SEA ANIMALS PROVIDE NOVEL IDEA FOR A WOMAN’S CAREER

Southland Times, Issue 23538, 18 June 1938, Page 17

SEA ANIMALS PROVIDE NOVEL IDEA FOR A WOMAN’S CAREER

Women take up all kinds of careers these days along orthodox lines; so much so, in fact, that we have ceased to wonder at the things women can do. But now and again we are startled out of our complacency by a really ingenious idea, often very simple. Take, for instance, the American girl who earns a living from sea horses. How? Well, like a good many other jobs, this one came about almost by accident, but “there is a tide in the affairs of men”— and women. And the wise people grab opportunities before they are lost —or snatched away by somebody else. Miss Peggy Lynch practically cornered the sea-horse market, and it came about like this. She was employed by a man who, before the Great War, decided to grow pearls. This industry has been carried out by the Chinese, and, according to him, there was no reason why an American could not do the same, so he planted a great bed of mussels and began the long wait of 20 years, when he hoped the pearls would mature. Meanwhile they were fed regularly. One of his worries was a plague of sea horses which consumed all the food meant for the mussels. So, of course, he had to try and get rid of them —which he did, with nets. In 1925, when Miss Lynch entered his employ, he had 18,000 dried sea horses heaped in an attic, and one of her first jobs was to dispose of them. Strangely enough, she had always been extremely interested in these little creatures, and then the idea of selling them occurred to her. These flashes of inspiration do sometimes amount to something, but it

is ironic tp think of the failure of the pearl-growing industry, while out of disaster, as it were, the sea horses flourished. For the mussels died many years ago and Miss Lynch has been turning out from 5000 to 10,000 of her specimens a year.

Perhaps you have seen them somewhere enclosed in a glass paper weight or mounted on a pin. Some of the latter were sold at the aquarium at a counter given over to “scientific souvenirs.” Now they are sold at various museums in America as pins and in paper weights. The paper weights have a plain glass top, a green border, and a dried sea horse in a hollow inside, packed in cotton. The pins bear a sea horse gilded, silvered, or painted red, blue, green or any other colour Miss Lynch fancies. The retail price of each is 50 cents.

The original supply was used up long ago, and nowadays a buyer goes up and down the coast buying them from the fishermen who net them with the rest of their catch. New York, Philadelphia and Miami are her best markets, but Bermuda is good, too. American tourists to whom the novelties are quite new buy them there, thinking they are getting exotic souvenirs, whereas they take them back from where they came. Such is the origin of many a souvenir! Miss Lynch is a pretty, dark-eyed young woman in her early thirties, and she sits day after day preparing her product for the market. One would naturally suppose that she would be tired of the sight of sea horses long before this, but she isn’t. They are still to her just as fascinating as they ever were, and she says they are all different, just like people. But, then, she just happened to love them to start with—which makes all the difference,