all railroad stock.’
At that time I decided not to bother Justin with my `Prudence Penny’ venture – not
when he was feeling bruised on his macho bump. Instead, I had taken it up with
Eleanor. Entrusting a secret to Eleanor was safer than telling it to Jesus.
‘Prudence Penny, The Housewife Investor’ started out as a weekly column in country
newspapers of the sort we had had in Thebes, the Lyle County Leader. I always
offered the first six weeks free. If a trial period stirred any interest, a
publisher could continue it for a very small fee – those small-town weeklies can’t
pay more than peanuts; there was no sense in trying to make money on it at first.
In fact my purpose was not to make money. Or only indirectly.
I set the format in 1953 with the first column and never varied it:
Prudence Penny THE HOUSEWIFE INVESTOR
Page 222
Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
TODAY’S DEFINTTION: (Each column I gave at least one definition. Money people have
their own language. If you don’t know their special words, you can’t play in their
poker game. Some of the words I defined for my readers were: common stock, preferred
stock, bonds, municipal bonds, debentures, margin, selling short, puts and calls,
living trust, joint tenancy, tenants in common, float, load, points, deficiency
judgement, call money, prime rate, gold standard, flat money, easement, fee simple,
eminent domain, public domain, copyright, patent, etc., etc.
(Trivial? To you, perhaps. If so, you did not need `Prudence Penny’. But to most
people these elementary terms might as well be ancient Greek. So I offered one
definition each column, in one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words that could be
misunderstood only by a professor of English.)
Next I offered a discussion of something in the news of the day that might affect
investing. Since everything, from weather to elections to killer bees, affects
investing, this was easy. If I could include a little juicy gossip, I did. But not
anything hurtful, or cruel, and I was most careful not to offer anything actionable.
My next item each week was TODAY’S RECOMMENDED INVESTMENT. This was a sure thing,
based directly or indirectly on Theodore’s predictions. The same recommendation
might be repeated many times, alternated with others from the same source.
I always closed with Prudence Penny’s Portfolio:
Ladies, we started this portfolio with one thousand dollars ($1000) in January 1953.
If you invested the same amount and at the same time, investing and changing
investments just as we did, your portfolio is now worth $4823.17.
If you invested $10.000, your portfolio is now worth $48.231.70.
If you invested $100.000, today your portfolio is worth $48217.00.
But it is never too late to start prudent investing with Penny. You can start today
with $4823.17 (or any multiple or fraction), which you then place as follows:
(List of investments that add up to $4823.17.)
If you want to see for yourself the details of how a thousand dollars grows to
(current figure) in only (fill in) years and (blank) months, send ($1.oo, $2.50,
$4.00 – the price went steadily up) to Pinch-Penny Publications, Suite 8600,
Harriman Tower, New York, NY HKL030 (that being a drop box that caused mail to be
routed, eventually, to Eleanor’s stooge in Toronto) or buy it at your local
bookstore: The Housewife’s Guide to Thrifty Investing by Prudence Penny.
The hugger-mugger about the address was intended to keep the Securities Exchange
Commission from learning that `Prudence Penny’ was a director of Harriman
Industries. The SEC takes a jaundiced view of ‘Inside Information’. So far as I
could tell, it would matter not at all to them that my advice was truly beneficial
to anyone who followed it. In fact, that might get me beheaded even more quickly.
The column spread from country weeklies to city dailies and did make money after the
first year, and quite a lot of money in the thirteen years that I wrote it. Women
read it and followed it – so my mail indicated – but I think even more men read it,
not to follow my advice, but to try to figure out how this female bear could waltz