In a book valuably organized by neighborhood, we hear an Upper West
Side resident, Olga Marx (b. 1894):
On New Year’s Day, all the women
stayed at home to receive callers.
… When a man would call, it was a sign of gentility to leave an engraved
visiting-card in an urn at the door.
Then my mother would use them to compare with friends. Of course, it was very important to
have more cards than anybody else.
-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must
Remember This: An Oral History of
Manhattan from the 1890s to World
War II (1989), p. 203
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