No one saw this coming. How could they?
At the time, Ed Babka was a 29-year-old electrical engineer with the Illinois Power Co. in Decatur, Illinois. It was a good job that comfortably supported his wife and two children. Only there was this itch his engineering job could never scratch. Babka wanted to be his own boss, to run his own business, to call the shots. Thing is, he didn’t know what that business could be.
Then in 1955, Babka heard about a man named Crawford Snell who had started a classified advertising, mail-order publication for gun collectors called . Snell would become the patron saint of the self-employed acolytes of the era. Stories circulating about said Snell was so successful
