Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 82, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1909 — HOBBIES. [ARTICLE]

HOBBIES.

Hobby—“ Any favorite object, pursuit, or topic.” To relieve the daily monotonous grind, to have a “hobby” provided its not detrimental to self or others, is a good thing. One may have more than one, owing perhaps to season of the year. To illustrate: at the present time ye editor’s hobby is the garden patch and he can’t even come for a meal without strolling out to see how things have “growed” and in this hobby, wilie happens to agree though we are all well aware there are hobbies that husband and wife don’t agree on, mostly the husband’s. The daily grind bn “Change” and in the business marts of the city is in most cases a nerve racking body wearing proposition either mentally or physically. Men get so absorbed, a hurriedly snatched meal is all the time he spares away from his office, and each is more or less a pull down grade against nature in the bodily sense. A Chicago paper recently commented upon the number of millionaires that have been laid away in their graves under the age of thirty-five. Their hobby was money, but after all did it pay? We can readily presume that too late they would have willingly given up a fortune to get back health. Perhaps a hobby that led to the golf links or out on the boulevards behind a favorite horse or other harmless and helpful recreation, would have kept him on terra firma much longer. Sure it is that in the following of some of our hobbies we pay the price. Some of us paying it now. Sometimes our hobbies are confined to certain seasons of the year as indicated before, but then again we have them in the different periods of life. During the “saphead” period the hobby is the best girl, but of times after marriage, said hobby gets to be a “nag” which is another definition of “hobby,” and then hubby sometimes follows other hobbies either in a business way to bury his marital disappointment or in some remote instances (and not so infrequent either) find his “affinityelsewhere. To admire horses —and who doesn’t admire a fine horse —is but natural and it isinany a man’s hobby, being a harmless diversion, but “following the ponies,” to copy a race track phrase, especially when one gets the most of liis money on the “slows” puts one in the has been or also ran class. Many employes in our cities owe their Saturday half holidays to the fact that the employer is a baseball crank. Many a staid quiet business man goes daffy at a ball game. One such told us that to utterly forget his office or business cares for the time being, the ball game wag the only thing that could take his mind entirely away. In some of the most strenuous business pursuits in metropolitian marts the man is keyed up to the highest tension with his faculties on the alert every minute of the day and too often far into the night. This tension must be relieved, like the strings of the fiddle, once in awhile, or something will snap, or the strings are soon out of tune, dead or useless. After the performance, the bow is unstrung till that of the next, but man gets “unstrung” by overdoing. He realizes too late the strings and sinews of life have been played upon at too high a tension and here is where a harmless helpful hobby would be of benefit, but all men do not have hobbies beneficial in his case or perhaps somothers one that would be, from greed of further gain, by begrudging the time that would be necessary to indulge in or enjoy it. Thus it seems possible by developing our harmless hobbies or diversions, we may add to our span of life. He has accomplished much indeed who can go home at • night and leave all business cares behind. We could dwell at length on the multitude of hobbies of our friends, including the maiden lady and her cat who retorts that a cat is far preferable to a dog of a husband, and perhaps some of the fair sex may at times regret they exchanged their hobby for a “hubby” but suffice it to say we all know what our hobbies are and we do not want in some instances for the world to know what they are. We know whether they are harmful or otherwise —“As a man tliinketh so is he.”