Mondays & Memories of My Mom – Picture Perfect Nostalgia

As always, Thank God it’s Monday, again. I LOVE Mondays, as they’re my 52 Chances a year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with you. Therefore, happy Monday, to everyone.

#TheRecipeDetective

#NationalPhotographyMonth

May is National Photography Month, among other things. Photography, as well as gardening, cooking, organizing, writing, crafting, and traveling are just several choices from an endless amount of popular hobbies that people have taken-up throughout the decades and turned into successful small businesses.

A hobby is generally a pleasure-seeking activity that we do, on a fairly regular basis, usually in our spare time. Hobbies add excitement, diversity and enjoyment to our somewhat hum-drum lives. Hobbies also provide us with a variety of positive physical and mental health benefits.

Hobbies are known, especially during the past five years, to provide relief from depression, anxiety and stress. Since 2020, many entrepreneurs have learned to utilize the internet and social media platforms to turn their hobbies into small businesses. It’s a wonderful feeling when you can turn what you enjoy doing most into a profitable profession.

As Mom used to say about her writing… “I make a living with my writing – but it’s my writing that makes living worthwhile!” Likewise, Mark Twain alleged: “Find a job you enjoy doing and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.”

Even though she claimed that writing was never a hobby for her, Mom found pleasure in the activity, on a fairly regular basis. However, it wasn’t just in her “spare” time – it was almost all of the time. It undeniably provided her with excitement, diversity, and enjoyment; all of which relieved any depression, anxiety, or stress she may have been under.

FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…

Excerpts about writing, as a hobby; by Gloria Pitzer, as seen in…

My Cup Runneth Over – And I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, pp. 25 & 53)

[WRITING WAS NEVER A HOBBY]

THERE WERE TIMES when the reporters asked to come out to our home – then in Pearl Beach (near Algonac) and so small… They would approach the story as if it were just another housewife with a happy little hobby who turned it into a profitable business.

My writing was never a hobby… For lack of a better definition, the Internal Revenue Service calls our enterprise a ‘business’… [while] others call it our ‘work’. I, however, like the word ‘livelihood’ because it is a lively experience. (p. 25)

BECAUSE THIS WAS never a hobby, never work, never a job, I have had no problem with the worry or concern that accompanies a position from which one expects to retire. I would not want to give up what I have been doing since I was a child [writing].

It would be unfair to have to give up doing something that has also brought so much pleasure and good information to so many people. It was, however, only when I realized what I should be writing about and what I should be sharing with the readers – what I knew best – that things really began to happen.

Of course, my husband wisely reminds me, when someone asked about writing their own cookbook, that WRITING it is the easiest part. Knowing how to SELL it is the hard part! (p. 53)

Going from being a hobbyist to an entrepreneur in anything, including photography, requires a lot of vision, hard work, and dedication. Marketing is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome because it doesn’t matter how great or unique your talent is if nobody knows about it.

Photography started to be recognized as a visually creative art form in the late 1800s. Many attribute the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words” to Confucius, who lived long before photography existed; but Wikipedia proposes that the saying began with a 1921 ad by Fred R. Barnard, using similar words.

For decades, it took a lot of special training and knowledge to become a professional photographer – or writer or chef or gardener or crafter – that has all changed and evolved, from one generation to the next, particularly with the help of social media platforms.

Although photography has been continuously evolving for almost 200 years, the introduction of the Polaroid (and Kodak) instant cameras for the average consumers in the 1960s and 1970s, began the quickest decent of the old film style cameras.

I remember when Polaroid’s “instant” cameras and various branded “disposable” cameras were thought to be new, cutting-edge technology. But you still didn’t know if the shot was “picture perfect” until it popped out of the camera and developed right before your eyes.

Then cameras were built into cell phones in 2004 (in the U.S.) – that’s when the world of photography (as a hobby and a business) started to soar. They were convenient and easy to use. In 2010, when Apple developed the front-facing camera, “selfies” (aka: self-portraits) became increasingly popular – now a cultural phenomenon.

Cell phones became our all-in-one-personal-assistants with built-in digital cameras and added SD picture cards (or “The Cloud”), for storing THOUSANDS of picture perfect “Kodak moments” whenever they happen. The freedom of digitally editing and sharing our pictures contributed greatly to the ease of turning a hobby into a profession.

Photography has come such a long way in a comparatively short amount of time since the advent of the commercialized digital cameras and SD cards, available to normal consumers, since the 1990s. Now it’s often used as a form of record-keeping and as a form of learning. Mom’s written stories of our family are bonus records to accompany her photo albums.

Mom and Dad, their parents and grandparents, all felt that pictures were important records of our lives and ancestry. I often go through all of their old photo albums that I inherited, I recall so many wonderful memories of our family’s special occasions – and of our family’s stories about older occasions.

I scanned all of those old photos, recipes, cards, letters, and other bits of our “family history” and put them on USBs to share with my kids and siblings, as well as for safe-keeping. Now, thanks to the digital age, we all get to have copies of their albums on one small, convenient USB stick. Digital picture frames have even expanded our picture-viewing pleasure.

MORE FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…

As seen in…

My Cup Runneth Over – And I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, pp. 6 & 7)

REDISCOVERING – OLD PHOTOGRAPHS

WRITER, DAVID MAZEL, in a Boston newspaper, talked about looking at old photographs, as if gazing into a lost world, and I know exactly how he feels. I was shuffling through a shoebox full of photos from years ago, feeling it was some other world entirely than the one in which we now lived…

Where warm memories could stir and awaken me to consider just how well we did with so little, as Paul and I and our five (now, adult) children developed our family enterprise. Over the years, some images, of how [our] recipe business began, have remained indelible.

Others, however, have changed; like the shifting patterns in a rotating kaleidoscope… From that very first article that I wrote for the Royal Oak Tribune [in 1950], when I was 14 years old, to the [last] issue of our Secret Recipes^TM Newsletter_©…the work has been, truly, a labor of love…

I must have spent hours studying the pieces I wrote in my early days – remembering where I was [and in] what I believed and expected from life when I wrote them.

There was always a certainty in each article [and] every book begun but not always finished, then, that life was good and surely God was a loving presence. This always carried me through. It still does.

LAST THOUGHTS…

#MemorialDay

#NationalRoadTripDay

#NationalCoolerDay

We’re finally approaching the brink of the summer season, which unofficially begins this coming Friday, with the onset of the Memorial Day weekend. It’s time to pack up a cooler and hit the road, as Friday is also National Road Trip Day and National Cooler Day.

Remember to take lots of pictures of your trip (if you go) and share them on social media with any or all of the hashtags I’ve shared today. Incidentally, June is coming in less than two weeks, celebrating National Great Outdoors Month; and, in almost four weeks, it’ll likewise be Nature Photography Day.

Mom was usually our family’s personal photographer, taking most of the pictures during our road trips (and other special occasions). Dad stepped in from time to time so Mom could be in some of the pictures with us kids, too. Back then, we couldn’t do “selfies” with the kinds of cameras we had available to us.

Thus, it was rare to have both Mom and Dad in any of the pictures of our family’s events, as one of them was always the photographer. Things were so much different way back when… It’s amazing – the leaps and bounds that photography and cameras have made, especially since the 1960s.

Back then, we didn’t have digital cameras that took almost unlimited pictures that you could review right then and there – deleting the ones that were blurry and out of focus or that cut off someone’s head or that were “photo bombed” by a passerby – before you paid for printing them all, sight unseen.

Hence, almost every shot was “staged” so it would be a picture perfect memory and not waste film. Nowadays, we can just point, click, and review. From there, we can pick and choose which ones we want to delete or share. In this day and age, we no longer need to pay for printing them, in order to share them, since it can all be done online, digitally!

On the downside, many photo printing services have gone out of business since you can now skip the whole “printing process” all together and just share your photos with others through email and on social media sites, as well as in text messages. There is so much to be said for innovation!

#GloriaPitzersCookbook

https://www.balboapress.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-001062253

Thanks for visiting! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my memories of my mom, her memories, and other related things. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at [email protected]. You can also find me on Facebook: @TheRecipeDetective.

IN CLOSING…

In honor of May, being National Egg Month, and tomorrow, being National Quiche Lorraine Day, here’s Mom’s secret recipe for a picture perfect “Quiche Lorraine”; as seen in her self-published cookbook… The Best Of The First 20 Years (Secret Recipes^TM, Marysville, MI; April 1994, p. 42). As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share it.

#NationalEggMonth

#QuicheLorraineDay