“Friending” -- Then and Now

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

[Note]  Most of the testimony in Kisseloff’s engaging collection  comes from ordinary folks, but often with a solid street-eloquence.   The woman looking-back in the above quotation  was Olga Marx, one of the more observant of Kisseloff’s informants (or “witnesses”  as he calls them).   Also one of the better educated -- Barnard, then a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr.   There followed a modest literary life.  But what caught my eye  was this detail:  she published “several mysteries for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.”    Salutations from across the decades, Dr. Marx!  That magazine is also where I got my start, chronicling the saga of the Murphy Brothers, Private Investigators.   You can check out the action  here:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html