Making Ends Meet

The was a time, a couple of decades ago, when I felt like I was good enough at art and design that I could pay the bills, put groceries on the table and have money left over to go fishing now and then. And I did that but it seemed like I spent a lot of time making things that either didn't sell or sold but were not used in the way I had originally thought. This drawing of my cousin, President Abraham Lincoln, for example is but one of many similar drawings I made but nobody was interested in buying them or using them and paying me for their use. Of course this was in the days before the Internet, computers and "digital" images. We had to send a letter to an editor of a magazine and include the image we wanted to sell and wait for a response. The mail was what we now call "snail mail" and it took a week or two for an ordinary letter to get from my home to Cincinnati, Ohio and to the Beckett Paper Company located in Hamilton, Ohio. They like the image and called their advertising company in and asked if they could use the image in one of their next ads. The ad company said they would use it if I could make it say "ABE" as in Lincoln and I did that but used the drawing of Lincoln instead of the letter "E". And to make it seem even better, I put it on top of the Gettysburg Address. This was back in 1978 and the ad agency bought it and used it in the next ad they did for the paper company. I suppose I got enough money to buy a pair of shoes or two for the 5 kids we had in the house.