A Hobby Turns Into A Business

Today was a beautiful spring day and I told Fran I would just love it if he would go to the shed and dodge the wasps and get out Mom’s Memory Box. We went through it together and much to my surprise, I think Fran was as fascinated as I was with it’s contents. Interestingly enough, when I moved here, I labeled the box, “Mom’s Memories.”
Well, inside the box was not only Mom’s Memories, but mine, my sister’s, my brother’s and my grandmother’s and anyone else that knew my family. Sadly enough my brother Keith, and my two cousins are the only ones left that would have their memories jolted by what I found in that box. I asked Fran, “do you realize how many stories are in this box? This will hold me in material for a long time for telling stories in my blog.”
Today I am going to tell you in detail about Mom’s baking hobby/business. The picture at the top of the page is my mother in the housedress that I bought her that Christmas I told you about with my allowance money. She is standing in our kitchen with her arm resting on the mixer that saved her arm from a really bad case of bursitis after a very long time of kneading her bread dough by hand.
The date of the newspaper is December 29, 1955. I was eleven years old and interestingly enough, my mother was almost through with her baking business; she was forty three years old. The article is very long, so I will paraphrase it for you.
The article was written by a lady that I knew very well. Her name was Ruby Peterson. As I read the article, I became aware that she was a terrible speller, or didn’t check her work, but be that as it may, she covered the story very well.
I did not realize it, but mother’s baking business was started by a phone call from a lady in town asking Mom to bake an angel food cake for her garden club meeting. She also asked mother to make some sweet rolls for a bake sale that her club was going to have. That’s all it took. From what the article insinuated, the phone rang off the hook. Mother was quite complimented and wondered if other people would be interested in buying her baked goods, so she stopped by the grocery store and asked the owner if he thought he could sell them. He was honest with her and told her he didn’t know. He made her a deal that he would buy them for fifty five cents a dozen, but only wanted twenty packages to see if they would sell. They all sold in twenty minutes. As time went on she would be selling over one hundred fifty packages of bread, rolls, pies, cakes, and cookies every weekend. She used over seventy five pounds of flour every week. One thing that I thought was interesting that I knew and have told my friends, was that my old electric roaster that my dad has repaired I don’t know how many times, was what she baked her angel food cakes in.
One thing the article said that I had to grin at was that Mother started this business because she was bored. They desperately needed the money. Let’s see at fifty five cents times one hundred fifty packages of baked goods would be about eighty two dollars a week, minus all of her flour and yeast and so on. She may have made forty dollars a week. However, look at all the material she got for free with the hundred pound sacks of flour that she bought. Those flour sacks would be my wardrobe someday.
As a footnote, my daughter, Melanie, still has Mom’s Kitchenaide mixer in her pantry. It is used frequently fifty five years later. That is a good advertisement for Kitchenaide, is it not? Mother would be so pleased.