by JEAN STEEL VENRICK, Wife of The Wordwright
Copyrighted - October 4, 2002

This sounds like a children’s story but it is not – it’s a true story.

For the background, we need to go back fifteen or twenty years ago when I was in my dieting era. We had gone to the Christian Armory on Morse Road in Columbus, Ohio where I found this delightful small paperback book entitled "Skinnie Minnie Recipe Book" by Frances Hunter, Published in 1976-77, cost only $2.95.

I was delighted with some of the recipes featured, some pared down to really cut the calories, others not to my liking at all. I kept it with my diet cookbooks.

Then one day my diet book came up missing! I was heartsick because I thought I knew what happened – I generously gave a hospital twig book sale a bag of books. Then I knew I would never see my little book ever again for I was sure it was not that widely circulated. I, or we, even went to the Christian Armory to see if they had another copy. I looked and looked at bookstores and book sales wherever we went. No one ever heard of it. In fact I could not even remember the name of the book, author, or what it looked like. I was frustrated. I finally resigned myself to the fact that it was gone FOREVER!

Then, and this is the good part, September 28, 2002, this group was having their annual book sale again. The cookbooks and other health books are always on a table or two by themselves, and that table is crowded when the doors open at 9:00 a.m. It’s a "grab, grunt and growl" situation as my dad would say. If you see a book you only think you might like, you take it now! I went around the table at least twice as the crowd swarmed, grabbing a book when I could see one.

The crowd subsided. There were a few lonely books no one wanted. I had seen this one little book on my previous trips around the table but now I could stop and look at the leftovers. I picked up this book with the big milkshake with a strawberry on top and started through it. To my surprise in the front was the author and her husband’s picture. I recognized her as the author of MY LITTLE LOST COOKBOOK. I nearly yelled outloud, "Eureka, I found it!!" Never could I have been more happy with anything in my whole life. I was ecstatic! "Skinnie Minnie" has been found and I paid all of 25 cents for it. (It was lost for at least ten years!.)

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