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.