How It All Began

August 31, 1999

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

It started at the kitchen sink. It was May of 1948, before Bulletin Boards, before e-mail, before computers. I was living in a house I hated, caring for a two year old boy and a five year old girl, and 3 men of the old school which taught that no male should lift a finger around the house as long as there was a female present. I had no car, no money, and no chance to make friends. I remember washing dishes, wishing I'd get some mail, then realizing you have to send some to get some. Suddenly I decided to offer a newsletter called The Friendly Cooks Club. As in later years I tended to buy the pig before the pigpen was built, I put a $2.00 ad in a magazine called Profitable Hobbies, before I had written even one sentence. The subscription price was a dollar a year. When 3 letters with dollars arrived I panicked and sent the letters ( and the dollars) back with an apology, saying I was too sick to do the newsletter as planned. When dollars kept coming, I realized I had found a bunch of other lonely people and had better get going.

The membership list grew to 200 before I decided that was big enough. Folding paper and stuffing envelopes is not exciting work. Not to mention addressing by hand. The letters ended in 1968, after a full 20 years, 'tho not a full 240 issues. From 1982 on, as I became involved with computers, I kept comparing the days of paying a shop to do mimeo work, then painting ink onto a Sears mimeo of my own with what came out of my printers painlessly. I was printing 200 labels in 3 minutes instead of writing them for 2 hours and getting constant cracks about hen scratches. The five year old became a computer guru, needled me into abandoning my AppleIIe ($3000) and getting a PC, and then began nudging about a website. I'm writing this in Word 97, and e-mailing it to the guru, a long, long, road from typing on wax stencils, with a portable typewriter.

So the Friendly Cooks Club is reviving, with the old mix of recipes and chatter, and you are invited to chatter back. I'll be digging into the old letters, and sharing old and new kitchen ideas. If you send a recipe please add a note that it's OK for me to print it here, if it is.