No Longer Heard

Cleaning out a desk drawer, I find three pieces of scrap paper -- 
and I can't take a picture to show you because my camera is no longer working. 
I don't feel capable of learning to use a new one. 
My cell phone is a dumbphone -- if there's a way to take pictures with it and transmit them to you I don't know how and I no longer feel capable etc.
Maybe I can find a vintage Canon SD1100 IS on ebay -- stay tuned. Meanwhile, here with no illustration to dress up the post is what it says on those pieces of scrap paper.  What do you suppose I was intending to write?

rumble seat
Sue Barton, Student Nurse
Dionne quintuplets
hand signals
house dresses
Dutch bob
matching panties
double dutch
popsicle stick "free"
Red Fairy Book
Shirley Temple paper dolls
tire blowout
dry cereal
floor wax
matching panties
penny candy
bathing cap
tourist cabin
mastoid
root beer barrels
candy cigarettes
diptheria

Profitable Hobbies

Yesterday I found a box of old letters Norm had saved from the few years before we were married.  He job-hunting; I putting myself through college (one could do it in those days) and freelancing articles to magazines.  I wrote “I just finished re-typing that article about you.  It’s not bad and I think it’ll sell – it’s about 2,000 words.” 

Well, I evidently did find a market for it, and the magazine may have paid something like a penny a word.  Twenty dollars would have been a lot of money in those days. 
That was a long time ago and I forgot the whole thing.

     Fast forward SEVENTY YEARS.

I get a phone call from a woman who lives one suburb over. She’s been reading the November 1947 issue of a magazine called Profitable Hobbies, and she finds an article about a Norman Lank who tape-records festivities like weddings and bar mitzvas.  There’s a picture of the young man, with his impressive huge recording machine. And the byline on the story reads Edith Handleman.  

“So,” she says, “Norman Lank had a real estate company here, and Edith Lank writes that column in the Rochester paper so I wondered…”

Which left me wondering how on earth she happened, 70 years on, to be reading the November 1947 issue of a magazine called Profitable Hobbies.