I have no idea today, how much the owners of The Index paid Ma Agee. The founder of the paper hired an eye candy tall teenager during the debate over women’s suffrage and Prohibtion and over sixty years later his son still drove his Cadillac every week to pick up the columns and by then, to divide the proceeds of Grandma’s book. So her wages must have increased many fold over the years.
But I do remember her 1963 book being published by The Index and my mother’s prediction nobody would pay $2 for a 32 page pamphlet being marketed as a book. $2 in 1963 would be $19.63 today.
Remunishuns of an Ozark Hillbilly sold the first 200 copies to the producers of The Beverley Hillbillies and the other 1800 copies sold out in a week or so.
That $4,000 gross in 1963 would be
$39,107 today. Printing costs were paid by The Index, and they estimated those at a dime a copy, which today would be nearly a dollar, but the circulation boost her book gave The Index was a bonus. The proceeds were split 50/50 off the top.
By the late seventies her book cost $5, which in 1978 would be $22.94 today.
Sales slowed after the Beverley Hillbillies ended its run, but I can remember my mother and her sister amazed and a little jealous Grandma earned more money being “Ma” Agee than they did as full time schoolteachers.
She still has an aging fan base. She’d be tickled beyond words her book is still counterfeited today, 43 years after she died. The Index hasn’t published any authorized editions since about 1978, when I drove her over to Humansville to live in Senior Housing. Anything published since then is a fake.
As her literary executor I’m often asked if she really did hate the “gubbermint” and every President except Harry S Truman, and my reply is if she didn’t, it was a lifelong good act, but she truly loved Harry, for dropping those two bombs and sending her son back home to her alive in 1946 from Germany, instead of in a box from invading Japan.
She didn’t hate taxes. She paid every dime.
She hated war, ignorance, and poverty, which she said were all related like a bunch of Arkansawyers.
But I do remember her 1963 book being published by The Index and my mother’s prediction nobody would pay $2 for a 32 page pamphlet being marketed as a book. $2 in 1963 would be $19.63 today.
Remunishuns of an Ozark Hillbilly sold the first 200 copies to the producers of The Beverley Hillbillies and the other 1800 copies sold out in a week or so.
That $4,000 gross in 1963 would be
$39,107 today. Printing costs were paid by The Index, and they estimated those at a dime a copy, which today would be nearly a dollar, but the circulation boost her book gave The Index was a bonus. The proceeds were split 50/50 off the top.
By the late seventies her book cost $5, which in 1978 would be $22.94 today.
Sales slowed after the Beverley Hillbillies ended its run, but I can remember my mother and her sister amazed and a little jealous Grandma earned more money being “Ma” Agee than they did as full time schoolteachers.
She still has an aging fan base. She’d be tickled beyond words her book is still counterfeited today, 43 years after she died. The Index hasn’t published any authorized editions since about 1978, when I drove her over to Humansville to live in Senior Housing. Anything published since then is a fake.
As her literary executor I’m often asked if she really did hate the “gubbermint” and every President except Harry S Truman, and my reply is if she didn’t, it was a lifelong good act, but she truly loved Harry, for dropping those two bombs and sending her son back home to her alive in 1946 from Germany, instead of in a box from invading Japan.
She didn’t hate taxes. She paid every dime.
She hated war, ignorance, and poverty, which she said were all related like a bunch of Arkansawyers.
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