Edith Lank, 'Renaissance woman' and longtime real estate columnist, dies at 96

Edith Lank, the longtime syndicated real estate columnist whose work appeared in the Democrat and Chronicle and well beyond, knew the value of persistence from a young age.

An aspiring writer from her youth, Mrs. Lank was once told by her father to save the rejections she would receive from publishers and newspapers with her stories or story ideas. "She understood that the way to get to 100 newspapers was to write to 500," said her son, Avrum Lank. "She wrote letters and letters and letters. Her father told her to paper her the walls of her bedroom with her rejection letters."

Throughout most of her life, Mrs. Lank, who died Jan. 1 at the age of 96, did not know rejection. She became a well respected columnist who fielded real estate questions from readers with a voice that was authoritative yet accessible, occasionally comical but never condescending. Mrs. Lank was 93 when her final column appeared, a column in which she said she had for the first time missed a deadline.

Mrs. Lank, a Brighton resident, wrote how her column had mushroomed from a few papers to a few dozen to one distributed across the Los Angeles Times syndicate. The author of real estate-related textbooks, she wrote that her column "was carried in more than a hundred newspapers.

"I answered half a dozen letters from readers a day, I had my own radio and then TV shows, and I toured the country giving talks," she wrote. "But that was long ago. I'm 93 years old now and things have changed. I've changed, newspaper have changed ― the world has changed. Younger readers can look up answers for themselves on the Internet. Older ones still send letters but they're fewer all the time."

Still, even in her later years of writing, her column was a go-to for those looking to buy, sell, or invest in real estate. Yes, there was much to be found on the Internet, but her columns had the imprimatur of decades of knowledge and research.

"It was like 'Dear Abby,' " said realtor Angie Flack Brown, a local Realtor and friend of Mrs. Lank. "Everyone trusted what she had to say. I had multiple friends who were not Realtors who said, 'I read her column for 25 years.' "

2019: This is Edith Lank's farewell column

A Jane Austen 'Janeite'

But there was more to Mrs. Lank ― far more ― than her writings on real estate. She decided in her 50s to learn to scuba dive. She was an avid bird watcher. And, she was one of the country's better known collectors of Jane Austen memorabilia, an array of national and international books and ephemera now donated to Goucher College's Jane Austen collection.

"She was into Jane Austen before it was cool," said her son, Avrum.

After Mrs. Lank's death, Deborah Yaffe, the author of "Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom," wrote of Mrs. Lank's affinity for Austen's works.

Wrote Yaffe: "While still in high school, Lank worked as a local newspaper reporter in small-town New York; in 1947, she graduated from college as an English major who, in an era with little interest in female writers, had never been assigned any Austen. She discovered her soon-to-be favorite author during a long, cold winter as a college teacher in Maine, when she decided to ease the boredom by reading her way through the library, starting with the A’s.

"Her own shelves eventually filled up with Austeniana: second-hand editions of Mansfield Park, initially her favorite of the novels (“of course, the older I get, the more I love Persuasion”); translations in languages from Albanian and Basque to Hebrew and Chinese; and first editions initially bought with the proceeds from a prescient early investment in a little company called Amazon."

Mrs. Lank was a founder of the Rochester chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America and served on the organization’s national board.

Edith Lank's columns were sent on Greyhound bus

A Massachusetts native, Mrs. Lank graduated from Penn Yan Academy and Syracuse University. She married her husband, Norman Lank, in 1948. Mr. Lank died in 2011.

Mrs. Lank began her writings as a teenager. As she related in her final column: "When I was a teen, my folks lived in the village of Penn Yan, Yates County, and summers I’d been a full-time newspaper reporter there. During the war, with millions of men overseas, the local Chronicle-Express was short-handed.

"I was also the county correspondent for both Rochester papers, Elmira and Geneva. I remember sending my typewritten articles (half of them carbon copies) off on the Greyhound bus that stopped at the village hotel every afternoon at 3."

It was in the 1970s when she turned her attention to real estate.

"In December, 1975, my husband, Norman Lank, was a Realtor, with two dozen salespersons under his supervision," she wrote in her final column. "He had received word that day that both Rochester newspapers — the Democrat and Chronicle and the Times-Union — would be raising their classified ad rates for the coming year. To sweeten the deal, the Sunday D&C was about to start a real estate section — no more lumping real estate with the women’s news.

"... In those days, classified ads were the Realtor’s biggest expense. The prospect of those raised rates had Norm so worried that he couldn’t sleep. When he couldn’t sleep, neither could I. I lay awake, and I got to wondering what kind of news the paper would put in that new real estate section."

Mrs. Lank, who ran her husband's business, thought of the many questions that real estate agents confronted, and, in turn, the column was born. She wrote a few test columns, with questions and answers, and mailed them to the editor of the "new real estate section" in Rochester. Days later she received a call, asking if she could do this regularly. Of course, she said, noting that she'd written a regular column for her university newspaper.

Angie Flack Brown, the real estate agent with Keller Williams Realty, remembered when she was young how she would search out Mrs. Lank's columns. As a youth, she was a neighbor of Mrs. Lank and "I thought she was really famous because she was in the newspaper. I would get the Saturday paper and I would read the funnies and Edith's column."

Mrs. Lank later became a trusted source of real estate advice, Brown said. In the 1970s, Brown said, at a time when women were often precluded from mortgages without a husband's backing, Mrs. Lank bought her own former schoolhouse for writing.

"That to me speaks volumes about her as a person and a feminist in the 70s. She really was a Renaissance woman."

Mrs. Lank is survived by her sons, Avrum (Dannette) of Milwaukee and Dov (Constance Smith) of Port Moody, BC, Canada; a daughter Anna (Michael Mortenson) of Manhattan; six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Edith Lank, syndicated real estate columnist based in Rochester, dies