January 2, 2023 · 19,988 Comments

My mother was an early Entrepreneur

My mother, Sonia Henninger Smith, was an early Entrepreneur. She was a housewife while my two siblings and I were growing up in the 1960’s but she was so much more. As a stay at home mom, she was also our Girl Scout Leader, PTA member, church volunteer and Instructor for some of our 4H activities.

As long as I can recall, my mother was an artist. She loved to paint, draw and make arts & crafts. One of her most profitable ventures was making handmade Christmas ornaments out of a special bread dough mixture. When I was in the 6th grade, I remember getting out of school for the day because I was going to help my mother sell her bread dough ornaments at the Hot Springs Arts and Crafts Fair. Since this was the 1960’s, decades before the internet existed, everything was done by phone and/or mail. My mother’s family moved to Hot Springs when she was in Junior High, and my Grandmother still lived there, so we visited often. We heard of the fair, that is held in the first full weekend in October, so my mother completed an application form and mailed in a payment for a booth .After she and her handmade crafts were approved by an Executive Board to be displayed in the arts and crafts fair in the fall, she got busy getting ready for the fair. These are the reasons I call my mother an early Entrepreneur:

For months before the fair, my mother spent hours making the different shapes and sizes and many characters, such as Santa Claus and Snowmen. She also had some that were shaped like a fireplace with stockings hanging from the mantle and she could personalize the stockings with the names of the customer’s children.
Making the dough was just one part of the process of making these ornaments. She would have to make dozens of batches of the dough to make the ornaments. After she finished making the dough and it was still pliable in her hands, she then handmade each ornament, shaping it with her hands and also using other utensils, such as a garlic press, to make small strings of dough that she used as hair for the ornaments. She baked each ornament in our oven on cookies sheets and then later hand painted each one. Her last step was dipping the ornaments in shellac to seal the colors.
By the time the fair rolled around, she had made hundreds of ornaments that she stored in containers and to also make arrangements for a table, chairs and other supplies, such as a money bag and cash for change to take to Hot Springs. Our small car was full!
I helped her by taking the customer’s money, wrapping the ornaments in tissue paper and giving the purchases to the customer. She could them spend time personalizing some of the ornaments.
By the end of the three day crafts fair in Hot Springs, my mother had sold all her ornaments and we headed back to Little Rock with all her cash from her sales!

This photo of my immediate family, along with my Grandmother Nina, my mother’s mother, was taken in the 1960’s, about the same time I helped my mother with her crafts fair

Through my school years, all the way to when I was in college, my mother attended several crafts fairs all throughout Arkansas. I actually had a microwave oven my senior year of college that my mother bought me for Christmas using money she earned from selling her crafts. I lived in an off-campus apartment in Jonesboro with my Chi Omega sorority sister Rebecca that year so we both really loved it!

A couple of years later, when my mother was in her 50’s, she went back to college to finish her degree that she stopped when she got married young and then had me. By the time she started her classes at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) my youngest sibling, my brother Chuck, was also attending UALR and they had some classes together! On May 15, 1991, she graduated from UALR with a degree in Liberal Arts. Take that, the Kardashians and all the Bachelor/Bachelorette hopefuls that list “Entrepreneur” as their career.