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She finds engraving an excellent hobby for a housewife, for it gives her opportunity to do creative art, and yet not leave her home during the hours when she wishes to attend to the needs of her family. She keeps no "business" hours; in fact engraving hours are from dusk to dawn and from dawn to dusk again; just whenever she has work to do and when she wishes to do it.

Mrs. Roth entered the Kansas City School of Watchmaking during the war, thinking it would be wise to build a trade for herself in the event her husband would be kept away from home for some time in the service. She claims she survived only two days of watchmaking, then decided it was too taxing. It required patience and more patience, relaxed watchfulness and more. But there was opened to her the possibility of a course in engraving. She took to this quickly, for it was a creative art and when she had finished a piece she felt she had accomplished something new, whereas in watchmaking she would only be repairing. Mrs. Roth is artistic in many ways; engraving is but one of them.

The equipment needed is not expensive—another factor in the engraving appeal. Mrs. Roth has acquired many gravers (she is the engraver, the tool is the graver) over the years and she has certain ones which she uses over and over again. The graver is simply a steel rod, round or square, cut to a point at one end, and set into a handle like a small door-knob, at the other end. The rods vary slightly in length but are approximately 3½ inches long. Some she has shaped to a curve, to facilitate turning the tool in her hand; others are straight. Some are cut to it fine point; others to a wider cutting surface. She tests the sharpness of her tool by scratching her thumb-nail. (The shade of her beauty operator hovers over her while she does this.) She can tell by the "feel" whether it is ready for use. That came with practice. She has a scope, which is a set of magnifying glasses worn as eyeglasses. They magnify the product three times. In addition she has a block which holds in a vise the article to be engraved. The block is assembled on a swivel base so the article can be turned readily while the engraving process is going on. Then she has a buffer, to polish the finished product. All in all, her equipment, she estimates, has cost not more than $150. She has her studio in the basement of her home. Her telephone is by her side and she can carry on a conversation over the phone and engrave "with the greatest of ease."

MRS. ROTH'S services began to be in demand after "a friend told a friend" about the beautiful work she could do. She gave a piece of silver to a friend and engraved it with a monogram—a personalized design which was not standard "copy." Friends, seeing this work, demanded to know where they could have similar work done and Mrs. Roth found herself besieged with orders, but she still considers her work a hobby. She still does her work in her basement, piece by piece, at her own time.

Each piece to be engraved is first rubbed over with a liquid called "Chinese white," then the design is scratched in. Mrs. Roth may first design the inscription on paper with pencil but usually she designs directly on the metal. Then each line is cut with the chisel—or graver—a deep line here, a turned line there, a delicate line on the other side, thus producing light and shadow.

She engraves on aluminum, pewter, copper, brass, gold, silver and enamel, but not on steel. Each metal produces its own style of beauty in inscription, but she prefers to work with sterling silver. Plated silver can be engraved, but often it is too shallowly plated and the tool goes through the plate so is not acceptable. Engraving can also be done on ivory and some plastics and inlaid with enamels in colors, which produces beautiful results.

Mrs. Roth's inscriptions are made in all types of lettering, many of the designs being entirely original with her. She prefers to use a leaf script, with delicate leaf traceries branching off from the main lines of the letters. With each design she adds that bit of "extra" which is the acme of salesmanship—she gives a pattern to the customer so that it can be copied if desired, in another community at another time, or it can be kept merely as a souvenir of the work done. This pattern is made by fixing a piece of moistened paper to the metal which has been covered with jeweler's wax, and then burnishing the paper, thus setting on the paper an exact duplicate of the inscription on the metal. If the customer does not wish to take this, Mrs. Roth keeps it for reference, for often a customer will ask for a piece of silver to be engraved "just like the other one" and this enables her to duplicate it quickly. In each case where a number of articles must be engraved alike, a wax impression is made of the first, so that the other pieces can be drawn from the pattern.

MRS. ROTH'S customers include sporting goods houses, which carry trophies. When they sell a trophy, they also sell the inscription and have Mrs. Roth do the work. She does work for the Army base in El Paso, for the various athletic clubs and for stores. Because of her conscientious way, she is approached constantly for work.

Her work is so well-known that customers making a purchase of something to be engraved will ask that Mrs. Roth do the work. When she first began to do engraving, she placed on file with the stores a "sampler" of her monograms, similar to the one shown, so that customers may make their selection of design. It is literally true, in her case, that "a satisfied customer is the best advertisement." El Paso is not a large city and Mrs. Roth is well-known in social circles and in civic organizations. Wherever you go, you see examples of her work—either on the tea table or in the trophy cabinet. When people in El Paso think of engraving they just naturally think of Mrs. Roth.

Mrs. Roth's smallest job was a baby's gold locket, not larger than your thumbnail. It had to be engraved: "To my dear little great-grand-daughter from her grand-father Thomas E. King." Even with the scope, magnifying the letters three times normal size, that was an eye-straining job. The letters had to be placed on both sides of the locket.

The largest job was a back-straining one. It was copper, a so-called "loving cup" 4½ feet high, standing on a base. (That's a lot of love.) There were 600 letters in the inscription, all the information needed for posterity, plus all the names of the "winnahs." That about broke up the business, for Mrs. Roth is small, dainty, with long narrow hands and slender arms. To wrap herself around that trophy and engrave those letters really was a job.

Rush jobs can be annoying, too. Two men brought a small tray to her which needed an inscription of about 100 letters. They said they would "wait," so wait they did and romped with the dog, thus adding to the state of confusion, while Mrs. Roth concentrated on the painstaking task. It took her about an hour—that is about average for the course, but next time she would prefer not to have folks standing over her, asking whether she is about done, and then throwing the dog a ball while they wait.

The worst rush job was 2,000 letters and had to be out "right away." (You know when you work at a hobby, folks think your time is not important.) Anyway that took fifteen hours, and she managed to gulp down a cup of coffee periodically to keep at the job.

The most exasperating work she is asked to do is often prefaced by a remark like this: "Mrs. Roth, can you just do a little work on that tray of mother's? It looks so sort of worn. I'd like to have it done over, re-engraved, or whatever you would call it." That means painstaking work, eye-strain to pick up the old line formations, and much buffing to try to "iron out" the scratches, and the customer probably won't be satisfied anyway. It will still not look like new as she had hoped.

CHARGING FOR work which everyone calls your "hobby" is a problem. There is no fixed rate for art in any form—the value is in the eyes of the buyer. Yet the artisan should receive a fair pay for the time involved, the material used, plus the exercise of the artistic ability that goes into the finished product. So Mrs. Roth has to gauge her prices by the situation involved each time. Generally speaking, the cost is from ten cents a letter and up, but the size of the letter and the complexity of the design naturally governs the price. A monogram on a tray should bring $10 a letter; an inscription on a copper plate, ten cents a letter.

Mrs. Roth is thrilled with her hobby. It relaxes her completely. She can concentrate on engraving and her household problems fade away until they seem almost to be out of mind; then she can attack those problems and handle them efficiently. In addition to her household duties, Mrs. Roth manages to serve on the executive boards of four clubs, is an officer in her church, and does considerable welfare work.