine. The company was able to find the original color separations, and 400 cards were printed on a short-order run for Cunningham.

“I think it’s the most wonderful card. It’s not expensive or glittery,” Cunningham said earlier this week from Laguna Beach. “But for the adversarial business I am in, it is the most beautiful card. Since I sent it, I have received all kinds of comments in [courthouse] hallways.”

The Christmas card has created a bond between the two women. They have talked by phone three or four times.

“Hearing from Ann was a real rush for me,” Dowling said. “When I was drawing cards so many years ago, I would always think, what is this card going to do once it goes out there? It’s really nice to have people think enough of your card to use it to promote good will.”

The women found some common threads in their lives.

Dowling is 54, Cunningham, 52. Dowling lives within a few miles of the ocean; Cunningham lives on the beach.

Then again, they are opposites.

Dowling lives in the country’s northeast corner, Cunningham is in the country’s far southwest corner. When Dowling was living on a commune in the mid-’70s, Cunningham was taking part in ROTC classes at Ohio State.

Today, Dowling is self-employed and gets work by word of mouth. Cunningham’s name lands in the Los Angeles newspapers when her clients “do stupid things.”

Just this week, Cunningham said, she represented a man charged with hate crimes and attempted murder. She produced a witness and the charge was reduced to vandalism.

“What I do is very intense, and I try to keep these people out of harm’s way,” Cunningham said. “It’s just what I do. I don’t have an adversarial personality, and I don’t make problems. I become friends with the judges and prosecutors I work with.

“It has been difficult to find a card that says, regardless of our differences, ‘I send you my holiday greetings.’ This is the card that says it. I could have sent 100 more.”

The limitation was merely having the time.

“Free time is not what I have a lot of,” said Cunningham, who works among the courthouses of San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.

“This is my work. It’s my life.”

Cunningham came across the card more than 20 years ago, when she bought two or three boxes. She always kept an eye out for more designs by the same artist but never saw any again.

But she always kept this one card on her desk. This year, she realized how right it would be to send to her professional contacts.

After years of carrying the card to stationary stores, hoping to find something similar and being told the design had been discontinued, she was determined to seek out the original artist, if it came to that.

“The message for this card is timeless,” Cunningham said.

“I have looked for more of this artist for 20 years. When I finally found Marilyn, she said very calmly, ‘Oh, yes, that’s my work.’

“We had the loveliest conversation. She put everything in place to make the card available again.”

On the East Coast, Dowling spent just four years working in greeting cards. She looks back on those years, and her 16 years in the commune, with fondness.

She had moved to the commune in 1973. There were 300 people living there at its height, “every possible kind of person,” she said.

“It was without too much structure, as a lot of communes were back then,” Dowling said. “But as we got older, we had to become more structured. The ones just looking for a free ride split off, and the rest of us realized we had to get jobs. That’s how we started the card company.”

Dowling moved to Jonesboro, where her mother grew up, in 1991. These days her work is largely in painting signs for businesses and designing labels for packaging.

She spent every weekend between June and October painting a cartoon-style mural in Ellsworth, 145 feet long, for the Child and Family Opportunities Center.

She is touched that someone would go to the extremes that Cunningham did to locate reprints of her cards.

A bit of small print on the card’s back, C-11, reminded Dowling that the card was the 11th Christmas card design the company had printed.

The verse had been written by Ronnie Sellers, who now lives near Portland. Snipper, who colored the card, still lives in Massachusetts.

“I always liked this one. That was a good one,” Dowling said. “But all cards have their own life. You always have to come up with new things. You always phase out the old ones.”

Just not this year.

Marilyn Dowling’s greeting cards are available at the Woodwind Gallery in Machias.