It’s a rarity, but last week I took a vacation from the podcast. And I traveled a long distance to get to my destination, which was our laundry room on the second floor of our house. I began working on the cabinetry, doors, and moldings months ago, but life just seemed to get in the way of me completing the project. In addition, every task took far longer than I expected – one of the downsides of owning a house that is over 100 years old – but I can now say that the project is finally done.

So, I woke up Saturday morning and set my sights on picking out the next story for the podcast. As I went through the possibilities, some were set aside because they would require far more time to research and write in the short amount of time I had allotted myself, while others seemed too similar in theme to other episodes that I had recently recorded.

Eventually, I whittled it down to the story that you are about to hear. With only three articles bookmarked and a few notes that I knew that I had a lot of research to do.

One of the articles that I had was from the June 20, 1980, edition of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. The headline on the story was “Desperate? Try renting a wife.” It described a new business that 38-year-old Petaluma, California resident Karen Donovan had recently launched. She named it “Rent-A-Wife.”

According to Karen, who had divorced after “13 years, 8 months, and 23 days” of marriage, “I was sitting around trying to decide what to do with my life and to figure out where my expertise lay. It suddenly occurred to me that I was better at being a wife than any other profession, since I’ve done it for almost 14 years.”

That’s when a friend who had run a successful Rent-A-Wife business in nearby Berkeley suggested that Karen try doing the same. The friend had closed that venture after her business partner quit.

Karen decided to give it a try. She began by taking out small ads in the Bay Guardian and the Pacific Sun, two San Francisco Bay Area alternative papers. She coupled that with some small press releases that she thought “would end up in the trash.” But they didn’t, and that is how she ended up being featured in Argus-Courier.

And just what does a Rent-A-Wife business entail? A portion of the text of one of her ads explained it all:

“Rent-A-Wife will greet your guests and entertain them, shop for presents and food, decorate & oversee decorators, pay your bills for you, select your appliances, arrange your home and office moves, type and do research, search for your ancestors, give your parties, care for your home while you are away, do your errands, arrange your vacation and travel, watch your soap operas & report happenings, meet friends and relatives at the airport, help you with time management & budgeting, write & answer your letters, consult with you on your wardrobe buying… or just ask.”

But Karen was quick to point out that the “just ask” portion did not mean that her service was “Rent-A-Mistress.” “Sex and money don’t mix,” she said. “It takes all of the fun out of it.”

Karen noted, “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying being a wife. I think there’s a real need for wives nowadays. Even married couples who both work need the talents of a wife.”

Karen charged $25 per hour, $150 a day, and $600 a week. Adjusted for inflation, that would be nearly $100/hour, $580/day, and $2,300/week.

“We are not cheap. Wives cost a lot of money, they’re worth big bucks. Our prices are modest compared to the value of a wife.”

For that kind of money, Rent-A-Wife was clearly not marketed as a glorified babysitting or maid service.

To ensure their safety, all of her employees worked in pairs. While Karen was the company’s only full-time employee, she noted that “I’ve got six part-time rent-a-wives on my staff, and two of them are male.” The surrogates, as they were called, were each paid $10 of the $25 per hour that Karen charged the customer.

She was also quick to point out that her entire staff was well qualified. Their real jobs ranged from attorney and legal assistant to one who was a marine biologist. Karen was no slouch either. She had spent years working as a legal secretary for the Army, was a notary public, had served as the Sonoma County Court clerk, managed property, had been a college student, and organized Tupperware parties.

As the expression goes, a little publicity goes a long way. It wasn’t long before Karen was fielding more than 100 phone calls daily. Some were from potential clients. Others were from women who wished to set up their own Rent-A-Wife franchise. But perhaps most significantly, Karen received numerous inquiries from the media. That included countless radio shows, Newsweek magazine, The London Daily Mail, Good Morning America, and The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. The NBC television network even expressed interest in creating a situation comedy series based on the Rent-A-Wife concept.

I’ll throw in one more: A Ripley’s Believe It or Not! strip that ran in newspapers everywhere. Written below a sketch of her, it said, “Karen Donovan of Petaluma, CA is the founder of a firm called “Rent-A-Wife” which rents household supervisory personnel at a charge of $600 per week.”

Karen Donovan was suddenly a minor celebrity, and Rent-A-Wife was receiving nationwide attention. “I really don’t have time to be running around the country for these interviews, but I ask myself, why not? I’m just riding this thing right now. When all the fanfare dies down, maybe I’ll get back to doing business. What I really need right now is a vacation.”

Things were getting so crazy that Karen had to hire a Beverly Hills lawyer to handle the more complicated details of running the business. The first step was to copyright the Rent-A-Wife name, plus she applied for federal trademarks for both Rent-A-Wife and Rent-A-Husband. Being a mother with two teenage boys, two dogs, and two cats in the house, she joked about setting up a Rent-A-Family service: “We’ll come over and mess up your house, and then you call ‘Rent-A-Wife’ to straighten the mess out.”

Choosing the name Rent-A-Wife did come with its share of complaints, mainly because some felt it reinforced the idea that wives are subservient to their husbands, and that it implied that its services helped to fulfill male fantasies. Karen pointed out in one interview that “I should have called it Rent-A-Person, but if I did that, they wouldn’t get the drift of what we do.”

Karen dealt with those problems head-on: “That’s so wrong. I’m trying to professionalize wives, show them how much their skills really mean. I think a wife is worth a fortune!”

She noted that, “A lot of women have called me to say that they think it is wonderful and that it does a lot for the self-esteem of women. I was just dying to take a wife and put her into the category of a doctor or a lawyer. I didn’t know that I had a little women’s cause here, but that’s exactly what I have here.”

And to get the point across that everything that her company did was above board, her staff members all wore T-shirts that bore the message, “Anything But Sex.”

All of this publicity was great, but the real question was whether or not Karen ever made any money with her Rent-A-Wife business. A story published about one month after that initial Argus-Courier article described how she had only taken on four clients up until that point.

Did she take on more? Probably. But whether she was successful at it is a question that is unanswered. When 80-year-old Karen Donovan passed away on August 25, 2022, her obituary noted that she had retired after a 22-year career in the US Army and that she had worked an additional twenty years as a special investigator in the insurance industry. There was no mention of her Rent-A-Wife business.

Normally, that would have been the end of the story, but then I began to wonder if the Rent-A-Wife concept originated with Karen or not. My conclusion is that while Karen Donovan had brought fame to the concept, she was definitely not the first.

There had been occasional mentions of renting a wife over the previous century, including a man in London who, in 1968, wished to rent his 21-year-old wife for three months for 50 pounds/$120. He had broken into a store and stolen some cigarettes, and they needed the money to pay the fine. His wife told the press, “Anything is better than having Peter in jail.”

That’s a cute, quirky story, but definitely not what I was searching for.

Instead, I believe it all began with a July 10, 1978, story that columnist Bob Greene wrote for the Chicago Tribune. Days later, it was syndicated to newspapers across the United States.

The headline on the article was “Renting a wife – to surrogate with love?” The third paragraph reads, “Enter the country’s first rent-a-wife service.”

In the story, Bob talked about a New York woman named Emma Fried who “started the rent-a-wife company.”

She told him, “It seemed inevitable to me. There is a definite need. I had been working as a surrogate wife for 12 years, but just for one client at a time. Then I realized that the time was right to go into it all the way, as a business available to people who want to rent wives on a part-time basis.”

The 44-year-old Mrs. Fried named her company “The Surrogate Wife” and advertised her services in some unnamed New York publications. Her fee was $20 for the first hour, $15 for each additional hour.

And just what did a surrogate wife do?

Emma said, “A wife for hire. It’s much more than just a secretary. There are millions of secretaries you can hire, but in this day and age, a lot of people aren’t really looking for a secretary. When you come right down to it – they’re looking for a wife.

 “A wife will do whatever needs to be done for a man. I’m not talking about sexual things, of course – that’s not what my service is all about. I’m talking about things like getting the refrigerator fixed if it’s broken. Think about that. If you don’t have a wife, that’s a real crisis. With my wife rental service, you merely pick up the phone and say, ‘the refrigerator’s broken’ and I get it fixed.

“The list of services is virtually endless, you know. A wife shops for a man, takes care of furnishing his home, buys his clothes, hangs his pictures, picks out his wallpaper, takes care of his bankbooks to make sure they’re balanced, unpacks his crates, arranges his parties, acts as hostess – listen, whatever a man needs to have done, that’s what a wife does. Both in real life and in my service.”

She continued, “Unfortunately, I believe that ‘wife’ has become a dirty word. I’m trying to change that. I don’t happen to agree that being a wife is a bad thing. There is a great deal of satisfaction in being a wife. A wife is a nurse, a helper, a teacher – what a wife does is worth a great many dollars an hour. And if a lot of women aren’t willing to do that work any more well, I am.”

On February 21, 1979, about seven months after Bob Greene’s story ran, The Berkeley Gazette ran a story about two women named Maryann and Laughing Water Pomegranate who launched a business called Rent-A-Wife. Their real names were Maryann and Michelle Smith, and they explained in the article that they got their idea for Rent-A-Wife after reading the article about Emma Fried’s Surrogate Wife service.

Do you remember earlier when I mentioned that Karen Donovan got her idea for Rent-A-Wife from a friend in Berkeley who ran a successful Rent-A-Wife business, but was forced to close after her partner quit? Could one of the Pomegranate women have been Karen’s friend?

Three months after the Berkeley Rent-A-Wife story appeared, the Courier News in New Jersey reported on two women, Gail Kennedy and Freddi Kaiser, who started a similar business. They named it – you guessed correctly – Rent-A-Wife. Not long after this, their story was picked up by newspapers and radio stations across the nation. One of those papers was the Columbus Dispatch, which ran the story on its front page. This caught the attention of reader Diane Widish, who ran another Rent-A-Wife business in Ohio. In this case, however, Diane had a leg up on all of her competitors: she owned the federal trademark for Rent-A-Wife.

A quick search of the US Patent Office’s records shows that she filed for the trademark on November 20, 1978, and that she had begun using the name the previous July. That was the same month Bob Greene’s article ran in the Chicago Tribune. (Sidenote: The Rent-A-Wife trademark was cancelled on Dec. 22, 1988, so there may be a business opportunity out there for some enterprising person.)

Widish, whose business employed twenty-three women and had franchises in Florida, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Georgia, called Kennedy and Kaiser to inform them of their trademark infringement. “I called Freddi and Gail and told them they have three choices: They can change their name, they can cease-and-desist, or they can buy a franchise from me.” The two women opted to simply change the business name.

Soon after this, the number of Rent-A-Wife businesses seemed to pop up everywhere. How many of these had licensed the name from Diane Widish is unclear, but one could rent a wife in Arizona, Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, Wisconsin, and many other locations.

And that’s not including all the variations on the Rent-A-Wife name: Rent-A-Kid, Rent-A-Husband, Rent-A-Hubby, Rent-A-Grandma, Rent-A-Housewife, Rent-A-Perfect Wife, and so on.

One would typically find these businesses in the classified sections of local newspapers, but full-length stories did appear from time to time.

For example, there was a 1980 Pittsburgh Press story about 32-year-old Sonja Baxter, whose business model varied little from the others. What amused me most about the story was what she had printed on her business cards. Baxter said she would do “anything from A to Z except X.”

Yet, while researching this story, I found the same three Rent-A-Wife businesses coming up over and over again. The first, of course, was Petaluma’s Karen Donovan, but her fame was short-lived. There was barely another mention of her in the press one month after her story exploded in the media.

Then there was Toronto resident Judith Blackman, who was 50 years old when she launched Rent-A-Wife in 1980. Amazingly, the company is still in business. The Toronto location is operated by daughter Kris, while the Rent-A-Wife in Ottawa is run by her daughter Laurel. If you check out their website, rentawife.ca, they have an entire page titled “About our Name.”

The first paragraph reads: “The name “Rent-a-Wife” was chosen, in 1980, by our mother and feminist, Judith Blackman following an epiphany. She purposely wanted to reflect the “incalculable value” that women give to the home. Judith’s belief, in those days was that the work women did in the home was undervalued and underpaid; she wanted to elevate the tasks of the “homemaker” and legitimize the work performed to that of a salaried position, lending dignity, rather than degradation to housework. The “vision” of Ms. Blackman, was to provide a service, by women for women, to cook, clean, shop, organize moves, do minor repairs and walk the kids home from school for a fee.”

And it goes on from there.

The third Rent-A-Wife business that received significant press coverage was in Hadley, Massachusetts. Jane Hanne, a divorced mother of five, started the business in 1980. She quickly ran into the same problem as the two women in New Jersey: she was told that the Rent-A-Wife name was trademarked. So, she changed the name to Jane of All Trades and successfully ran that business until Friday, June 25, 1993.

Of the three women most prominently covered by the press, I knew that Karen Donovan had passed on, Judith Blackman, if she was still alive, would be at least 95 years old, and I was unsure about what happened to Jane Hanne.

But I was determined to find out. It took quite a bit of detective work on my part, but I did finally locate Jane. And I am so happy that she has agreed to join me on the podcast today.

(Note: The following is an automated transcript that may contain typographical errors.)

Steve Silverman: Well, Jane, thanks for joining me. I’m very happy you agreed to do this. Why don’t you quickly introduce yourself to the audience?

Jane Nevinsmith: Hi, I’m Jane Hanne. I used to be, I am now Jane Nevensmith. Hanne was my maiden name. I chose to use that when I had Rent-A-Wife because I didn’t want to be looked up in the phone book. We’re talking back in 1980, early 80s.

Steve Silverman: So, Jane, I thought we’d just go back to the beginning. How did you end up in Hadley?

Jane Nevinsmith: Well, it took me a lot of time to get here. So, originally when I grew up, and this is critical to the Rent-A-Wife story, I have an older brother and a father who was very interested in teaching both of us all the skills he had, both mechanical, electrical, and carpentry. So, at a very early age, I was able to do a lot.

I remember a story my parents told when we they went to parents for first grade and I was in a very, I guess, progressive school then in Great Neck, New York where the girls took shop and the boys took Home Ec. And the shop, there were parents in the shop saying why does my daughter have to learn this and the shop teacher said well there’s one girl in this class who knows the name of every tool and how to use it. Guess who?

And I didn’t know, I mean I went along and when I was in the process of getting divorced, I got a job as the administrative assistant to the affirmative action director at the University of New Hampshire. And we were doing all of these women equality things. It was the time of Title IX. And I said to the director, why don’t these women know anything? And she said, you’re very unusual. But you only know your own experience. And since I knew it, I assumed everybody knew all the things I knew. Anyway, so then I was different.

All right, moving along. I got divorced and I was looking for a job and an engineer I had worked for years ago when we were in a college community writing a program text in thermodynamics and publishing an engineering review book journal asked me to come and run his business. He was running a energy systems. So I moved to Hadley to do that. That’s how I got to Hadley.

Steve Silverman: So how did you go from that to running a Rent-A-Wife business?

Jane Nevinsmith: Okay. So, after a few years his business closed, and I had recently read an article in the paper about some woman, I think she was in Ohio, who had a business called Rent-A-Wife and I thought that’s a great name and those are the things I can do. So, I decided I would start a business called Rent-A-Wife.

My father was horrified. My brother called me up and said, “What are you gonna say if somebody calls you up and wants sex?” I said, “I never thought about it.” And he said, “Well, here’s your answer. You just laugh and say, “What? With you for $10 an hour?” So, I did actually did that once when I had one call and then I didn’t get any more calls about that.

The other thing that made me feel really good about having just recently worked in the affirmative action office was that I was – we’re now talking 1981 – I was charging $10 an hour and that was a lot of money back then. But I had people, I had hired people to work for me and I wanted to give them a reasonable wage, as well as I was running a business. I had to cover my costs.

So, I was in the mall one day and I overheard a conversation saying, “Well, he can pay $10 an hour if he wants to get somebody else to do the work I’m supposed to do. And I thought, okay, I’ve been validated. This is perfect.

So, it ended up that I had um I can’t remember 17 people working for me with a secondary office up in the northern part of Massachusetts, just because travel was easier to distribute from two different places than one. And interestingly, the woman who had called me looking for work who lived up there was also named Jane. So, she was Jane of the North.

Steve Silverman: So, I guess we should back up a bit. You started the business as Rent-A-Wife, but then you had to change the name. So, why don’t you go into that?

Jane Nevinsmith: So, I did have to change the name because after a while, the woman in Ohio contacted me and said, “You’re using my name illegally. If you want to use it, you have to pay me. Otherwise, I’m going to sue you.” And I thought, “I can change my name. I’m out of here.” So, I changed it to Jane of All Trades, which was the same business but different name. That went on until 1996, at which point, for a variety of reasons, I needed to stop doing that. So, the people who I had working for me who were interested, I trained them all how to do their own business, and they all went independent.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: So, I had taught them all how to do the bookkeeping and the taxpaying and all of those things.

Steve Silverman: That’s incredible.

Jane Nevinsmith: So, I’m now Jane of Less Trades.

Steve Silverman: What did the business entail, and did it change over time?

Jane Nevinsmith: Yes. When I started, I thought the business was going to be the skills that I had in terms of house maintenance, I guess you would call it. And it was long before there were services like that. At first, when I started it, because I wanted it to be a real business, I went to the bank vice president and asked for a loan of $2,500 because I wanted to not use my money but to keep it totally separate and have enough money for startup expenses. And I found it really interesting because this was a black man that I was talking to and he said to me, “A woman business doing that will never make it.” So, I was always amused afterwards. Every time I saw him on the street, I would wave and laugh to myself. Anyway, so yes, I made it for quite a while, and it was a successful business.

Steve Silverman: What did the business evolve into?

Jane Nevinsmith: So, originally, as I say, I was going to be doing things like painting for people or building bookshelves or, you know, gardening, anything practical. And what I got, because we live in a college community, was calls for people who wanted reliable housekeeping. College students are great housekeepers unless they fall in love, have an exam, or go on vacation. And so they were looking for somebody who was stable, and if their specific person wasn’t able to come that there would be an alternative person I could send. And that opened it up to a whole different business. I mean, we still did the other part of the business, but I was able to hire single moms who had kids in school who wanted to work school hours, and that worked really well for everybody.

Steve Silverman: Mhm.

Jane Nevinsmith: So, and as I said, they were great. They loved their customers. Their customers loved them. And they could say to their client, “Well, my daughter’s doing a recital today. Would you mind if I came tomorrow?” And it worked really well. It was just a very nice relationship people had with their workers.

Oh, okay. So, here’s the fun part. So, how do you find out who’s a good housekeeper and who’s not? Well, I can teach people how to clean, but the question is and the question I asked myself for everyone who applied for a job was “Would I send this person to my mother’s house?” Because back then, hard to say this now, we were working for old people.

Steve Silverman: Yeah, how do we end up there? I don’t know.

Jane Nevinsmith: And so my mother was the test. Would my mother be comfortable if this person was in her home? And that was a really good sign for me about how to judge people.

Steve Silverman: Was it difficult, I assume at times you had to let people go, was that difficult to deal with?

Jane Nevinsmith: Actually, I never did.

Steve Silverman: You never did? That’s amazing.

Jane Nevinsmith: They always either found a different job or moved or did something else, but no, I never had to fire anybody.

Steve Silverman: And did most of your employees stay long-term or was it or was there a lot of turnover?

Jane Nevinsmith: It was fairly steady. The people who were doing the non-cleaning stuff who also could do cleaning were long-term. And the cleaning people were – there was one woman who was with me the whole time – and a couple more who were pretty long time. One of them died unfortunately. I had an unfortunate medical issue, but mostly yeah they just they were there. And the more people I had, the more people heard about us, the more people wanted us. So, it was really good for everybody.

Steve Silverman: Did you charge?

Jane Nevinsmith: We charged hourly. Charge by the hour instead of by the job, because that way if you ran into a problem then you had time to fix it and you weren’t being unhappy. The other thing was with cleaning. If somebody’s doing house cleaning and you say, “Okay, she’ll be there for 3 hours,” and she works for 3 hours, and they call me up and say, “But she didn’t do this and this.” I said, “Then next time you need more time.” We also had an interesting thing here in the college area which we called shovel jobs, which were one-time cleaning jobs, and we charged more for those because it was much more intense. And truly, there were times we had to take shovels in and clean out things.

Steve Silverman: Wow. I have to say my wife and I go to estate sales, and we’ve been in some of those places. You know, the ultimate hoarders, I would say.

Jane Nevinsmith: Well, the ultimate hoarders. And then they… So, here we have a college town, college professors’ sabbaticals. Come to town, rent a place, furnish it, and leave.

Steve Silverman: Sure.

Jane Nevinsmith: I used to have great tag sales. I would say, so Smith College would hire me, and I would say, “Do you care what I do with the things?  I hate to take all of this to the landfill. Can I take it home and sell it?” “Yes, just don’t charge me for your time. You’re doing that.” “Fine, I’m good on that.” So, I had great tag sales. Paid for our vacations for years.

Steve Silverman: Wow. It reminds me. I live not too far from RPI, you know, Rensselaer Polytechinic Institute.

Jane Nevinsmith: I know RPI.

Steve Silverman: When they check out in the spring, you just drive down the street and there’s all this…

Jane Nevinsmith: Exactly. Exactly. Actually, here now they have set up an area where if you have good furniture, you can leave it and then if somebody’s coming in in the fall, they can get it inexpensively, which is nice.

Steve Silverman: It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but when I first met my wife 20 years ago, I was living in an apartment complex. It was a little bit of an upscale apartment, and it was a fairly large complex. And at the end of every month when people would move out, of course, they’d toss out whatever they didn’t need. And so, at the end of the month, I would just walk around the complex, which was a full mile to make the loop, and there’d always be furniture and things like that. And you walk around my house, and people go like, “Where’d you get that?” I go, “Well, I got it out of the trash.” You know, it wasn’t really in the trash. It was next to the, you know, next to the dumpster, but it, you know, it’s quality stuff, you know.

Jane Nevinsmith: So, going on from there, my wife and I also built and opened a self-storage business. And that’s the interesting piece because the college students rent a storage space and they pay it for years and years, and all of a sudden think, “Why am I paying $25 a month? What is in there? I haven’t missed it. I don’t want it.” So, they don’t pay. And then we say we’re going to auction – this was the early, early auction wars that they talk about. Long before that was popular.

So, because of the legality. If we auctioned it and did it illegally, we were liable for three times damages. If, however, we owned the stuff, we didn’t have to auction it or we could auction it and it didn’t matter. So, we would say, “Okay, if you sign this over to us, you are free and clear. If you don’t sign it over to us and we sell it and we don’t make the amount that you owe us, we’re going to report it to the credit bureau as debt.”

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: And so, a lot of people signed it over, and a few people who didn’t have reached out to us later to pay off their debt to clean up their credit bureau thing because they wanted to buy a car or whatever. But the stuff that we would get. Once we got a car.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: You know, once we got a $6,000 set of drums. It was amazing. Just turned over to us.

Steve Silverman: You would think it’d be worth getting that stuff back, you know.

Jane Nevinsmith: Well, you know, they didn’t want it. So, okay.

Steve Silverman: I happen to know it, but why don’t you mention the name of that business? I really like it.

Jane Nevinsmith: That was Stuff-It Storage.

Steve Silverman: And do you still own it? Or you sold it?

Jane Nevinsmith: No, we sold that.

Steve Silverman: Uh, does it still exist?

Jane Nevinsmith: It still exists. It’s on Route 9 in Hadley.

Steve Silverman: Wow. See, you did free advertising for them.

Jane Nevinsmith: See, and I should. They did well by me. They made it possible that we could retire.

Steve Silverman: So, I was going to show you these. Are those your ads?

Jane Nevinsmith: Uh, yes. It’s at least my phone number. I don’t know if it’s my ad, but

Steve Silverman: Yeah. Well, it says Rent-A-Wife Incorporated serving Amherst –Northampton. And so, I assume that’s yours. These are pretty early on. These are from January of 1981. So, you wouldn’t have been in business, you know, probably more than six or eight months, I would bet.

Jane Nevinsmith: Was just starting. Yeah.

Steve Silverman: Anyway, I just love them because every ad was a little bit different. You know, Need a handyman?, Sick in bed? Uh, what else do we have here? Daily house check?

Jane Nevinsmith: Oh, I did a lot of that when people were away. They wanted somebody just to go in and either water their plants or make sure nothing was going on. That was good money.

One of the jobs we had was for one of the apartment complexes because they were having problems with students withholding rent because they had vermin, which is a legal thing to not pay your rent for. And they had a suspicion that a lot of people didn’t have cockroaches, but were buying them from someone else in the unit.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: So, my job, to do two things. One is to get all 150 units ready on a routine on a rotating basis, to be exterminated once every 3 months. And the other was to try and figure out who it was that was selling. So, what I did was to put cockroach traps under everybody’s sink and mark them with their apartment numbers. And so, there was one apartment number that you could tell had cockroaches, but you could also see cockroaches had been lifted out of the traps because there were legs left on it. Those could be shown as evidence that other people had cockroaches in their apartment and why they weren’t paying. Anyway, that was an interesting job.

Steve Silverman: Quite the detective work there, huh?

Jane Nevinsmith: That was fun. That was really fun.

Steve Silverman: Besides that, any other crazy things? I did read in one of the earlier articles on you about your service that you had to witness a will.

Jane Nevinsmith: Oh, that we did that often. People who lived alone needed – the lawyer would come to the house, and they would need a witness. So, they would hire me to come and be there.

Steve Silverman: Huh.

Jane Nevinsmith: To say that they were of sound mind and body – well, not necessarily body – and were able to sign this part of this article.

Steve Silverman: I bet you never envisioned the business would take that on when you started it, did you?

Jane Nevinsmith: Oh no. There were so many things that I never envisioned. For instance, one of the things we did was to take kids to doctors’ appointments because their parents were too busy to do that. Okay, that’s fine. We can do that. But they wouldn’t pay me to take care of a child to the same level that they would pay me to take care of their pets. Pets were worth more money than children even then, which I find fascinating.

Steve Silverman: My parents owned a pet shop, as I mentioned when I first signed on with you. People spend incredible amounts of money on their pets. My parents – they’re deceased now – but they closed their pet shop maybe about 18, 19 years ago now. And even back then, you know, people would come in and buy a rawhide bone for their dog. You know, this giant rawhide that was $20 and the dog would chew it up in like 10 minutes. And I’m like, “Holy cow.” I mean, you know, why don’t you just burn your dollar bills, you know?

Jane Nevinsmith: Yeah. Really? I’ve had that sense about a lot of things in my life.

Steve Silverman: Are your kids local? Are they around the country or?

Jane Nevinsmith: Yeah, around the country. I have one in um, uh, she just moved. She’s down in Santa Cruz, California. I have one in Philadelphia, one in North Carolina, and two in Massachusetts still. Six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Steve Silverman: Wow. Congratulations.

Jane Nevinsmith: Thank you.

Steve Silverman: Did you do all the PR for the business?

Jane Nevinsmith: Yes, pretty much.

Steve Silverman: Yeah. So, you came up with the catchy slogans and things like that.

Jane Nevinsmith: Yeah. Yeah. And at one point, I hired a general manager because it was getting out of… I really like being out doing things, and I was spending all this time in the office. So, I was introduced to this person who would like to do this kind of work and turned out he was perfect. And he could do all the things I could do, and we were very similar, and we got on really well. So, he was general manager, but he could do anything, but he especially loved to clean. He was a gay man and a gay man who loves to clean is a gem. And I would say to a new client, “Well, I’m going to send Bob.” And they would say, “Oh, I don’t want a guy.” I said, “Let me send Bob, and if you don’t like him, I’ll send you a female the next time.” “Oh, no. Please send me Bob every time.”

Steve Silverman: Right. So, how many men? I mean, obviously the business started as Rent-A-Wife originally, although you did change the name. How many men did you have working for you?

Jane Nevinsmith: Two or three out of the whole group. So, not a lot.

Steve Silverman: And I noticed in one of your ads, you were actually looking for, you know, people to work for you, and you wanted women who had more than 10 years in the home. Is that correct?

Jane Nevinsmith: Right. So, one of the interesting things I found is that women who had children were much… How do you say this? They’re not afraid to put their hand in the toilet and clean it. People who didn’t have children, that was like, give me a brush and rubber gloves and all the disinfectants in the world. No. But you know, there’s a huge difference there from people who have handled bodily wastes.

Steve Silverman: Although I have to say I’ve never had kids, I have no problem doing that kind of stuff. Did you have to make a big investment to start the business or was it pretty much on a shoestring?

Jane Nevinsmith: No, the bank wouldn’t loan me the money, so I made myself a loan and I systematically paid it back.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: And I actually incorporated the business, which was a fairly major cost, but I wanted to protect my own assets. So if somebody sued the business, I was independent of that. I had to take care of my finances.

Steve Silverman: Now, was this while you were still Rent-A-Wife or had already changed the name?

Jane Nevinsmith: When I became Jane of All Trades.

Steve Silverman: Good thing your name was Jane. Huh?

Jane Nevinsmith: Well, it would have been something, I would have had a different name

Steve Silverman: That worked out well.

Jane Nevinsmith: Yeah.

Steve Silverman: Your clientele, were they, would you say they were mostly women? Because, I mean, with Rent-A-Wife, when it first came on the scene, when I started read, you know, when I looked at the original articles, most of the clientele was intended to be male, but then over time, what these women realized is that most of their clientele were women. Is that what you found?

Jane Nevinsmith: I had a lot of couples. I had elderly women, because men had already died off, but there were a few elderly men who needed things. I mean, at that point, and I understand it better now, they wanted somebody to come and change their light bulbs, climb a ladder, do things that elderly people are wise not to do. And so, you know, we served two populations. We served the faculty of the colleges and other town residents. I don’t mean to say it’s exclusively college people, but there were also the older people who couldn’t do things anymore.

Steve Silverman: And did sometimes their children contact you to arrange the services or?

Jane Nevinsmith: No.

Steve Silverman: No.

Jane Nevinsmith: No.

Steve Silverman: That’s kind of surprising because, you know, having had elderly members of my family, you know, their children have had to go out of, you know, try and find somebody who could go in and do this kind of stuff.

Jane Nevinsmith: But this was, this was before home services were a real popular thing. This is long before you had had, what do they call it? Merry Maids and things like that. Home services were not something people were willing to think about as a business. It was sort of under the table, but I didn’t want to do under the table. I didn’t think that was fair to employees.

Steve Silverman: Mhm. Looking back, would you say pretty much you have a fond recollection of the business or?

Jane Nevinsmith: Oh, absolutely. I loved it. It was great. There were always new things. I loved solving problems, and every day there was a new problem to fix.

Steve Silverman: Do you miss it?

Jane Nevinsmith: I miss physically being able to do the things for my own home that I used to do for other people.

Steve Silverman: So, after you, uh closed the business and turned it over to your employees basically,  you ran a B&B for a while. Is that right?

Jane Nevinsmith: We ran a B&B, and we lived on two acres, so we had a lot of gardens and perennials always need dividing. So, we sold perennials in the front yard. It was like, Hadley’s a very, especially back then, open farm community, and you put a little coffee can out and say, “Put your money in the can.” You put a price tag on it and people would leave their money. It was that easy. And we planted Christmas trees and had a Christmas tree farm, and that was cut your own, and it’s by the foot, and here’s a measuring stick. Put your money in the can. You know, it was fun. We did a lot of different things. And we also had an art rubber stamp business.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: Which was called Rubber Tree Stamps. And that was fun. My wife is an artist, so that was easy. It actually is her fault. She one day said to me, “Would you go see if that woman that closed her rubber stamp business has any wood blocks for me to mount my stamps on?” And I came back, and I had bought the business. So, she said, “Did you get me the blocks?” I said, “Well, yeah, I got you a little more than that.”

Steve Silverman: And how long did you have that business for?

Jane Nevinsmith: We had that till 2006. That’s really when we retired. That’s when we sold the storage business, and we sold the rubber stamp business, and we moved to a smaller house because I realized as I was getting older, I wasn’t going to be able to take care of our big old New England farmhouse.

Steve Silverman: Mhm.

Jane Nevinsmith: So, the bed and breakfast was a great thing to do with a big house because ours had 13 rooms in it.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: And I’m pretty smart with money. And if you have an investment, it should be earning money for you. So here we have money invested in the house. What’s it doing? It’s sitting here. So, we have empty rooms. And there was a lesbian couple up in the Berkshires, the only other lesbian B&B in the area that broke up and therefore closed their bed and breakfast. But one of the women was working for Jane of All Trades. Surprise. And she said, “Why don’t you open a bed and breakfast? I’ll teach you everything you need to know.” So, we did.

Steve Silverman: But what did that involve? I mean, was it just a matter of keeping the place. I mean, you were able to just go off and do what you needed to do, I assume, while this is going on.

Jane Nevinsmith: Right. I worked out of the house, but I’d always.  The Jane of All Trades was, the offices were there. Before we made it a bed and breakfast, we had made it, it had been a two-family house. So, the downstairs was the rental part, and that turned into the bed and breakfast.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: So, we had our own space anyway. And then the bread and breakfast was secondary. And it was great. As people said, “Oh, isn’t it a lot of work?” And I always said, “No, you know, I have five children. These people just come and they give me money and all they want is breakfast and to know where a good restaurant is.”

Steve Silverman: Okay. So, you had you had a a B&B, you had a storage facility, you had a rubber

Jane Nevinsmith: Rubber Tree Stamp.

Steve Silverman: A rubber stamp company, and then you decided to retire. The two of you.

Jane Nevinsmith: Yeah.

Steve Silverman: And now you’re very active in your community from what I heard. So why don’t you talk about that?

Jane Nevinsmith: Okay. So, I got my invitation when I turned 60 to join the local senior center, and I read the newsletter, and it said we’re looking for a driver. I love to drive. So, I thought I want this job. Here’s something for me to do. This was even before I was retired. So, I went and I applied for the job, and I was sure everybody else wanted to do it because there were all these people there. And nobody else wanted it, so, I got the job to drive.

And that started with taking seniors shopping or out to lunch, and after about a year they started saying Jane we don’t need to go shopping. We have everything we need. We like to go out to lunch. We like social, but we really want to go somewhere, but we don’t know how to, you know, we’re not up to putting together a trip for ourselves. Can you take us overnight trips?

Until you get involved in something, you have no idea. I mean, the number of rubber stamp magazines that exist, for instance, and conventions, and all of these things. Same with storage. Who knew? Until you’re in it, you have no idea of all that.

So, there are all these companies that do travel for seniors, and they put together really good trips at a reasonable price. I call up the company and I say, “I want to go here. I’ve looked at your catalog,” and they send me literature. I pass it out. People sign up. The bus comes. It picks us up. It takes us on the trip. It’s got everything arranged. Meals, rooms, entertainment, they bring us home. Wonderful. So, I did that until up to this year, when I’ve turned it over to somebody else.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: But we have done incredible things. We have, the first, and it changes people’s idea about seniors. The first senior group I took on a cruise to the Caribbean, I took 32 seniors.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: 19 of them went ziplining. One of them, because it was her 70th birthday, went hang gliding.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: Okay. This is different than what most people think of seniors. So, and the Hadley Senior Center is really great in terms of what it offers.  I can’t say enough about it.

Steve Silverman: And you’re also uh the planning board. You’re on. I’m trying to think what you’re on.

Jane Nevinsmith: Select Board.

Steve Silverman: And what does the Select Board do?

Jane Nevinsmith: Well, the Select Board runs the town, but that came about because I was in the senior center and the senior center needed a new building. So, I ended up being chair of the building committee because I had a lot of building skills. And so, we got this great new building. But in the process, I had to sit in Select Board meetings to clarify any questions they might have or straighten out things they might be incorrectly saying. And I thought, “Wow, I didn’t know the town did all this. I think I want to be on the Select Board.” So, then I decided to run for Select Board.

Steve Silverman: And how long have you been doing that?

Jane Nevinsmith: I’m in my fifth year.

Steve Silverman: Wow.

Jane Nevinsmith: They’re three-year terms. So, I’m up next year, and I’m not going to run again.

Steve Silverman: No?

Jane Nevinsmith: I’m too old. I mean, to do it conscientiously takes a lot of work.

Steve Silverman: Yeah.

Jane Nevinsmith: And I want to, you know, do things with my wife and not be as committed.

Steve Silverman: Yes, I totally agree. Anyway, Jane, I really appreciate you doing this. I just want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day to, you know, share your story with my listeners.

Jane Nevinsmith: I’m happy to do it. It has been fun.

Steve Silverman & Jane Nevinsmith: Bye.

Jane Nevinsmith: Thank you.

The 2022 interview with Jane Nevinsmith can be viewed below: