Standing in the Rainbow

THE

BEGINNING

THE PLACE:

SOUTHERN MISSOURI

THE TIME: THE 1940s

THE MOOD: HOPEFUL

Elmwood Springs

ALMOST EVERYONE in town that had an extra room took in a boarder. There were no apartment buildings or hotels as of yet. The Howard Johnson was built a few years later but in the meantime bachelors needed to be looked after and single women certainly had to have a respectable place to live. Most people considered it their Christian duty to take them in whether they needed the few extra dollars a week or not, and some of the boarders stayed on for years. Mr. Pruiet, a bachelor from Kentucky with long thin feet, boarded with the Haygoods so long that they eventually forgot he was not family. Whenever they moved, he moved. When he finally did die at seventy-eight, he was buried in the Haygood family plot with a headstone that read:

The homes on First Avenue North were located within walking distance of town and school and were where most of the town’s boarders lived.

At present the Smith family’s boarder is Jimmy Head, the short-order cook at the Trolley Car Diner; the Robinsons next door have Beatrice Woods, the Little Blind Songbird; the Whatleys up the street have Miss Tuttle, the high school English teacher. Ernest Koonitz, the school’s band director and tuba soloist, boards with Miss Alma, who, as luck would have it, has a hearing problem. But soon the Smith family will take in a new boarder who will set in action a chain of events that should eventually wind up in the pages of history books. Of course they won’t know it at the time, especially their ten-year-old son, Bobby. He is at the moment downtown standing outside the barbershop with his friend Monroe Newberry, staring at the revolving red and white stripes on the electric barber’s pole. The game is to stare at it until they are cross-eyed, which seems to them to be some sort of grand achievement. As far as amusements go, it is on a par with holding your breath until you pass out or dropping from a rope into the freezing swimming hole outside of town named the Blue Devil, so cold that even on a hot day when you hit the water the first shock jolts you to your eyeballs, stops your heart, and makes you see stars before your eyes. By the time you come out your body is so numb you can’t feel where your legs are and your lips have turned blue, hence the name. But boys, being the insane creatures they are, cannot wait to come crawling out covered with goose bumps and do it all over again.

These were some of the activities that thrilled Bobby to the core. However, for Bobby just life itself was exciting. And really at that time and that place what red-blooded American boy would not wake up every morning jumping for joy and ready to go? He was living smack-dab in the middle of the greatest country in the world—some said the greatest country that ever was or ever would be. We had just beaten the Germans and the Japanese in a fair fight. We had saved Europe and everyone liked us that year, even the French. Our girls were the prettiest, our boys the handsomest, our sol-diers the bravest, and our flag the most beautiful. That year it seemed like everyone in the world wanted to be an American. People from all over the world were having a fit trying to come here. And who could blame them? We had John Wayne, Betty Grable, Mickey Mouse, Roy Rogers, Superman, Dagwood and Blondie, the Andrews Sisters, and Captain Marvel. Buck Rogers and Red Ryder, BB guns, the Hardy Boys, G-men, Miss America, cotton candy. Plus Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen, Amos ’n’ Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, and anybody could grow up and become the president of the United States.

Bobby even felt sorry for anyone who was not lucky enough to have been born here. After all, we had invented everything in the world that really mattered. Hot dogs, hamburgers, roller coasters, roller skates, ice-cream cones, electricity, milk shakes, the jitterbug, baseball, football, basketball, barbecue, cap pistols, hot-fudge sundaes, and banana splits. We had Coca-Cola, chocolate-covered peanuts, jukeboxes, Oxydol, Ivory Snow, oleomargarine, and the atomic bomb!

We were bigger, better, richer, and stronger than anybody but we still played by the rules and were always good sports. We even reached out and helped pick up and dust off Japan and Germany after we had beaten them . . . and if that wasn’t being a good sport, what was? Bobby’s own state of Missouri had given the world Mark Twain, Walt Disney, Ginger Rogers, and the great St. Louis World’s Fair, and aboard the battleship Missouri the Japanese had surrendered to General Douglas MacArthur. Not only that, Bobby’s Cub Scout troop (Bobwhite Patrol) had personally gone all over town collecting old rubber tires, scrap paper, and aluminum pots and pans. That had helped win the war. And if that wasn’t enough to make a boy proud, the president of the entire United States, Mr. Harry S. Truman, was a true-blue dyed-in-the-wool Missourian, and St. Louis had won the World Series. Even the trees stood a little straighter this year, or so it seemed to Bobby.

He had a mother, a father, and a grandmother and had never known anyone who had died. He had seen only photographs in store windows of the boys who had been killed in the war. He and his best friend, Monroe, were now official blood brothers, an act so solemn that neither one spoke on the way home. His big sister, Anna Lee, a pretty blue-eyed blond girl, was quite popular with all the older boys, who would sometimes hang around the house and play catch or throw the football with him. Sometimes he was able to make a quarter off the guys just to leave them alone on the front porch with Anna Lee. In 1946 a quarter meant popcorn, candy, a movie, a cartoon, and a serial, plus a trip to the projection booth to visit Snooky, who read Mickey Spillane books. And after the movie he could go next door to the Trolley Car Diner, where Jimmy, their boarder, would fry him a burger if he was not too busy.

Or he might stop by the drugstore on the corner and read a few of the newest comic books. His father was the pharmacist so he was allowed to look at them for free as long as he did not wrinkle or spill any food on them. Thelma and Bertha Ann, the girls who worked behind the soda fountain, thought he was cute and might slip him a cherry Coke or, if he was lucky, a root-beer float. Downtown Elmwood Springs was only one long block so there was never any danger of getting lost, and the year-round weather couldn’t have been more perfect if he had ordered it off a menu. Each October a nice big round orange harvest moon appeared just in time for Halloween. Thanksgiving Day was always crisp and cool enough to go outside and play tag after a big turkey dinner and snow fell once or twice a year, just when he needed a day off from school.

And then came spring, with crickets, frogs, and little green leaves on the trees again, followed by summer, sleeping out on the screened porch, fishing, hot bright sunny days at Cascade Plunge, the town’s swimming pool, and so far every Fourth of July, after all the firecrackers, whirligigs, and sparklers were gone, lightning bugs and large iridescent blue-and-green June bugs showed up in time to make the night last a little longer.

On hot muggy August afternoons, just when you thought you would die of the heat, clouds would begin to gather and distant thunder boomed so deep you would feel it in your chest. Suddenly a cool breeze would come from out of nowhere and turn the sky a dark gunmetal gray, so dark that all the streetlights in town got confused and started coming on. Seconds later an honest-to-God Missouri gully washer would come crashing down hard and fast and then without warning pick up and run to the next town, leaving behind enough cool water to fill the gutters so Bobby could run out and feel it rushing over his bare feet.

Although Mr. Bobby Smith had only been on this earth for a very short time and at present occupied only four feet eight inches of it, he was already a man of considerable property. Most of which he kept in his room on the floor, on the walls, on the bed, under the bed, hanging from the ceiling, or anywhere there was an empty space. As the decorators would say, he was going in for that casual, devil-may-care, cluttered look that his mother had the nerve to say looked like a Salvation Army junk store. It was only an average-sized bedroom with a small closet, but to Bobby, it was his personal and private magical kingdom full of priceless treasures. A place where he was the master of all he surveyed, rich as a sultan. Although in truth there was nothing in the room that a sultan or anybody else, for that matter, would want unless they were in the market for a box of painted turtles or an assortment of rocks, a flattened-out penny he and Monroe had put on the streetcar tracks, or a life-sized cardboard stand-up of Sunset Carson, his favorite cowboy, that Snooky had given him from the Elmwood Theater. Or maybe two silver dollars or an artificial yellow fish eye he had found behind the VFW or a small glass jeep that once had candy in it, for about five seconds. Among his possessions that year was a homemade slingshot, a bag of marbles, one little Orphan Annie decoder pin, one glow-in-the-dark ring, one compass, one Erector set, three yo-yos, a model airplane, a boy’s hairbrush with a decal of the Lone Ranger on it (a birthday present from Monroe that Monroe’s mother had bought), a cardboard Firestone filling station complete with pumps, a bookshelf full of ten-cent Terry and the Pirates, Joe Palooka, and Red Ryder books. Under the bed were several Spider-Man, Porky the Pig, Little Audrey, and Casper the Friendly Ghost comic books, plus an L&N train set, his plastic braided Indian bracelet a girl gave him that he thought he had lost, and one white rubber handlebar cover from an old bicycle.

But Bobby’s world was not limited to just what he could see or touch or to the space inside the four walls of his bedroom. He had traveled a million miles in the L&N train under his bed, ridden up treacherous mountains through long black tunnels over raging rivers, and in the little plane hanging from the ceiling he had flown around the world, often over Amazon jungles teeming with alligators. Even the streetlight on the corner provided Bobby with a wonderful show. As he was lying in bed on breezy summer evenings, watching the shadows made by the leaves of the poplar tree dancing on the side of the house next door, they soon became palm trees, swaying back and forth in the warm trade winds of the nearest tropical island. Some nights he could hear the faint strains of Hawaiian music and see rows of hula girls dancing right above the Robinsons’ bedroom window. So enthralled was Bobby with this image that he had sent off for a ukulele. Nobody was more disappointed. He had expected it to play a song when strummed but it had not. The sound it made was a far cry from music, Hawaiian or otherwise, so he quickly moved on to the harmonica and was convinced he was really playing a song when he wasn’t. So great was his imagination that when he rode a broomstick handle around the backyard he could see the dust and hear the sound of the thundering hoofs as he galloped across the dry western desert. That year he went to sleep each night with his eyes full of cowboys and Indians and his head filled with voices. “Tom Mix and the Ralston Straight Shooters are on the air!” “From out of the West comes America’s fighting cowboy!” “Quaker Oats . . . delicious, nutritious, makes you ambitious!” “You bet ’um, Red Ryder.” “I’m back in the saddle again.” “Well, I’ll be a lop-eared kangaroo if it isn’t roundup time.” “Me Tonto, you Kemo Sabe.” And his favorite, “Hi-yo, Silver, away!”

An outside observer might think his life was just about perfect. However, to be fair, there were two distinctive and troublesome drawbacks to being Bobby Smith. One was his appearance. He was a nice-enough-looking boy with brown eyes and brown hair. His teeth were straight. His ears stuck out slightly but nothing out of the ordinary. One problem was that his mouth turned up a bit at both corners, making him look like he knew a secret and was pleased about it. This expression caused his mother and his teachers to ask constantly, “What are you up to?” even when he wasn’t up to anything. No matter how much he professed his innocence, they always replied, “Don’t lie to me, Bobby Smith, I can tell you’re up to something by the look on your face.”

The other drawback was his parents. Everybody knew who they were and would tell on him the minute he did something wrong. His father, the town’s only pharmacist, a Mason, a Rotarian, an Elk, and a senior elder at the First Methodist Church, was just naturally on a first-name basis with the entire town. But to make matters even worse, his mother was a local radio personality known as Neighbor Dorothy, who five days a week broadcast her show from their living room. And each year she would send her listening audience Christmas cards with the family’s picture on them, so that people for miles around knew who he was and what he looked like, and sometimes when a guest did not show up his mother would grab Bobby and make him be the guest and ask him all kinds of questions as if he were a complete stranger. On holidays his mother would put him on the radio to recite some stupid poem. And to add insult to injury, his personal and private business was often discussed on his mother’s radio show and everything he did, good or bad, was talked about for all the world to hear.

His only consolation was that this was a cross both the Smith children had to bear. This was of little consolation to Anna Lee. Last year his sister had gotten hysterical when their mother happened to mention that Anna Lee did not have a date as of yet for the prom because she was holding out, hoping the boy she thought looked just like Glenn Ford—her major movie-star crush at the time—would ask her. Dorothy had always shared things about her family with her audience before but when Anna Lee heard that piece of information going out over the airwaves she ran through the house screaming as if someone had shot her and flung herself on the bed sobbing, “Oh, Mother, how could you? You’ve ruined my life. I’ll never get another date as long as I live. I might as well just kill myself.” She stayed in bed wailing with a cold cloth on her head for two days while her mother, who felt terrible about it, tried to make it up to her by bringing her homemade peach ice cream and promising never to mention her name over the air again.

At the time Bobby thought it was pretty funny but Bobby was not yet at the sensitive stage where what other people thought about you was a matter of life and death. So for the moment, other than not being able to get away with much, he didn’t have a care in the world and, like most ten-year-old boys, believed that something wonderful was always just about to happen.

Neighbor Dorothy

IN THE LATE 1920s and early 1930s, as more and more electric lines were strung down country roads to the farmhouses, the long, lonely days of isolated farmwives living far away from their nearest neighbors were suddenly filled with warm and friendly voices. They were the voices of other women coming into their homes via the radio. As early as 1924, women all over the Midwest known as “radio homemakers” began broadcasting, supplying the wives with new recipes, tips for raising children, household hints, gardening advice, local news, and entertainment, but most important, a daily visit from a good friend. Every day listeners in Iowa heard over KMA in Shenandoah Kitchen-Klatter with Leanna Driftmiller or Down a Country Lane with Evelyn Birkby. Those who tuned to WNAX in Yankton, South Dakota, heard Wynn Speece, “the Neighbor Lady.” Also broadcasting were Adella Shoemaker, Ida Bailey Allen, Bernice Currier, Alma Kitchell, Edith Hansen, and others.

One such radio homemaker was Bobby’s mother, Mrs. Dorothy Smith, who broadcast from her home in Elmwood Springs, Missouri, between 9:30 and 10:00 A.M. over local radio station WDOT, number 66 on your dial. She was certainly qualified for the job. Besides loving to talk she had gone to Boston to study and had come home two years later armed with a degree in home economics and child care and with her eye on Robert (Doc) Smith, who had recently graduated from the University of Tennessee’s School of Pharmacy. Six months later they were walking down the aisle of the First Methodist Church, anxious to settle down and start a family. By the end of the war, she had been broadcasting since 1936 and over the years became known to her many listeners as, simply, “Neighbor Dorothy.” Every day, Nalon Klegg, the male announcer from the main station in Poplar Springs, would introduce her with the phrase “And now here she is from that little white house just around the corner from wherever you are, your neighbor and mine, the lady with the smile in her voice, Neighbor Dorothy . . . with Mother Smith on the organ.” Her mother-in-law would then break into a rousing rendition of the show’s theme, “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

This theme song was not chosen by accident. When Doc bought the house in 1934, he knew his wife would love to have plants blooming in every window, in and among all the little blue-glass violins she collected, so he made sure the new house really was on the sunny side of the street. Neighbor Dorothy was a pleasingly plump woman with a sweet smile on her face, a face that eventually graced the cover of her cookbooks and billboards all over the Midwest. Most people, seeing her picture or listening to her calm and friendly, always cheerful radio voice, might never have guessed she had ever had a worry or a problem in her entire life. What most people did not know and she never talked about was their first child, a four-year-old little blond boy named Michael. Dorothy had thought it was just another childhood fever or maybe a cold coming on, certainly nothing serious. But by midmorning he had started going into convulsions. He died quite suddenly and with little warning. One day he was laughing and alive and the next day he was gone.

The doctors said it had been an unusually virulent bacterial infection that had hit him overnight and by five-thirty that afternoon he was dead. They never found out exactly what it was or why he had gotten it but by the time they reached the hospital the infection had already spread and settled in his lungs. No one can ever really be prepared for the death of a loved one but losing a child is surely the worst pain a human being will ever have to bear.

It struck them so suddenly and so hard that Doc’s mother, a widow, moved into the house to take care of them. After a while Doc went back to work but Dorothy was still unable to do anything except sit in the little boy’s room and stare at the bed.

She wouldn’t eat no matter how Mother Smith tried and she couldn’t sleep unless she took one of the pills Doc got for her. Though the doctors repeatedly told her there was nothing anybody could have done, she never really believed it. She questioned it over and over in her mind. She asked herself a hundred whys and what-ifs and she couldn’t find one answer that made any sense. At that time Doc was little or no help. If anything, she resented the way he had seemingly just gone on with his life as if nothing had happened. He wouldn’t even talk about it with her and when she tried he just walked out of the room. She was young and did not know that men deal with grief in different ways. Doc, who was also young, was mistakenly trying to hold himself together to be strong for her. She did not know that he often drove outside of town, parked the car, and sat and sobbed.

The loss of their child was a wound that would not heal, something they would never really get over. But, after a year or so, they were both able to make it through the days.

It was at this time that Dorothy first began to bake. It helped her, somehow, to keep busy. There were days when she baked as many as five or ten cakes. Pretty soon everybody in town started carrying forks in their pockets or pocketbooks because if you passed her house, you would be offered a piece of cake. Soon she was overrun with cakes and needed desperately to get rid of them so when she said, “Please come in and have a piece of cake,” you knew she meant it. Gerta Nordstrom, her friend who owned the bakery, said her cake business dropped in half because Dorothy was giving so many away. Pretty soon Dorothy began supplying the Nordstroms and became well known for her baking. The year her recipe for a six-layer surprise upside-down pineapple cake took second place in the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest she was invited to be a guest on a radio show in Poplar Bluff. In the midst of the interview she just happened to mention that she always used Golden Flake Lite-as-a-Feather Flour. When Golden Flake Flour sales doubled overnight, they offered her a show of her own. Soon the large radio tower with the red light on the top went up in the backyard and she was “on the air.” Later, after Anna Lee was born, she and Doc began to be their old selves again, although the little blond boy was not forgotten. Life went on pretty much as usual until, one day when Dorothy was forty-three, long after either one of them had given it a thought, life changed again. The doctor informed her that she was not, as she had suspected, going through the change of life but was pregnant. And seemingly out of a clear blue sky, along came Bobby, who turned out to be a real change-of-life baby in every sense of the word.

The Water Tower

MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE they are still short and close to the ground or maybe their senses have not yet been dulled by the years but to children days seem longer, smells stronger, colors brighter, noises louder, fun more fun. Bobby was no exception. He viewed the world each day through brand-new eyes, almost vibrating with excitement. If you could have plugged him into the wall he would have lit up like a 500-watt bulb. This was all very well and wonderful for him but for his family it was like living with a sixty-eight-pound puppy running in and out of the house all day. And this day, as usual, he and Monroe were up to something they shouldn’t be.

They had walked almost a mile outside of town, to the water tower that had ELMWOOD SPRINGS written on it in huge black letters, with the express intention of climbing all the way to the top. An idea that if his mother knew anything about would have caused her to have a heart attack or worse. Years before, a high school senior had fallen off and killed himself. But when you’re young facts do not concern you. You are convinced that nothing will ever happen to you. Besides, he and Monroe had double-dog-dared each other to climb it, so there was no turning back.

Secretly both of them were a little nervous. Scared that they might chicken out at the last minute. But overriding any fear of being called a sissy by the other was the lure of being able to brag to everyone they knew, except their parents, that they had climbed it. And just to make sure that everybody would know for certain they really had done it, Bobby had come up with a plan.

That morning he had gone over to Warren’s Hardware and bought a large ball of heavy string. Monroe had a pocketful of red balloons that they were going to blow up and tie to the top of the tower to prove to any nonbelievers that they had been there. But when they finally arrived at the base of the tower and looked up, what had appeared from a distance to be just a round silver ball hanging up in the sky now seemed as big as a football field. It was so high it hurt their necks to look up at it. People said that from the top if you turned around in a circle you could see six states and on a clear day you could see all the way to Iowa . . . at least that’s what they said. Bobby and Monroe hemmed and hawed and kicked the ground a little and discussed the balloon plan.

“Do you think we should blow them up before we go?” asked Monroe, stalling for time.

“No. Don’t you remember what we said? If we blow them up first, somebody might see them while we’re climbing up.”

“Oh, that’s right.”

“When we get to the top, we blow them up and tie them to the side, then get down as fast as we can.”

Monroe, a chunky, carrot-topped boy with pinkish skin, suddenly looked a little pale. He glanced back up at the top. “Who’s gonna go first?”

Bobby thought about it for a minute but made no move. Then Monroe said, “This was your idea. I think you should get to go first.”

“No, it’s O.K., you can go first if you want to. I don’t care.”

“No, fair is fair. You’re the one who thought it up—you go.”

Monroe had him there, so Bobby could not very well back down now. “O.K., if you’re scared, I’ll go first if you want me to.”

“I’m not scared, it was just your idea, that’s all.”

“Then you go first if you want to.”

Monroe looked back up at the top. That settled it. “I don’t want to.”

Bobby assumed a nonchalant attitude. “All right, I’ll go first, but remember—Macky Warren said the trick is not to look down until you get up there.”

“O.K.”

“All right then, let’s go.” Bobby took a deep breath and put his foot on the first rung of the ladder and started up the long, thin steel stairs that led to the top. As they both soon found out, it was a long and steep climb. What they had not counted on was how hot the sun would be the higher they got or how hard it was to hold on to the slippery rails with sweaty hands, not to mention the wind that almost blew them off the ladder. After what seemed an hour of climbing, they finally made it, both of them out of breath, dripping wet with perspiration, hot, and thirsty. When they stepped off the ladder onto the small, round corrugated-steel platform at the very top, their legs were so shaky from the climb that they had to sit down and rest. Monroe’s face was now about as bright red as the balloons in his pocket.

After a while they mustered the strength and the courage to stand up and look over the side. The first thing Monroe said when he looked over was: “Whoa! . . . We must be ten thousand hundred feet up in the air . . . higher than an airplane or the Empire State Building even!”

They weren’t, of course, but you sure could have fooled them. Bobby and Monroe had never seen the world from anything higher than a tree or the top of a garage. They could see for miles around, and when Monroe spotted a cornfield way off in the distance he was positive he had seen all the way up to Iowa.

Bobby was so overwhelmed at the sight he was speechless. He stood there stunned. He had not known what the world would look like from this far up. He had thought maybe it would look round, like the world globe in his father’s den, but to his surprise it was all flat! Nothing before him but big flat brown and green squares as far as the eye could see. It looked just like a map! But when Monroe spotted their town off to the right and pointed it out, Bobby was in for the second shock of his young life. “Look,” Monroe said, “there’s the church and the school—see it?”

Bobby’s mouth hung open in total disbelief. Elmwood Springs, which an hour ago had seemed to him to be such an enormous place, was now nothing more than a block of buildings, houses, and streets no bigger than an inch, just stuck sitting out there in the middle of nowhere. He could see where downtown was, the church on one end and the Masonic Hall on the other. The small black specks walking back and forth were no bigger than ants, and the cars looked like Matchbox toys; the buildings were the same size as the ones in a Monopoly set.

Monroe said, “Look, there’s your house . . . see the radio tower in the backyard?”

Bobby peered over to where Monroe was pointing. It was his house all right. He could see the red light on top of the radio tower and if he squinted he could just make out a black speck moving around in the backyard, hanging clothes on a clothesline. Then it struck him: that speck was his mother! At once another thought hit him, scaring him half to death. What if he were at home right now and out in the yard and somebody else was up here looking down at him? Then he would be no bigger than an ant. No, half an ant . . . no bigger than a flea! From up here he would no longer be the huge center of his huge universe, the apple of his parents’ eyes; from up here he would be nothing and nobody special, just another black dot. Suddenly he broke out in a cold sweat.

“I’ve got to go home, my mother’s calling me,” he said. He started back down, leaving a startled Monroe calling after him: “Wait. You can’t go . . . we haven’t done the balloons yet. Wait!”

But Bobby did not hear him. All he could hear was the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears and his only thought was to get on the ground as fast as he could. He had to get back home, where he was the right size.

But Monroe, who had been deserted, abandoned, was not going to leave. He was determined. If he had climbed all the way to the top, people were going to know about it. The heck with Bobby Smith; he would just blow up the balloons himself. As he pulled one out of his pocket and started to blow, he suddenly remembered. He ran to the side and yelled down the ladder. “Bobby, wait, stop, you’ve got the string! Throw me the string!” But it was too late. Bobby was more than halfway down the ladder.

Sometime later Bobby hit the front door of his house running and didn’t stop until he got to his room and onto his own bed. When Anna Lee, who was out on the porch, saw the look on his face as he went by, she figured someone was chasing him. She got up to look and see if it was Luther Griggs, the big bully who was always beating Bobby up any chance he got, but Luther was nowhere in sight.

Poor Monroe had stayed up on the tower for at least another forty-five minutes, trying as hard as he could to attach one of those red balloons to the side of the railing, but they all flew off.

But for Bobby the day had been far more than just the failure of the balloon caper. It was the first time he had seen his life from a distance or from anywhere, for that matter, except from the center of his own giant universe. Could it really be possible that he was nothing but just another small dot among a bunch of other small dots? He had always thought he was something different, something special. Now he was thrown for a complete loop.

Raggedy Ann

THAT NIGHT Bobby was especially sweet and after dinner, when they were all out on the porch, he went over to his mother in the swing, lay down with his head in his mother’s lap, and went to sleep, something he had not done since he was six. It was an extraordinarily warm evening and the entire family, including Jimmy, and Dorothy’s red-and-white cocker spaniel, Princess Mary Margaret, all sat out trying to catch a little night breeze. It was a quiet night and they were enjoying the sound of the crickets and the soft squeak of the swing. Dorothy looked down at Bobby. He was now in such a deep sleep that when she crossed her legs with his head in her lap he did not awaken. She smoothed his hair back off his forehead. “He must have been up to something today because he’s dead to the world tonight.”

Anna Lee said, “I thought Luther Griggs was after him again. He ran in the door this afternoon going about a hundred miles an hour.”

His mother sighed. “I’m worried that the Griggs boy is really going to hurt him one of these days. He’s already a head taller than Bobby.”

Doc knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the side of the porch. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much. He’ll have to catch him first. Bobby may be little but he’s fast.”

Dorothy thought about it and was somewhat reassured. “Well, that’s true. The other day, by the time I got my switch he was out the door and so far out in the field all I could see was the top of his head.”

Anna Lee, who, now a teenager, had recently started referring to her brother as “that child,” made an observation. “That child is certainly a lot of trouble, isn’t he, Mother?”

“Yes, but he can be sweet when he wants to. He’s just at that age, I suppose.”

“Was I ever like that?” asked Anna Lee.

“No. You were just a little angel—wasn’t she, Mother?”

Mother Smith agreed. “Absolutely. You were the best-behaved little girl. I used to take you everywhere with me and all I had to do was to put you down with one of your little dolls and you’d sit there and play and I never heard a peep out of you.”

“You loved your dolls,” Dorothy said. “That big Raggedy Ann was your favorite; you used to take it everywhere.”

They sat there in the quiet listening to the crickets for a few more minutes. Then Dorothy turned to Anna Lee. “What ever happened to your Raggedy Ann doll?”

“Bobby knocked its head off.”

“Oh.”

Just then Tot Whooten, a frazzled-looking woman, walked by on the sidewalk headed somewhere in a hurry. She did not stop but waved her hand in the air and called out over her shoulder, “Momma’s left her purse at the picture show again and I’ve got to get there before they close.”

Mother Smith shook her head. “Poor Tot, that’s the second time this week.”

Dorothy agreed. “Poor Tot.”

A few minutes later, Tot came walking by again, this time with her mother’s huge black purse on her arm. Mother Smith called, “I see you got it.”

“Yes, thank heavens Snooky found it and was waiting for me. Good night.”

They all said, “Good night.” Mother Smith added, “Tell your mother I said hello.”

“O.K.”

And after she was out of earshot Dorothy said “Poor Tot” again. Several other people walked by on their way home from the movie and waved. After a moment, Dorothy said, “I wish Bobby hadn’t done that to Raggedy Ann. I was hoping you could give it to your little girl someday. You just loved that doll. You even took it to first grade with you.” She looked at her daughter with a sad, wistful expression in her eyes. “It seems like only yesterday when I was taking you to your first day of school.”

“Didn’t I just walk?” Anna Lee said. “It’s only two blocks.”

“No. I took you the first day but you weren’t afraid. You seemed happy to go really, you and Raggedy Ann. I stood there and watched you go up the steps and when you got to the top you turned and gave me a little wave and went on in. And oh, it nearly broke my heart, I was losing my little girl. I stood there on the street just crying my eyes out for all the world to see.”

Anna Lee said, “You did?”

Doc nodded. “Oh yes,” he said and relit his pipe, shook the match out, and put it in the ashtray by his chair. “Your mother came down to the drugstore practically hysterical. You would have thought she had just put you on a freighter headed for China.”

This was the first time Anna Lee had heard this story. “Were you that upset when Bobby went off to the first grade?”

Dorothy looked down at her sleeping son for a moment. “No. I hate to say it but I think I was actually relieved. The day before he had ruined all six cakes I had baked for the church sale, ran his finger around the bottom of each one and ate the icing. So, no, I was glad to let somebody else have him for a while. But little boys are different. When you get married and have one of your own, you’ll see for yourself.”

Anna Lee shook her head. “Not me. I’m not having any boys. I’m only going to have girls.”

Mother Smith laughed. “That’s not something you can control, honey. You may want little girls but wishing doesn’t make it so.”

“Then I’m not ever getting married.”

Mother Smith smiled. “That’s what we all say until Mr. Right comes waltzing in the door. Isn’t that right, Dorothy?”

“It was for me. I told everyone I was going to New York to go on the stage and become the next Sarah Bernhardt. Then your father asked me to the Christmas dance and there went my Broadway career plans out the window.” Dorothy moved a little in the swing, and Bobby’s head moved with her. “Now my other leg has gone to sleep. I don’t know what he has in his head but it weighs a ton.”

“Rocks probably,” said Anna Lee.

Jimmy stood up, yawned, and stretched. “Well, folks, I guess it’s about that time. See y’all tomorrow.”

“Good night, Jimmy.”

Dorothy looked at Doc. “You better come over here, Mr. Right, and take your son to bed. I need to get on in and work on the show before it gets too late. It’s almost ten o’clock.”

Doc put his pipe down and walked over and picked Bobby up and put him over his shoulder. “Should I put his pajamas on?”

“No, just let him sleep in his clothes. It won’t hurt him.”

Doc said, “Good night, all.” As he got to the screen door he turned to Dorothy and said, “Good night, Miss Bernhardt.”

Doc Smith

DOC WAS MUCH older than the other fathers of Bobby’s friends and it worried him because he could not roughhouse or play football with his son like they could, but as far as Bobby was concerned there were plenty of things he did with his father that more than made up for it. Doc, it seems, had been a good baseball player in his youth and was still an avid baseball fan and so was Bobby. They listened to all the games on the radio together and studied the players’ statistics. With Doc’s vast knowledge of baseball he taught Bobby to appreciate the finer and more subtle elements of the game. And though Doc was never much of a hunter, he did love to fish and from the time Bobby could walk he always took him along. Doc would come into his room at about 3:30 in the morning, long before it was light, and wake him. Bobby would get up and dress and they would both quietly slip out the front door so the Robinsons’ chickens would not wake up the neighborhood. Doc would start the 1938 Dodge with the bad muffler as quietly as possible and drive in the dark through the back roads until they came to the river. It was on these mornings that his father would let him have a sip of coffee from the thermos he had brought, preceded with “All right, just a sip, but don’t tell your mother.” This little ritual made Bobby feel as if he and his father were partners in a grand conspiracy. Even though the coffee always tasted bitter and horrible, he endured it without making a face. It was a man thing. Sometimes they would go with Glenn Warren and his son, Macky, but he liked it best when it was just him and his father. He loved having his father introduce him to the other men at the camp as his son. He could tell they all respected his father and it made him feel proud. He also enjoyed going to Old Man Johnson’s fishing camp, where they rented their boat. The ramshackle wooden cabin was filled with rods and tackle. Mounted fish of all kinds and sizes hung on every inch of the wall. Also alongside the fish hung a calendar with a picture of a pretty girl in short shorts fly-fishing in a stream that Bobby thought was exotic. They always bought their live bait out of the cooler plus two cold drinks, crackers and tins of sardines and Vienna sausages for their lunch, and were usually out on the water just as the sun was coming up. Bobby’s job was to row the boat back up into the deep shady places, where the big fat trout and catfish liked to hide, while his father cast his line as close to the bank as possible. The crackers Mr. Johnson sold were stale and the drinks warm by noon but it didn’t matter. Anything tastes good when you are hungry. Some days they would catch a huge string of fish, sometimes just three or four. One day the fishing had been so bad that his father bought some trout from Old Man Johnson to take home. That night Bobby went into such long and elaborate detail about how each trout was caught and how hard it fought that his mother began to suspect something. But Bobby didn’t really care how many fish they caught; he just loved being alone with his dad. A few years before, his father had casually laid out a handful of baseball tickets on the kitchen table and asked, “Son, would you like to go to the World Series with me?” Miracle of all miracles, their team, the St. Louis Browns, was playing the St. Louis Cardinals that year and everybody in the state of Missouri was trying to get tickets. As it turned out, a friend of Doc’s from pharmaceutical school just happened to be Luke Sewell, the St. Louis Browns’ manager’s brother-in-law, and Doc had been able to get tickets from him. Doc brought in a replacement to work for him at the drugstore and Dorothy packed their bags. On October 3, the two of them got on a train headed up to St. Louis with tickets for all six games if it lasted that long and they hoped it would. What a town. What a trip. Just him and his dad staying at a real hotel, eating out at restaurants just like two grown-ups. A Yellow Cab ride to the huge Rexall drugstore in downtown St. Louis to visit his father’s friend and back. He had his picture made under the big steel Gateway Arch, and got a brand-new Browns baseball cap. Each day they took a streetcar from downtown to North Grand Avenue, all the way out to Sportsman’s Park. Going and coming it was always filled with the aroma of Old Spice shaving lotion and cigarette smoke and packed full of loud, exuberant men and boys of all ages headed to and from the game. The sight of the ballpark that first day—the crowds—the noise—the smells—the crack of the bat—the green grass—the hot dogs—the peanuts—that sip of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer! It was all too much. Bobby was so excited he was dizzy. Their team won the first game 2 to 1, which gave them hope, but went on to lose the series as expected. Still, they had been there cheering them on anyway. It had been a wonderful time for both of them. Although the poor St. Louis Browns were never to play in a World Series again, at least Bobby did not come home empty-handed. He was the proud owner of a real, genuine World Series baseball, a foul ball his father had managed to catch, autographed by none other than the National League’s MVP of the year, shortstop Marty Marion. Bobby and his dad stood in line for about two hours to get the autograph but it was worth the wait. When they got home Bobby showed it to everybody. He was quite the big man around town for a few days, or at least until everyone had seen it several times. As for Doc, he came home happy and rested, a rest he had much needed.

On the surface, being a small-town druggist did not seem like such a hard job, certainly not a hazardous or a grueling profession. But it had its own hidden stresses that few knew about. His was a multifaceted job of many duties. Not only did he have to stand and listen with great patience to everybody in town who seemed compelled to tell him in long, drawn-out detail all about each and every little pain or complaint they had, but people also brought him birds with broken wings to fix, kids with cuts and scrapes, smashed fingers, and sprained ankles to bandage, and a variety of colds, upset stomachs, sore throats, cat scratches, dog bites, black eyes, and poison ivy rashes to ask about. All this he was glad to do but for Doc, as Elmwood Springs’ only pharmacist, it meant that he was also privy to private information and secrets he sometimes wished he didn’t have to know. With his knowledge of medicine he often knew exactly what was wrong with people by what the doctor had prescribed.

He was painfully aware, for example, that his best friend had a bad heart condition by the strength of the medicine and by the frequency it was to be taken but he never mentioned it. He also knew that poor Tot Whooten had been given a prescription for Antabuse and she was secretly slipping it into the coffee of her husband, James Dwayne, every morning to try to get him to stop drinking. He knew which soldier had come home from the war having contracted syphilis, what lady was taking pills for bad nerves, which men were being treated for impotence, and those women who were having female trouble, as well as who did not want any more children and who did. All this he kept to himself. It was especially hard when his own family was involved. The day his father’s prescription for morphine was called in he knew his dad was dying, long before his father did.

But if his job was sometimes complex, Doc’s life at home was a pleasant escape. And it certainly was never dull. Just last week a complete stranger had wandered in and had dinner with them.

Because the Greyhound bus stopped in front of their house, people were always sitting around on the porch or in the living room. This combined with the number of Neighbor Dorothy’s fans that dropped by all day caused the man to make an honest mistake. When he saw everyone going in and out and the radio call letters written on the front window, he naturally assumed the place was a restaurant called WDOT and decided to stop by later and have a bite to eat before driving on to Poplar Bluff. At around 5:30 he parked his car, strolled in, and sat down in the living room with Doc and Jimmy, who were reading the paper, and asked, “What time is dinner served?” Doc did not know who he was but pleasantly told him, “In about thirty minutes.” Then the man asked where the men’s room was and went down the hall and came back, sat down, and picked up a magazine and waited. As far as Doc knew, he could have been one of Dorothy’s sponsors come to town. When Dorothy called out that dinner was on the table the man got up and went in. Nobody asked him who he was, all thinking he was a friend of someone else’s, and Neighbor Dorothy quietly put out another place setting. He thoroughly enjoyed the pot roast and mashed potatoes and happily chatted away all through dinner, entertaining everyone with his tales of life as a professional poultry inspector for the state of Missouri. And how people always kidded him about being a poultry inspector with Fowler for a last name. He amazed them with how many different breeds of chickens were in the world. After finishing his second piece of coconut cake, he pushed himself back from the table and announced, “Well, folks, I better get on the road before it gets too late,” and dug into his pocket and asked Dorothy how much he owed.

A surprised Dorothy said, “Why, you don’t owe a thing, Mr. Fowler—we were just happy to have you. I hope you’ll be sure to drop in and see us again anytime you are passing through.”

That night Mr. Charlie Fowler left town thinking that Elmwood Springs was the friendliest place he had ever been. He did come back often and they were always glad to see him.

An Ordinary Day

ON AN ORDINARY weekday Jimmy Head, the Smiths’ boarder, is usually the first person awake. He gets up around 4:30, goes out to the kitchen, puts on the coffee, drinks a cup, then heads out the door before five. The only other lights on in town are at Nordstrom’s bakery, which opens at 7:30, but Jimmy has a big breakfast crowd and has to get the Trolley Car Diner ready to go by 6:00. Doc and Mother Smith are also early risers and usually come into the kitchen and have a cup of coffee together around 5:30. Dorothy is up and dressed by 6:30, comes in, and starts her day by putting a batch of radio cookies in the oven for her guests and then feeds Princess Mary Margaret and her two yellow canary birds, Dumpling and Moe. If it is summer Bobby is up by 7:00 and Anna Lee tends to float into the kitchen around 8:00 or 8:30. She needs her beauty sleep. Doc is down at the drugstore by 7:30, which opens at 8:00.

The milkman, the iceman, and the bread man have already been there by 9:20 and Beatrice, the Little Blind Songbird, who sings on the show every day, has come over from next door. She and Mother Smith, who accompanies her on the small organ, go on into the living room to run through Beatrice’s song. Dorothy and Princess Mary Margaret arrive for the broadcast around 9:25.

Princess Mary Margaret greets anyone else who is in the living room to see the show with a wagging tail and often jumps up and sits in someone’s lap during the show. Or if she is not in the mood she gets into her basket under Dorothy’s desk (many have remarked how the dog is much better trained than Bobby). Then Dorothy says hello to her guests and welcomes her live audience, usually people waiting to catch the bus or ladies from women’s clubs. Dorothy sits down and runs over the format and her commercials for a last-minute check and looks out the window so she can give her radio audience the very latest weather update. At 9:30 on the dot the red light on the organ blinks, the on-air signal, and Mother Smith hits the first strains of the theme song, the show begins . . . and everyone in town and thereabouts is usually tuned in.

Today, fifteen miles outside of town Mrs. Elner Shimfissle, a large-boned farm woman with a plain but pleasant face, dipped her hand into a blue-and-white speckled pan filled with Purina feed and threw it to the chickens in her yard. The chickens, mostly Rhode Island Reds, ran every which way with their heads down close to the ground, trying their best to beat all the other chickens to each grain. She wore a new green-checked apron over her somewhat faded floral-print dress and comfortable old-lady white tie-up shoes.

She shielded her eyes from the sun and looked far out into the fields and saw her husband plowing behind the reins of their two black mules and called out, “Whoo hoo, Will!” The small man in the large straw hat stopped and waved back and then continued plowing. After she emptied the pan she walked over to the water pump and rinsed it out and hung it on a nail on the side of the house by the big tin washtub. She looked up at the sun again, wiped her hands on her apron, and guessed that it was getting to be about that time and went on back in the house. She had been up since four A.M. and had already done the milking, gathered the eggs, gotten her husband’s breakfast, scrubbed the kitchen floor, done some washing, hung it up on the line, put a pair of overalls to soaking, killed a fryer, and put up sixteen jars of fig preserves. She figured she could afford to sit down and relax awhile and went over and poured herself a cup of coffee and got her pencil and pad ready to take down the receipts. She turned on the radio—it was always set on WDOT, the only station that comes in clear this far out—and heard The Neighbor Dorothy Show, the same program that she had been listening to for the past sixteen years.

It was the only show other than Gospel Time, U.S.A., the farm report, and the Grand Ole Opry that Mrs. Shimfissle listened to on a regular basis. And this morning Neighbor Dorothy started the show as she always did with a cheery “Good morning, everybody, it’s a pretty day over here in Elmwood Springs and I hope it’s just as pretty where you are. We’ve got so many wonderful things to tell you about on the show this morning . . . so many special guests . . . that I can hardly contain myself. And sitting right here in the living room with me is somebody I know you are going to want to hear from. Mr. Milo Shipp, who has traveled all the way from New York City to tell us about his brand-new book, Hilltop in the Rain, and we can’t wait to hear about that. And also we want to welcome our in-studio visitors.

“We have six ladies from the Claire De Lune Garden Club with us and they are headed all the way up to St. Louis for the big flower show later this morning”—Mother Smith played a few strains of “Meet Me in St. Louis”—“and I know you all are going to have a big time up there. We have a good show for you today. Along with our regulars, Nurse Ruby Robinson and Beatrice, the Little Blind Songbird, who will be singing . . . what? ‘I’m in Love with the Man in the Moon’ . . . and also on our musical menu this morning the Goodnight sisters have promised to drop by later to sing a song in honor of our out-of-town guest, entitled ‘My Sweetheart Went Down with the Ship.’ They say it’s a sad song but it was the only one they could find with ship in the title.

“But before we get to our interview I want to say a big hello to one of my brand-new sponsors, Verna Clapp’s original strained baby food, and we’ll be talking a lot more about that a little later in the program. First, just in case you’re wondering what you are hearing, it’s not your radio. Poor Tot’s fox terrier got out again and that noise is coming from a box of twelve of the cutest puppies you have ever seen—don’t you think so, Mr. Shipp? He says he does.”—Mother Smith played a bar or two of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” and Dorothy laughed.—“Well, they are absolutely free and all Tot wants is to find good homes for them. She says there are five boys and seven girls but not to hold her to it. We know who the mother is but she says she has no idea about the father. As far as I can tell from the look of them, I think the honors will go to that Airedale up the street, so come on by and get yourself one.

“Also, before I forget I wanted to mention how pleased we are with all the responses we are getting from all of you for the dessert cookbook. Mrs. Frances Cleverdon of Arden, Oklahoma, writes:

“Dear Neighbor Dorothy,

“I think your idea for a dessert cookbook is a good one and will gladly contribute my favorite in the line of a Nesselrode pudding.

“Thank you, Frances. And I see we have a few items on our swap-and-shop segment this morning. Mrs. Irene Neff of Elkton writes to ask if there is anyone with a pair of size nine men’s maroon felt house shoes with a black embroidered Indian on them and is willing to swap four tea towels for both or just the left one. Also Mrs. Claudia Graham of Blue Springs is looking for a Lady Esther face-powder box. She just wants the box not the powder, and will swap an Evening in Paris perfume bottle. But before we get to our interview and our songs, we have a winner in our What’s the Funniest Thing That Ever Happened to You Contest and here it is.” Mother Smith played a fanfare.

“Dear Neighbor Dorothy,

“One day I scrubbed and scrubbed my kitchen sink but it would not come clean. It was then my daughter came in and asked why I was sprinkling Parmesan cheese in the sink. My husband took me for glasses the next day.

“Signed, Mrs. Mina Fleet of Mount Sterling, Kentucky.

“So, congratulations! You have just won a five-pound sack of Golden Flake Flour, the flour that makes biscuits that make all your family say ‘yummy.’ And I know just how you feel, Mina; I am headed for spectacles myself. Now, what else did I have to pass along this morning? Oh, here it is. James Whooten has finished with the Whatleys’ house and is available. He says you get the paint, I need the work, so call. What else did I have? What? Oh, Mother Smith said I forgot to give out the question of the week. I’m sorry, girls, Monday is such a busy day—I guess I’m a little rattled, so many exciting things happening. Now, where’s the question? I know I had it.”

The phone in the hall suddenly started ringing.

“Here it is, I found it. The question is, ‘What is your favorite cooking utensil and why?’ Didn’t we have that one before, Mother Smith? She says no, so I guess we didn’t. And whoever is calling me on the phone is going to have to ring me back in thirty minutes because I’m on the air. Call back after ten.” The phone stopped ringing. “Pardon me a second, girls.” Dorothy put her hand over the microphone. “Bobby! Put that back in the kitchen where you found it right now!”

Just then a large man walked up on the front porch, leaned through the living room window, and handed Dorothy a note, which she took and promptly read over the air. “Merle says in case it rains on Saturday, the Elks Club fish fry will be held over at the American Legion Hall across the street. All right. Thank you, Merle, but let’s just hope it doesn’t rain. Now, coming up next is our interview with our famous author all the way from New York City, who will be telling us all ’bout his new book and I know you’re going to enjoy hearing what he has to say.”

Dorothy reached over and pulled a piece of paper she had Scotch-taped to the side of the sack of Golden Flake Pancake Mix sitting on her desk so she would not forget it. “And speaking of books, here’s a fun fact for you, Mr. Shipp. Did you know that a Mrs. Patricia Lennon of St. Paul, Minnesota, while going through her attic, found a library book that had been overdue for twenty-eight years? Her library fee came to over three thousand dollars. The title of the book? How to Improve Your Memory—so make sure you get your books back on time. But before we get to Mr. Shipp, let me ask you this: Did you ever long for a trip south of the border, down Mexico way?” Neighbor Dorothy signaled to Mother Smith, who immediately played a little of the Mexican hat dance. “The people at Niblets say down with drabness and up with flavor. That’s right, viva Niblets brand Mexicorn! The whole-kernel corn mixed with red and green peppers. Now you too can have a real Mexican fiesta right in your own kitchen and have your whole family shouting Olé!”

Meanwhile Milo Shipp, author, a thin man in a bow tie, sat in a wooden chair stunned, with a cookie in one hand and a large cocker spaniel on his lap, while a young boy grinding an eggbeater ran in and out of the room. Eight people carrying suitcases had just gotten up and left to catch a Greyhound bus that had pulled up and honked, and a puppy that disproved the old adage “all puppies are cute” had escaped the cardboard box and was now busy chewing on his shoelaces.

Several small children all under the age of six who were attending nursery school on the back porch continued to wander in to get cookies and pet the puppies, while two teenage girls kept sneaking around the corner to catch a glimpse of him and giggle. In a few minutes a pair of middle-aged women dressed alike, named Ada and Bess Goodnight, came in and proceeded to sing in perfect harmony a terrible song about the sinking of the Titanic, nodding and smiling and waving at him the whole time. As he sat there dazed, trying to nod back and fake a smile, he wondered what in the world had he gotten himself into and what the hell had his publishers been thinking of by sending him into this madhouse. He had made the long trip all the way across the country to the middle of nowhere because they had assured him in glowing terms that this Neighbor Dorothy woman sold more books on her show than anyone else in the Midwest. But now, looking at this unimpressive round little housewife sitting behind a desk covered with stacks of paper, potted plants, and a goldfish bowl sitting on the base of a green ceramic cat, he found it all hard to believe.

Twenty-nine minutes, one interview, and three recipes later, Dorothy looked up and said, “Oh . . . I see by that old mean clock on the wall . . . it’s time to go. It’s always so pleasant to sit and visit with you every morning, share a cup of coffee. You make our days so happy. And when I go and look in our basket to see all the mail you send me I feel as rich as a millionaire, so until we see you again you’ll be missed and do come back tomorrow, won’t you? This is Neighbor Dorothy and Mother Smith from our house to yours, saying have a good day.”

Back out at the farm Elner Shimfissle stood up and went over and turned off the radio and threw what was left of her coffee in the sink. She wished that Neighbor Dorothy had been giving away kittens instead of puppies. Will said the next time she had some they would go into town and get one. Elner added the cake recipe to the rest and also jotted down the name of the man’s book. She was not much of a reader but that sounded like a good one. She then went on about her day a little happier, feeling as if she had just had a nice visit with a good friend.

As for Mr. Shipp, he had no idea how lucky he was that Neighbor Dorothy had agreed to have him on the show. Her vast listening audience, which now covered a radius of five states or more, knew she never recommended a book she didn’t really like. And they could be pretty sure that if Neighbor Dorothy liked it, by and large they would too.

Three weeks later Mr. Shipp found himself in his publisher’s office amid the “I told you so”s of the publicity staff, having to admit that the trip to the Midwest had not been a fool’s errand, as he had so loudly proclaimed upon his return to the big city. Much to his surprise, Hilltop in the Rain had suddenly popped up to the number three spot on the New York Times best-seller list, a place he had never been before in his life. But he was just one of the many who had been and would be surprised over the years at what this woman could do.

The Goodnights

WHILE MR. MILO SHIPP might have thought Dorothy’s friends the Goodnight sisters, who sang and did expressive gestures in unison, were a bit odd, everybody else in town had known them all their lives and saw nothing strange about them.

Of course, when they were first born their arrival had caused quite a stir. Twins were rare and everybody for miles around had come to look at them. Their mother, Hazel Goodnight, postmistress at the time, had them on display in the back room of the post office until they were five.

Although Hazel always referred to them as identical twins and dressed them as such, they were not. Ada, the eldest by a minute and a half, was larger by a dress size and always ten pounds heavier than Bess but to please their mother they continued to dress alike. They even kept their hair in the same short hairdo, permed in tight little brown curls, and always went to the beauty shop on the same day. Both were good-natured and friendly and known as the town’s cutups. If you asked one a question, the other might answer and they were so close they often finished each other’s sentences.

The only time they had ever been separated for any length of time was Bess’s one-week honeymoon during the war. After Pearl Harbor was hit, Ada, always the bolder of the two, took the attack personally and surprised everyone the next day by packing her bags, vowing to help “smash those Japs flat” in any way she could.

A vow most people in town believed. She had led the women’s softball team to the state championship in ’36. Because Ada used to date Vern Suttle, a crop duster, she had some knowledge of planes and eventually wound up in the WASP flight training program at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. It was a tough program and many washed out. Ada had to put in many long and grueling hours but when she wrote home she said she had only two complaints about Sweetwater. Too few men. Too many bugs.

When Ada had joined up, her sister Bess had jumped into the war effort on the home front. Not only did she take over running the Western Union office downtown, she became a Red Cross volunteer and helped serve food down at the train station whenever she could. Shortly after the war started Neighbor Dorothy organized a women’s committee to make sure that every troop train passing through Elmwood Springs was met at the station with hot coffee, doughnuts, sandwiches, and homemade cake. Most of the soldiers were just scared young boys trying to be brave but just the same they wrote their names and addresses on pieces of paper and threw them out the train windows, hoping to get some girl to write to them. At the end of the war Elmwood Springs prided itself on the fact that not one boy who had thrown his name and address out the window had ever gone without an answer. During the war the girls spent hours every night answering letters. Every morning, right after they had applied their bright red lipstick for the day, the younger women sealed their letters with a big red kiss. Hundreds of boxes of homemade cookies, cakes, candy, and knitted socks were sent overseas. Bobby and Monroe’s job was to run all over town and collect all the letters and get them down to the post office so they could go out in the first mail. Macky Warren, a cute sandy-haired boy who was too young to enlist, was not happy about his girlfriend, Norma, writing to so many soldiers but he didn’t say so. It would not have been patriotic to be jealous of fighting men. The soldiers who wrote back and said they had no girlfriend of their own asked for photos. As a result Anna Lee, Norma, Patsy Marie, and others had their pictures carried into battles halfway around the world and looked at several times a day by boys they had never met. During those years some of the soldiers without much family developed lasting friendships with their pen pals in Elmwood Springs. But not all were pretty young girls. Bess Goodnight was thirty and married; she had eighteen soldiers she wrote to. She even sent all of her boys a pinup photo of Rita Hayworth and had signed each one love and kisses from Bess Goodnight. After the war several of the boys came to town to visit her. They wanted to meet Bess, whose letters had meant so much and had helped them feel connected to home. As all wars do, it brought many people together who might never have met. For instance, in 1943, after she had gotten her wings, Ada Goodnight, while visiting New York City on a weekend pass, was to have a brush with greatness and with a real Hollywood star. And if it had not been for a complete stranger the incident could have gone unnoticed.

That night Ada and a bunch of gals in her squadron went out on the town and wound up at a famous place where a man asked Ada to dance.

And as she was to tell the tale later: “Honey, I danced the rumba at the El Morocco nightclub with a movie star and didn’t even know it. This cute little short fellow came up and asked me to dance and when I stood up he grabbed me by the waist and off we went in a tizzy fit. I was jerked this way and that, back and forth all over that dance floor, and when I finally got back to my seat and caught my breath—so help me, Hannah—this man at the next table leans over and says to me, ‘Young lady, you may not know it but you have just danced the rumba with Mr. George Raft!’ And, oh, did I feel the fool. Not only did I not recognize George Raft, I didn’t even know I had danced the rumba!”

Ada was to have many more exciting and dangerous experiences after that. One of her squadron’s assignments was to fly over an artillery field dragging long white silk targets behind them so our soldiers could practice tracking and shooting down enemy planes. And some were not such good shots as yet and would occasionally miss the target and hit the plane. Ada wrote Bess that her tail had been hit so many times that it looked like Swiss cheese.

Back at home, although life may not have been as glamorous or nearly as dangerous as it was for Ada, the whole town was focused on winning the war. Neighbor Dorothy had adjusted all her radio recipes, leaving out or reducing the amount of the items that were rationed, sugar and fat, butter and meat. Victory gardens were planted in every yard and Doc Smith was the town’s air-raid warden. They staged several blackouts and did well, although few really worried that the Japanese or the Germans would go out of their way to attack Elmwood Springs. But even without the threat of being bombed, the war years, as they did everywhere, brought heartbreak and change. In 1942 the entire senior football team at the Elmwood Springs high school had enlisted the day after graduation and some did not come back. The Nordstroms, who owned the bakery, lost their boy Gene in Iwo Jima in ’44 and several farm boys living on the outskirts of town did not come back as well. Some of the older girls and women who had left town and gone to the larger cities to take factory jobs returned with different attitudes and ambitions than they’d had before they’d left. Ada Goodnight told her sister that if she could fly a plane there was no limit to what women could do—and proved it. She brought her new husband home and proudly introduced him all over town as her “war bride” and soon owned and ran her own flying school. Soldiers who returned seemed more serious than they had when they’d left. But even people who stayed home during the war had grown up a little faster than they should have, including Anna Lee.

At an age when she should have been concerned with nothing more than going to dances, wearing pretty clothes, and having fun, she received a letter.

October 24, 1945

Yorkshire, England

Dear Miss Smith,

I regret to report that your friend Pfc. Harry Crawford, United States Army, passed away in hospital this morning resulting from wounds received.

Although I did not know him long I can tell you he was a lovely boy and displayed bravery and courage right up to the very end.

If it is any consolation do know your letters and your photo cheered him greatly during his last days. As I was the one who read them to him, I felt I might take the liberty to write and return your letters and photo, along with my deepest sympathies for your loss.

Respectfully,

Glyniss Neale, R.N.

Veterans Hospital

That afternoon her mother tried to console her but there was little she could do except sit and listen as Anna Lee sobbed. “Oh, Mother, I’m so ashamed, I didn’t even answer his last letter. I thought now that the war was over it didn’t matter if I didn’t write so much. . . . Now it’s too late. . . . I feel so bad. I wish I could die.”

It was shortly after that day that Anna Lee solemnly announced to her family that she had made a decision never to marry and to dedicate her entire life to the nursing profession. Her mother said, “Well, that’s wonderful, honey, but let’s wait until you finish high school and then see how you feel.”

Dorothy certainly would not mind. As their next-door neighbor Nurse Ruby Robinson always said, “Nursing is a good steady profession.” But Dorothy was not convinced Anna Lee would stick to her decision. Last year Anna Lee had announced to the family that she planned to become a professional ice skater and travel around the world. An odd ambition for a girl who had never been near an ice-skating rink in her life, but as Mother Smith quietly pointed out, Anna Lee might have seen one too many Sonja Henie movies.

The Songbird

AFTER THE WAR the town’s population had remained much the same, except for the addition of Ada Goodnight’s new husband and the Nordstroms’ daughter-in-law, Marion, and their new grandbaby, who had come to live with them. Beatrice Woods, known professionally to her radio fans as the Little Blind Songbird, first moved to Elmwood Springs in the spring of 1945. Although she was Ruby and John Robinson’s official boarder and paid rent, she was a distant relative of Ruby’s. How she came to board with them that year turned out to be a stroke of good luck for everyone involved. As Dorothy said, “Everybody was in the right place at the right time.”

The right place in this case being the funeral of Mrs. Lillian Sprott, who was Ruby’s oldest sister. Ruby and her husband, John, had traveled to Franklin, Tennessee, for the occasion. Beatrice Woods, who was Lillian’s niece by marriage, had been asked to sing at the funeral. At the time Beatrice and her father lived on a small farm outside of town.

Blind from birth, Beatrice had passed all nineteen years of her life so far pretty much limited to the house. Her little Philco radio was her only window to the world. Except for church on Sundays or a rare outing, she spent most of her days alone listening and had learned to sing just about every song she heard.

From the moment she sang her first song in church, her reputation quickly started to spread around the county. People came from miles around to hear the blind girl who sang like an angel. One Sunday, a visiting preacher, moved to tears by the beautiful sound of her high, lilting, almost ethereal voice, said it was as pure and clear as a songbird at dawn. From then on she was known as the Little Blind Songbird of Tennessee.

On the day of Lillian Sprott’s funeral, when the preacher signaled it was time, Beatrice’s father led the girl in a white dress up the aisle and put her in a chair and placed her zither in her lap. She sang the old hymn “Someone’s Waiting for Me Up There” and ended the service with “There’ll Be Peace in the Valley.”

After she finished there was not a dry eye in the house. One woman who had not particularly cared for the dear departed remarked that old Lillian had most certainly been sung into heaven that day, whether she deserved to be or not. John Robinson told Ruby they should get Beatrice to sing on The Neighbor Dorothy Show. Dorothy was always looking for talent. That afternoon her father asked Beatrice if she wanted to go. She immediately said yes and two days later she went on the radio and sang “Always.” A guest artist on The Neighbor Dorothy Show was certainly not an unusual occurrence. Throughout the years Dorothy had featured many singers. Only the week before, twelve-year-old Ian Barnard, billed as Windsor’s Wonder Boy of Song and Dance, had come all the way from Canada and had caused quite a stir singing and tapping to the tune “If You Knew Susie.” But never before had there been such an overwhelming response to a single performance as there was to Beatrice Woods’s first appearance. Calls and letters came pouring in, everyone wanting to hear more from the “Little Blind Songbird of Tennessee.” And on the next appearance, when Beatrice sang “Old Shep,” a song about a dog, everyone who had ever had a dog that died, or even one that might, broke down and sobbed, including Neighbor Dorothy, who had to leave the room and when she came back was barely able to sign off the air. Down at the hardware store, fifteen-year-old Macky Warren, who was helping his daddy, heard it and cried so hard over his dog Tess he made himself sick and had to go home. She was such a hit that Neighbor Dorothy asked her to appear on the show every week and the Golden Flake Lite-as-a-Feather Flour company agreed to pay her room and board if she would. Her father drove her back over to Elmwood Springs, this time with her clothes and her radio. As it turned out, Beatrice knew the words to hundreds of songs and could sing anything—hymns, popular songs, gospel, country, you name it. Pretty soon she received so many requests she was appearing on the show every day. Since she was now living in Missouri she dropped the “of Tennessee” from her title and just went by the “Little Blind Songbird.” She did not have far to go every day since Ruby and John lived right next door. Doc ran a clothesline from one back door to the other so she could hold on to it and find her way back and forth between the two houses without any trouble. This worked out fine unless it rained. Then she was told to wait on the back porch until someone came over to get her.

The Secret

BOBBY WOULD BE the first one to discover Beatrice’s secret. One rainy morning Dorothy looked out the window in the kitchen and saw that it was not letting up and told Bobby he better go get Beatrice. He had just finished his breakfast, said O.K., and started for the door when his mother stopped him.

“Bobby, take the umbrella.”

Bobby moaned. He did not mind going to get Beatrice—he liked her—but he did mind having to take the umbrella. Muttering to himself, he went to the hall closet and rummaged around behind the heavy winter coats his mother had hanging there and pulled out the large black umbrella he despised with a passion. The huge multispoked creature had tortured him for years. Besides being almost as big as he was, it had a mind of its own and was mean and ornery. One spoke was always off and by the time he wrestled it to the ground three or four more had popped off. Then there was the problem of maneuvering it out the back door without falling down the stairs. Mother Smith said never to open an umbrella in the house because it was bad luck but if he stood outside on the back steps he would be drenched before he could get it open, so what was the point.

He dragged the dreaded monster to the back door, pushed with all his might, and the thing popped into place but as usual one spoke on the left side flipped up. He decided not to even fool with it and he banged and pulled himself and the umbrella out the door and down the steps. Beatrice was dressed and waiting. She had on her yellow raincoat and rain hat and galoshes, which Nurse Ruby always insisted she wear just to walk from one house to the other. Beatrice greeted him before he opened the screen door.

“Hi, Bobby,” she said, knowing it was him by the way he ran up the steps.

They walked arm in arm, chatting.

“What are you going to sing today, Beatrice?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet. . . . What do you think?”

Bobby thought about it as he guided her around a big puddle.

“What about ‘Cool Cool Water’?” Bobby’s musical tastes always led him to suggest cowboy songs first. “Or maybe ‘April Showers’?”

Beatrice nodded. “Those are two good ones.”

Mother Smith was waiting for them on the other end and opened the door. “This is a humdinger, isn’t it? Come on in and let me get those wet things off of you.” Beatrice loved going to the Smith house every morning. It was a treat for her, with the aroma of warm, freshly baked cookies and the sounds of people running in and out and busloads of fans dropping by to visit. It was a far cry from the quiet rooms where she spent most of her time.

The Robinson house, given Nurse Ruby’s fear of germs and considering her personal credo, “I never met a germ I couldn’t kill,” always had the slight smell of Lysol disinfectant lingering in the air. After the show Beatrice usually stayed for lunch and went home around one. That day the rain continued in a constant downpour and Bobby was summoned from the attic, where he had been busy mowing down an army of clay soldiers with a tank made out of a large matchbox. When they stepped out Dorothy’s back door, Beatrice heard Bobby grunting and struggling with the umbrella and whispered, “Bobby, let’s not even use that thing. Let’s just go without it.”

Bobby’s eyes lit up. “You don’t care if you get wet?”

“No. Don’t you think a walk in the rain would be fun?”

“Yeah!”

She took her rain hat off and put it in her pocket. “Let’s go!”

About ten minutes later Bobby and Beatrice were having the time of their lives, running up and down the sidewalk in their bare feet, stomping in every puddle Bobby could find. They were headed up to the end of the block again when Ruby Robinson, who had just come in from work, looked out the window and saw them. She ran out on the front porch and hollered for them to come in this very minute. Hers was clearly a medical concern; she took the responsibility of her boarder’s health very seriously.

They were both soaking wet and by the time they came up the front stairs, Ruby was in a fit. “Well, I’ve heard of people who didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain but this is the first time I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And to think, Bobby Smith, that you of all people would lead a poor little blind girl around in a downpour.”

Beatrice defended Bobby. “It’s not his fault. I’m the one who wanted to walk in the rain.”

Nurse Ruby looked at Bobby, dripping all over her rug. After she moved him off the rug onto some newspapers, she said somewhat skeptically, “Well . . . whoever’s idea it was, if you die of double pneumonia it’s not going to matter. Both of you ought to be ashamed, putting your health at risk for such foolishness. I’ll be surprised if you live out the week.”

Despite her dire predictions, neither one got sick, not a cold or a sniffle, a disappointment to Nurse Ruby, who took their temperature daily for a week. After the seventh day, unable to detect the slightest symptom, she relented. As she held the thermometer up to the light and it read 98.6 again she said, “Well, all I can say is that you both were just lucky this time, that’s all.”

Later that day she said to Dorothy, “Imagine if that girl had come down with pneumonia and died while she was living under the roof of a registered nurse, what would people think? After all, I have the responsibility for the health of this entire community and I take that seriously.”

Neighbor Dorothy said, “I know you do and everybody appreciates it but—”

She continued. “Beatrice takes this whole episode lightly but I have a medical reputation to uphold. How could I go on giving out medical advice on the radio if my very own boarder had died right out from under me, I ask you that?”

Dorothy tried to be sympathetic and tactful at the same time. “Ruby, I know you worry about her and that’s very sweet of you but don’t you think she needs just a little bit of fun every once in a while?”

Nurse Ruby puffed up and slung one side of her blue cape over her shoulder. “Fun? Well, Dorothy, if you call putting your health at risk fun, then no, I don’t.”

There was no getting around Ruby, but what she did not know would not hurt her, was Bobby and Beatrice’s way of thinking. From that day forward Beatrice was taken on many secret excursions that Nurse Ruby knew nothing about. Including one wild ride in a wheelbarrow, a trip out to Blue Springs on the back of one of Anna Lee’s boyfriend’s motorcycle, a gallop on the back of an old mule that Monroe had borrowed and brought over, and a slide down a hill in the snow on a flattened cardboard box.

They had been caught only once when some busybody happened to mention to Ruby, “Oh, by the way, I saw your boarder Beatrice out at the state fair riding that big roller coaster and she and Bobby Smith were screaming their heads off.”

This information was serious enough to cause Ruby to put on not only her official nurse’s cap but her cape as well and immediately march over to the Smith house to tell his mother. And even Dorothy was a little alarmed at the thought of a blind girl on a roller coaster. “What if she had fallen out and broken her neck?” she said afterward to Bobby. Bobby just thanked his lucky stars that someone had not told Nurse Ruby about the other rides he and Beatrice had gone on that night, including the Loop the Loop, the Thunderbolt, the Whip, the Wild Mouse, the Caterpillar, and the bumper cars. Especially the bumper cars. They both could have gotten hurt the way he drove. With Beatrice at his side, going as fast as the car would go, he had whizzed around the track like a madman, with blue electrical sparks flying overhead, crashing into everybody he could. And in turn Monroe, a speed demon in his own right, had shown them no mercy and banged them back and forth with a vengeance. Not to mention the time Luther Griggs bashed them from behind so hard that they both were almost knocked out of their car. But bumps and all, Beatrice had loved every minute of it. At the end of the ride she exclaimed, “Oh, Bobby, let’s do it again!” and they had. Two more times, as a matter of fact.

That was the summer Bobby found out her secret. Something that most people just looking at this sweet, serene, almost ethereal person would never have guessed in a million years. Beatrice Woods had a wild streak. She longed for romance and adventure. And more than anything in this world, she loved to ride.

Anna Lee

BOBBY’S SISTER and her two best friends, Norma and Patsy Marie, were growing up together. Norma was a pretty brunette girl whose father ran the only bank in town. Patsy Marie’s parents, Merle and Verbena, owned and operated the Blue Ribbon Cleaners. Patsy Marie made the best grades of the three but was not a beauty. As her aunt put it, “She had old-maid schoolteacher written all over her from the time she was six,” but she was sweet. All three were nice girls and if they had a fault it might have been that at present they were right in the middle of their movie-star phase.

Every time the feature at the Elmwood Theater changed they were there in the twelfth row center. Each had a different movie actor they adored. Anna Lee’s major heartthrob this month was Dana Andrews. She filled piles of scrapbooks with pictures of him cut out of movie magazines. Patsy Marie’s current crush was Alan Ladd, whom she had just seen in The Blue Dahlia. But Norma’s movie star du jour was a puzzlement to both the other girls. She chose a lesser-known actor named William Bendix. They asked her why him; he wasn’t even good-looking. “Well, that’s the point,” she said. “Somebody’s got to like him.”

However, as the school year grew closer to the end they concentrated on the upcoming high school prom and movie stars took a backseat. Norma would be going with Macky, of course, and Patsy Marie would go with her cousin, as usual. Anna Lee was the only one who had not committed to any of the boys who had asked her so far. The really overriding question was what they were going to wear. All the girls in high school, no matter who they were, wanted store-bought prom dresses. Wearing a “homemade” prom dress would be akin to sprouting a big red H on your forehead. Although Neighbor Dorothy had a degree, made her own patterns, and was one of the best dressmakers in the state, she knew that nothing would do but to let Anna Lee go down to Morgan Brothers department store with the rest of them and buy her dress off the rack. It would cost about three times as much as it would for her to make it, but her daughter had to have a store-bought dress or die of humiliation. At least that’s what she said.

One of the other lures of buying a dress at Morgan Brothers department store was the saleslady, Mrs. Marion Nordstrom, who was in charge of the Better Dresses Department. If Mrs. Nordstrom helped you pick out your dress, then you had arrived. All the girls in Anna Lee’s group thought she was one of the most exquisite creatures who had ever lived. Tall and aloof, always impeccably dressed in the latest fashions, she was their ideal. A war widow, she had come all the way from San Francisco, California, and the wardrobe she had brought with her was the constant topic of all the high school girls. “She never wears the same thing twice,” they declared in admiration. After school Anna Lee and Patsy Marie would stroll into the store and pretend to shop just to see what she had on that day.

Anna Lee even copied the way she wore her hair piled high up on her head. The hairdo, Dorothy suggested, might be a little mature for a girl who still wore bobby socks and penny loafers but Anna Lee thought it was the last word in sophistication. The only concern Dorothy ever had about Anna Lee was that she might be getting a little spoiled. In every school there is always one girl that all the boys are crazy about and from first grade on Anna Lee had been that girl.

The only male who seemed to be oblivious to her charms was Bobby, who could not wait to torment her every chance he got. And she in turn could not wait to run and tattle on him for every little thing he did and because she was older everybody always believed her side of the story. Consequently, Bobby was not at all happy about the fact that Anna Lee had arrived on earth six years before he had. A fact that she never let him forget. He hated it when the family sat around and told stories about things that had happened before he was born. He would ask over and over, “But where was I?” His mother would answer, “You weren’t here yet,” at which point his sister would always sigh and say, “Those were the good old days. I was still an only child,” or something equally obnoxious. Not only did it irritate him that he had not arrived sooner; it completely baffled him.

No matter how hard he tried, Bobby could just not seem to comprehend the world without him. Where had he been? What had he been doing? One afternoon, confined to the house because Luther Griggs was floating around the neighborhood waiting to beat him up again, he took the opportunity to follow his mother around the kitchen, asking her the same old questions.

“But if I wasn’t here, where was I?”

“You weren’t born yet,” she said, slicing potatoes.

“But where was I before I was born?”

“You were just a twinkle in your daddy’s eye, as they say. Could you hand me the butter?”

“When I was born was I already me or did I just come here and then I was me?”

“You were always you.”

He handed her the butter plate. “Would I still have been me if I had been born in China—or would I be a Chinaman?”

“Oh, Bobby, I wish you wouldn’t ask me all these silly questions. All I know is that you are a part of Daddy and me and you are who you’re supposed to be.”

“Yeah, but what if you hadn’t married Daddy, then what would have happened?”

“I don’t know,” she said as she greased a glass casserole dish with the stick of butter. “I can only tell you that you were born at the exact time and place you were supposed to be, and besides I wished for you.”

“You did?” said a surprised Bobby. “Like on a wishbone or something?”

“Something like that.”

“What did you say when you wished?”

“I said, I want a little boy with brown eyes and brown hair that looked just like you, and here you are. So, you see, you’re a wish come true. What do you think about that?”

“Wow.” Bobby stood there for a minute thinking it over. Then he said, “How do you know you didn’t get the wrong boy?”

“Because don’t forget, there is somebody up there that knows better than you and I.”

Dorothy went over and turned the oven on and pulled the cheese out of the icebox as Bobby trailed behind her. “Yeah, but what if He got mixed up and made a mistake? What if I was born in the wrong year or the wrong country even . . . ?”

“He doesn’t make mistakes.”

“But what if He did?”

“He doesn’t.”

“Yeah, but suppose He did, then what would happen?”

Dorothy placed the casserole dish in the oven. She stood at the sink to wash her hands with Bobby right behind her, waiting. After she dried her hands she turned around and looked at him. “Well, Bobby, is there somewhere else you would rather be than here with us?”

Bobby immediately said, “No . . . I was just wondering, that’s all,” and tried to look as innocent as possible, pretending to suddenly remember that he had to water his daddy’s bed of fishing worms in the backyard.

He had not been entirely truthful with his mother. Sometimes at night he would secretly fantasize that one day someone would knock on their door and say, “We are here for the boy.” Then his parents would come and get him and tell him who he really was. He was really the rightful prince of England and they had just been keeping him until he was twelve. Then he would ride through the streets of cheering people and as he passed by they would bow and whisper, “It’s the young prince.” All his teachers at school would curtsy and bow. As he went by his house his parents and grandmother would all be gathered together on the front porch and would bow, too. He would quickly motion for them to stand up and Anna Lee would run to the carriage and grovel at his feet in tears. “I’m sorry for everything I ever did to you, Your Majesty. I didn’t know who you really were. Forgive me, forgive me.” “You are . . . forgiven,” he would say with a sweep of his hand. He would be a gracious, forgiving ruler for all the people except for Luther Griggs. He would have him arrested and dragged through the streets in chains, crying and begging for mercy but to no avail. Ah, the pure joy of it all.

Then there were other times when he daydreamed he was really the son of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans who had been kidnapped at birth but found at last. There would be another parade down Main Street, only this time he would be riding on the back of Trigger with Roy tipping his big cowboy hat to all as they rode by. Dale and Gabby Hayes would be riding beside them smiling and waving to the cheering crowds. He would go to live with Roy and Dale on the Double R Bar Ranch and bring his Elmwood Springs family with him. His days would be spent riding the range for bad guys, nights sitting around the campfire listening to the Sons of the Pioneers sing cowboy songs, and they would all live happily ever after. “Happy trails to you . . . until we meet again.”

But for the time being, at least, he was just plain Bobby Smith. And unfortunately for Anna Lee, he was, as she always suspected, up to something.

Bobby knew of only one sure way to get even with his sister for telling his mother he had been out at Blue Springs, a betrayal that had caused him to get grounded and miss seeing Pals of the Saddle and Wild Horse Roundup the following Saturday. He and Monroe had been plotting and planning for weeks. “It” was to happen the night of the prom.

His mother and Grandmother Smith were chaperones and Doc always kept the drugstore open late on prom night so the kids could come in afterward and eat ice cream. Jimmy would be off playing Friday night poker with his buddies at the VFW. Bobby and Monroe had the house entirely to themselves, so they could put their plan in action without anyone seeing them.

After the deed was done they went back to Bobby’s room and waited. Anna Lee was the last one home and floated in on a pink cloud at around 12:29, only one minute away from her 12:30 curfew, still glowing from her romantic evening. She had danced all night under silver paper stars and blue and white crepe-paper banners that hung from the ceiling of the gymnasium with her date Billy Nobblitt, a Van Johnson look-alike, or so she thought. She dreamily undressed, still hearing the strains of “It Had to Be You” and “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” playing over and over in her head.

When she had put on her nightgown and brushed her teeth, she carefully placed her gardenia corsage in a glass of water and put it on her dresser. She crawled into bed tired and happy, a feeling of bliss that lasted about one second.

She immediately shot out of bed screaming, “Snakes, snakes,” over and over at the top of her lungs. She ran to her parents’ room, threw their door open, and screamed, “Help . . . I’ve been snakebit!” and fainted dead away in a heap.

After Doc and Dorothy had tended to Anna Lee and had gotten her revived and somewhat calmed down, and after Mother Smith, out in the hall in her hair net and clutching her robe, had announced, “If there are reptiles in the house, I’m not staying,” peace reigned briefly. Mother Smith would not go back to bed until Doc went over to Anna Lee’s room to check. But it was no nightmare. Anna Lee’s bed was crawling with about a hundred slimy, squirming red worms straight from his own worm bed in the backyard. He’d guessed correctly.

“I don’t know why she has to make such a big deal out of it. They’re just harmless little worms,” said Bobby as he was being pulled out from under the bed by his father. And to make matters worse, the minute Doc had opened the door, Monroe, his true-blue blood brother, had jumped out the window and run all the way home in his Hopalong Cassidy pajamas, leaving Bobby to face the music alone.

Anna Lee was furious at Bobby and said that as far as she was concerned, he did not exist anymore. She made it a point to ignore him. She did not speak to Bobby for quite a while, until one day she forgot she wasn’t speaking to him and asked him to bring her some milk from the kitchen.

He reacted by laughing and pointing at her, saying, “Ha, ha, I thought you weren’t speaking to me. Go get it yourself,” and ran off the porch and down the street. A disgusted Anna Lee got up and went to the kitchen and opened the icebox and asked her mother, “What I don’t understand is why you had to have another child. Why didn’t you just stop with me?” Dorothy smiled. “Well, honey, we thought we had.” Anna Lee turned and looked at her mother in surprise; this was the first she had heard of this. “What happened?”

“I guess the Good Lord just decided to send us another little angel down from heaven.”

“I may be sick,” said Anna Lee and left the room.

Mother Smith came in. “What’s the matter with her?”

Dorothy laughed. “She wanted to know why we had to have Bobby.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I blamed it all on the Good Lord.”

“Well, that’s as good an excuse as any. According to the Presbyterians, everything in life is preordained, or at least that’s what Norma’s mother says.”

“Ida? How would she know, she’s a Methodist.”

“Not anymore. As of last week she claims she’s a Presbyterian.”

“What?”

“Oh yes . . . right in the middle of the bridge tournament she announced it.”

Dorothy, amazed, cracked three eggs in a tan bowl with a blue stripe and stirred. “But there’s not a Presbyterian church within a hundred miles around here. Why would she want to be a Presbyterian all of a sudden?”

Mother Smith poured herself a glass of iced tea. “I suppose it’s all part of her plan to move up in the world.”

Dorothy was baffled. “Well . . . I just don’t know what to say. . . . There’s a lemon in the icebox. I just hope she’ll be happy.”

Mother Smith reached into the icebox. “I do, too, but I don’t think anything can make her really happy unless, of course, Norma marries a Rockafella and she can at last take her rightful place in society.”

High Society

WHAT MOTHER SMITH said was true. If there was such a thing as high society in Elmwood Springs, Norma’s mother aspired to be it. After all, Ida Jenkins’s husband, Herbert, was the town banker and as such Ida felt she had a certain position to uphold and it was her civic duty to set the standards of genteel behavior. To light the way. Set an example. She was in charge of all the refinements of life and in her relentless pursuit to bring culture and beauty to the community she nearly drove Norma and her father crazy.

Even though she was living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, she subscribed to all the latest women’s magazines to keep abreast of the times. In the late thirties she took to spelling the word modern “moderne” and referring to their house as a “bungalow,” her clothes as “frocks.” She used the word “intriguing” as much as possible, had her hair styled just like Ina Claire, the Broadway star, and she never cried when she could weep or have “wept.”

Too, Ida was a club woman from tip to top. She was the grande dame of the National Federated Women’s Club of Missouri and had spearheaded the local Garden Club, Bridge Club, the Wednesday Night Supper Club, the Book Club, and the Downtown Theatrical Club and was never seen on the street without a hat and white gloves. She never served a meal in her home without having an individual nut cup at each place setting and a clean white tablecloth. “Only heathens eat off a plain table,” she said.

On Norma’s sixteenth birthday she had given her a copy of the new and enlarged edition of Emily Post’s book on etiquette, in which she had inscribed:

If everyone would read this we would certainly be spared a lot of unpleasantness in this world.

Happy Birthday

Love,

Mother

Ida was even on a first-name basis with the author and often wondered out loud, “I wonder how Emily would handle this?” Or she would sometimes preface her remarks with, “Emily says . . .” Ida’s life goal and, she assumed, all of America’s was to bring enlightenment not only to Elmwood Springs but to the entire world until even in the farthest igloo at the North Pole and the wilds of the deepest darkest jungles in Borneo people everywhere would know that the fork belongs on the left and that fresh flowers on a table supply a delightful treat for the eye, that a clean house is a happy house, and come to embrace the fact that raising one’s voice in anger is rude and uncalled for on any occasion.

Ida always said, “Remember, Norma, in America a person of quality and class is not judged by aristocracy of birth but by his or her behavior.” Norma figured that by that standard her mother must have thought she was the duchess of Kent by now.

Norma loved her mother but, as Norma said to Anna Lee, “You try living with her twenty-four hours a day. You just don’t know how lucky you are to have your mother and not mine.” In fact, Norma spent the night at Anna Lee’s as often as possible, as did Monroe. The house was always full of people and fun things to do and the food was delicious. And most important, over at Neighbor Dorothy’s house you could actually sit on the living room furniture, something Ida never let Norma or her father do. In Ida’s house the living room was only shown to people as they passed by and was called the formal room. It was so formal that nobody had been in it since she had decorated it eighteen years before.

On one of the numerous occasions when Norma was spending the weekend over at Anna Lee’s house, she helped Anna Lee pull a good one on Bobby and Monroe. One Saturday afternoon, Bobby and Monroe were in the parlor with the blinds and shades drawn, sitting in the dark eating peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and listening to their favorite scary detective shows on the radio. They had just heard Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar; Boston Blackie; and The Whistler and now a new show was just starting.

First strange and weird chords played on an organ, then a voice came through:

WOMAN: There he goes into . . . that drugstore. He’s stepping on the scales.

(Sound: Clink of a coin.)

WOMAN: Weight, two hundred and thirty-seven pounds.

(Sound: Card dropping.)

WOMAN: Fortune. Danger!

Organ: (Stinnnng!)

WOMAN: Whooo is it?

MAN: The Fat Man!!!

As promised, this week’s program was chock-full of suspense and mystery. Near the end both boys were literally sitting on the edge of their seats. Just as the strange man in the raincoat was being followed down a wet, dead-end street, with the sound of footsteps following behind him, growing louder and louder . . . click click . . . footsteps . . . closer and closer . . . louder and louder . . . nowhere to run . . . nowhere to hide . . . just at the very moment when the terrified man, his heart pounding, turned to face his fiendish killer, suddenly two figures wearing hideous rubber masks popped up from behind the couch with green flashlights shining under their chins, shouting BAAA! BAAA!

It scared them so badly that both boys shot straight up in the air and screamed like two little girls. They almost knocked each other down trying to get out of the room, falling over the coffee table and chairs while they scrambled for the door and ran down the hall.

Norma’s boyfriend, Macky, had rigged the flashlights with green bulbs and the masks had come from last Halloween. The girls had been hiding behind the couch all afternoon, just waiting for the right moment. When Anna Lee gave the signal, all the waiting had been worth it.

The Winner

Neighbor Dorothy started with a great big “Good morning, everybody! Well, I could hardly wait to get on the air this morning because as Gabriel Heatter says, ‘Ah, there’s good news tonight!’ or in our case, today, and we are just tickled pink and chomping at the bit to tell you about it. But first let me ask you this: Does your soap powder make you sneeze?

“Mrs. Squatzie Kittrel of Silver Springs, Maryland, says, ‘Rinso washes my clothes fast in rich soapy suds and it’s so easy on my hands and on wash days it does not make me sneeze like all the others.’ So remember, Rinso white, Rinso bright, the only granulated soap that is ninety-eight percent free of sneezy soap dust. And also, are you looking for checked, striped, or polka-dot material for that bedroom, den, or kitchen window? If so, Fred Morgan of Morgan Brothers says come on in and he’s also got a big bolt of dotted Swiss material he’s going to discount by the yard, so if you have been thinking about making curtains, this is the time.

“And now to the big news of the day . . .” Dorothy picked up the letter with the good news and beamed with pride. “You know, usually we don’t like to blow our own horn but we are all so excited we can hardly contain ourselves, so we just had to tell you about it.” Mother Smith played a fanfare on the organ. “Yesterday it was announced that Doc has won the Rexall Pharmacist of the Year Award for proficiency in dispensing drugs for the second year in a row. And he’s to receive it in person at this year’s Southeastern Pharmaceutical Convention in Memphis and I plan to be right there to see him get it. So if you are listening at the drugstore, Doc, we are mighty proud of you.”

Down at the Rexall, Thelma and Bertha Ann, the two gals in the pink-and-white uniforms who worked behind the soda fountain, had the radio sitting on the shelf behind them. Thelma was washing a glass banana-split dish and Bertha Ann was making the egg salad for the lunch crowd when they heard the news. They both stopped what they were doing and whistled and clapped and yelled to the back, “Yeah! Whoopee! Great going, Doc. Congratulations! Our hero!” Doc, who had just finished filling a prescription, handed a customer a bottle of paregoric for her baby who was teething. When she asked Doc what had happened, he said, embarrassed, “Oh nothing, those two are just acting crazy. You know how they are . . . just silly.” He continued, “Now you don’t need much, just a few drops in a glass of water, and that should do the trick.”

After she left Doc walked over to the soda fountain shaking his finger in mock anger. “You girls, what am I going to do with you two?”

They laughed. Bertha Ann said, “That’s what you get for not telling us.”

He sat down on a stool. “I guess I’m just going to have to put a muzzle on that wife of mine.”

But he was secretly pleased. “Fix me a lemon ice-cream soda, will you, Bertha, and fix something for yourselves. Now that the cat’s out of the bag we might as well celebrate.”

Meanwhile, back on the show Dorothy made another announcement. “The other winner today of our What Is the Biggest Surprise You Ever Had Contest was sent to us by Mrs. Sally Sockwell of Hot Springs, Arkansas. She writes, ‘Last year I lost the diamond out of my ring and I was so despondent because my husband, now deceased, had bought it for me when we were first married and now both were gone forever. So you can imagine my joy and surprise three weeks later when, frying an egg, I noticed something shiny in the white part and lo and behold it was my lost diamond. One of my hens must have pecked it out when I was collecting eggs. The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ Yes, he does, Mrs. Sockwell, and thank heavens you weren’t making an omelette or you might never have seen it.

“And speaking of missing objects, Leona Whatley called in and said that someone must have sold her sweater and purse at the school rummage sale. She says she put them down on a table for just a second and when she turned around they were missing. So whoever bought a blue woman’s beaded sweater and a black purse with a small box of Kleenex that had not been opened inside please call Leona, as she would like to buy them back. We have a lot more coming up on the show this morning. Beatrice is going to be singing one of your favorites, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.’ And yes, unfortunately, it’s that time of year again. Next Saturday down at the Elmwood Theater they are having the annual Bazooka Bubble Gum Bubble Blowing Contest . . . well that’s a mouthful . . . so mothers, get ready. I know Bobby is about to drive us insane over at our house—pop, pop, pop, chew, chew, chew, night and day. Also don’t forget every Wednesday night is dish night at the Elmwood Theater, so go on down . . . and let’s see . . . do we have anything else I’m forgetting, Mother?”

Mother Smith played a few strains of the funeral march and pointed to a jar on the desk. “Oh, that’s right, thank you, Mother Smith. Last week we told you about a new instant coffee but we will have to take it off our list of recommendations, and I am just as sorry as I can be about it but it’s just not up to snuff, as they say, is it, Mother Smith? She says no and made a face but as I say to all my sponsors, Keep trying because we are behind you one hundred percent.

“And remember our motto: If at first you don’t succeed, try again.”

Unfortunately for Bobby, his mother’s motto was one he was to hear from her firsthand the very next week, when he dragged in the door having lost the Bazooka Bubble Gum Bubble Blowing Contest for the second year in a row. It didn’t help him feel much better. He had practiced long and hard until his jaws were sore but he came in sixth. Rats, he thought. Everybody in the family is always winning something but me.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

DOC WAS HOME for lunch and Dorothy stood by the kitchen table waiting for an opinion about the new hat she had just bought for their upcoming trip to Memphis. He studied the object perched on her head for a long moment and then said, “Oh, I don’t know, Dorothy. As far as hats go, I’ve seen worse.”

“Well, thanks a lot,” she said.

Mother Smith jumped in and offered, “I like it,” and gave her son a dirty look.

Dorothy blinked hopefully. “Really?”

“Oh, yes, it’s very stylish. Don’t ask him. He doesn’t know anything about hats.”

Doc readily agreed. “That’s right. Don’t ask me. I can’t tell one from the other.”

“Honestly,” said Dorothy, “I don’t know why I go to so much trouble if you don’t know the difference. I could just stick a pot on my head for all you care.”

When she left the room Mother Smith said, “Now you’ve done it.”

Doc shrugged. “Well, they all do look alike, only this one looks like a pancake with some fruit and a dead bird on top.” Beatrice Woods, who was sitting at the table, laughed. Doc leaned over and spoke under his breath. “Count yourself lucky you can’t see it. You wouldn’t know whether to shoot it or eat it.”

After Doc had gone back to the drugstore they all sat around the table talking about the upcoming trip. Dorothy sighed. “I just wish I could lose ten pounds before I go.”

Mother Smith said, “I just wish I was eighteen again and knew what I know now.”

Dorothy said, “What would you do differently?”

“Oh,” she said, “I’d marry the same man and have a child, of course, but I would have waited awhile before I did it . . . maybe been a bachelor girl like Ann Sheridan or a career woman and had my own secretary, smoked cigars, and used bad language.”

Dorothy and Beatrice laughed and Dorothy said, “Beatrice, if you could have any wish come true, what would it be?”

Beatrice, whose favorite radio show was the Armchair Traveler, thought for a moment. “I would wish I could get in a car and drive all over the world and never stop.”

Dorothy reached over and touched her hand. “Would you, honey?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“It sure would,” said Mother Smith and quickly changed the subject. She could see that Dorothy was about to get emotional. What was doubly heartbreaking about Beatrice was that even though being blind had limited her life, she did not have an ounce of self-pity and they had to be sure she never heard any in their voices. And it was especially hard when the thing she wished for could never come true.

A week later, the old adage about the boy who cried wolf once too often came true for Bobby when he woke up and claimed he couldn’t go to school that day because he had broken out all over in big red spots. Dorothy knew this was the day of a big math test that he had probably not studied for. Last year at this time he had claimed his leg was broken. The year before it was appendicitis. So she sent Anna Lee to his room for the third time with a simple message. “Mother says if you’re not up and dressed and out the door in five minutes you’ll wish you had spots.”

“But I do!” Bobby protested. “Come here and look at all these big red spots all over me and I feel sick. . . . Come and look.” He pulled up his pajama top for her to see. “Look at these spots, they’re getting redder by the minute, and I feel sick and I think I have a temperature, feel my head.” But Anna Lee ignored him and said as she left, “Stay in bed—I don’t care, I hope you do get a whipping.” Bobby got up, mumbling and grumbling to himself, and put on his clothes and went to the kitchen to find his mother, who promptly handed him a banana. “Here, eat that on the way to school.”

“But, Mother—” he said.

“I don’t want to hear it, Bobby. Now you go on before you’re late.” He mumbled some more under his breath and stomped down the hall and out the door, slamming it behind him.

At about 2:00 that afternoon Bobby’s teacher called.

“Dorothy, I just wanted you to know that I had to take Bobby down to the sick room because he was all broken out in red spots. Ruby says he’s come down with measles and needs to be quarantined.”

Dorothy was alarmed. “Oh, no. Tell Ruby I’m on my way to get him right now, and thank you for calling.”

Dorothy could not have felt any worse and Bobby played the part to the hilt. “I told you I was sick, Mother,” he said in a thin voice and by the time Anna Lee got home from rehearsal, at 5:30, Bobby was propped up in his bed like a king, his every whim catered to. His bed was covered with loads of new comic books his father had brought home for him from the drugstore. He had already been served ice cream, two Cokes, and a 7UP, and his mother stood by ready to do his slightest bidding. When Anna Lee walked into the room, Dorothy looked at her daughter with stricken eyes. “Your brother has the measles—the poor little thing really was sick.” Bobby lay back and smiled weakly for her benefit and waited for Anna Lee to apologize. But instead of an apology she looked at him in horror and said, “Measles!” and ran out of the room to scrub her hands and face.

She was terrified of contracting a pimple, much less the measles. She had a performance to do. She was president of the Drama Club this year and was in the upcoming school play. It wasn’t until Nurse Ruby assured Anna Lee that she could not catch the measles twice that she consented to go anywhere near him. Even then she wore gloves and a scarf over her face. She could not afford to take any chances. Not only was she in the school play, she was the lead!

Mother Smith, Jailbird

UNLIKE HER SON, Doc, who was easygoing, Mother Smith was a thin feisty little woman who had been quite a beauty when she was younger. Born in Independence, Missouri, right down the street from Bess Wallace, who eventually married Harry S. Truman. He and Mother Smith had once played the “Missouri Waltz” together on the twin pianos, and she often remarked about the president, “I met him on his way to greatness.”

Mother Smith had always been a free-spirited woman, long before it was fashionable; she said you could not be born and raised in a town called Independence and not have it affect you. And it must be true: She had been one of the state’s early suffragettes and in 1898 she, along with a group of her college girlfriends, had marched on Washington to fight for votes for women and had been arrested for disturbing the peace. This is a story Bobby and Anna Lee loved to hear over and over. “They sure threw us in the old hoosegow that day,” she would say, then laugh and add, “Your grandmother may be a jailbird but we finally got the vote!” And although she was already in her forties at the time, she had been the first woman in town to get her hair bobbed. She had also visited a speakeasy in Kansas City, gotten a little tipsy on a teacup full of bootleg gin, and had played a jazz tune on the piano. But since she played organ for the First Methodist Church she did not spread that one around.

Mother Smith had small, dainty feet and was proud of them and liked to show them off. She owned over thirty pairs of shoes. And if Bobby got his curiosity from her, then surely Anna Lee had inherited her love of shoes. Just last week Anna Lee had gone downtown on Bargain Day and had spotted a pair of black-and-white saddle oxfords in the window of Morgan Brothers department store she was dying to have. But of course of all the shoes in the window those were the only ones not on sale. She had already spent her entire allowance buying her prom dress and was broke. For the next week, she was busy racking her brain trying to figure out how she could earn the money and living in fear someone else would buy them before she could. Every day she would go down and stare at them but she was having no luck until a few days before Doc and Dorothy were to leave for the convention in Memphis and Mother Smith suddenly had to go back to Independence to look after her sister, who had fallen and broken her hip. Even though Bobby’s measles were practically over, Dorothy did not feel she should leave town with him still sick. She was still a little nervous about either of her children being ill, but to everyone’s surprise Anna Lee immediately volunteered to stay home the entire weekend and baby-sit Bobby and look after Princess Mary Margaret for the price of the shoes, if she could get it in advance. Nurse Ruby said she would come over and check on him every day, and Jimmy assured her he would look after both Anna Lee and Bobby, too. So with much coaxing from everyone Dorothy decided to go after all.

For the next three days Bobby knew that Anna Lee was his captive slave. He spent them propped up in bed, listening to the radio, reading comic books, and barking orders for Cokes, root beers, ginger ale, ice cream, and anything else he could think of, while poor Princess Mary Margaret, a worrier from birth, wandered from room to room looking for Dorothy, clearly wondering where in the world she had gone and if she was ever coming back.

Doc and Dorothy had arrived at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis for the pharmaceutical convention on Friday night and the next day they were having a lovely time visiting with all their friends, unaware of the disaster in the making behind the scenes. In room 367, just down the hall, Norvel Float, the entertainment chairman for the big awards banquet, was fit to be tied. He had just been informed by telegram that the singing duo Willy and Buck, also known professionally as the How-Do-You-Do Boys, whom he had personally booked eight months ago for that night, had gotten into a fistfight over some woman in Shreveport, Louisiana. Buck had broken Willy’s nose and run off to Chicago with the woman. Needless to say, they had canceled at the last minute and Norvel Float was left holding the bag with 723 pharmacists who would have no after-dinner entertainment. He immediately got on the phone and frantically called every booking agent in the area. But they had nothing. Not a single tap dancer, singer, comic, or even accordion player was available for that night. He even tried to get Tommy Troupe, the man who did birdcalls and was terrible at it, but was informed that Tommy had died a month ago. As a last-ditch effort Float took a chance and called one of the local radio stations, WRCC, located upstairs on the eighteenth floor of the hotel. The man there was not encouraging. He said all they had to offer was a traveling gospel group that had appeared on their station that morning at 6:00 A.M. and was still in town. Norvel hired them immediately over the telephone, no questions asked, sight unseen. The man on the phone hesitated a moment and then asked, “Are you sure you want them? They’re kind of raw.”

“Listen, mister,” said Norvel. “I’m desperate. At this point, I’ll take anything I can get. Just have them here by nine-thirty.” He hung up a happy man. He had no idea what or whom he had just booked; he was just relieved to have something that could carry a tune.

The banquet that night was a splendid affair. Doc and Dorothy and all the other druggists and their wives were decked out in their finest formal attire. When Doc went up to receive his award, amid much applause, he looked so handsome and distinguished in his tux with his silver hair glistening in the spotlight that after he came back to the table Dorothy whispered to him, “I’m married to the best-looking man here.”

He laughed and whispered back, “You’re just saying that because you’re stuck with me.” Later, after all the other awards had been given out, the emcee for the evening came out and read what Norvel Float had hastily jotted down on a service napkin backstage:

“I hope you all enjoyed your dinner and congratulations to all the winners. And now, on with the show. Tonight we are lucky enough to have with us, all the way from Sand Mountain, Alabama, the famous Oatman Family Gospel Singers . . . and here they are, straight from their successful appearance on WRCC’s Yellow Label Table Syrup Gospel Hour to sing some of your good old southern gospel favorites.”

At this point the curtain opened, revealing the five Oatmans, a mother and father, two boys, and a girl. The mother, seated at the piano, a two-hundred-pound woman with white skin, her jet-black hair in a bun, without makeup, and wearing a homemade lavender dress, suddenly and without warning attacked the unsuspecting piano and took off from there, one chubby hand banging out the rhythm while the other banged out something else. The small upright seemed to be jumping up and down, fighting for its life, as she pumped away at the foot pedals. And again without warning the large older man, the two younger men, all in matching suits, and the young girl who had been standing motionless sang out at the top of their lungs, “HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS?”

There was not a person in the room that could not help but hear the good news. Minnie Oatman would see to that. Hers was the strongest voice in the group, a deep whiskey tenor so powerful it was said she could knock the paint off the back wall when she really let go. Those that did not care for her voice simply said she was loud. Over the next half hour the group ripped right on through “Glory, Glory, Clear the Road,” “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” “Mansion on the Hill,” “Tell Mother I’ll Be There,” “Some Glad Day,” and “When I Reach That City.” As they sang away, the pharmacists and their wives, particularly those from New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, sat in the audience, stunned, while most of the southerners nodded and smiled and tapped their feet. But the Oatman clan seemed completely oblivious to the audience one way or the other and continued on with rousing renditions of “Hang On, It Won’t Be Long Now,” “What a Day That Will Be,” “I’m Climbing Higher and Higher,” and ended with a song that Minnie proudly informed them she had just written that very morning while sitting in the hotel coffee shop having breakfast. She said, “It’s called ‘Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven’ . . . hope you like it,” and threw her head back and proceeded to sing out with full-throated joy.

I’ll climb up those crystal stairs

And run down that ivory hall

Right up to that throne of gold

Because I know Sweet King Jesus

Will be waiting for me there.

Oh I’ll know Him when I see Him.

I’d know Him anywhere.

His wounds have turned to rubies.

Where thorns once did dwell

Diamonds now sparkle in his hair.

Can’t wait to get to Heaven

Oh I’ll be so happy there

To leave all this pain and sorrow.

All my struggles will be lifted

No more earthly burdens to bare.

Can’t wait to run up those crystal stairs

And down that ivory hall.

Can’t wait to shout . . . Hallelujah!

At last my trials are over

’Cause Sweet King Jesus will be there!

When she hit the final E-flat at the end of the song and held it, many people in the room heard the ice in their glasses crack. Some singers sing at the top of a note, some at the bottom, but Minnie Oatman had perfect pitch and always hit the note dead center with the accuracy of a silver bullet. More than a few in the audience still had a ringing in their ears long after the curtain closed.

The Oatmans Are Coming

IT HAD BEEN a lively show, to say the least. When it was over Doc commented to the man next to him, “I’ll say this for them: I never saw folks look more forward to dying in all my life.” But Dorothy had thoroughly enjoyed the show. She had heard gospel music before but she had certainly never heard it sung like this. What the Oatmans may have lacked in polish and style they certainly made up for in enthusiasm. She and Doc were not particularly fans of gospel but she knew that a lot of her listening audience out on the farms loved it. While most of the other banquet attendees began stumbling out of the room in a daze, headed for the bar, not really sure what they had seen and heard, Dorothy headed backstage to find the Oatmans and compliment them on their performance.

When she finally found her way backstage they were still packing up their sound equipment. She walked over and introduced herself to Minnie Oatman and told her how she had so enjoyed their singing and said if they were ever in the vicinity of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, she would love to have them on her radio show. Minnie, who had worked up quite a sweat, was dabbing her face with a big white handkerchief. She said, “Well, bless your heart,” then turned and called out, “Ferris, ain’t we doing a revival somewhere in Missouri this year . . . or is it Arkansas? Look it up in the book. This nice lady wants us on her radio show.” She apologized to Dorothy. “We hit so many places, honey, I can’t keep up.” Ferris Oatman, who weighed a hundred pounds more than his wife, struggled to pull a long thin black book from his inside coat pocket. After he looked through it he said, “We’re booked at the Highway 78 Church of Christ outside of Ash Hill, Missouri, first week in July.” Minnie turned to Dorothy. “Is that anywheres near you, honey?”

Dorothy said, “Yes, I know Ash Hill; it’s not that far away from us. I’ll be happy to have somebody come and pick you up—and bring you back. Where will you be staying?”

Minnie laughed. “Oh Lord, honey, we never know till we get there. We stay with whoever can put us up. The church usually finds us a place. There’s six of us including Floyd—he’s out in the car waiting, he don’t work banquets, just churches and revivals, so if you know of a family willing to put one or two of us up for a week, let us know. You don’t happen to have an extra bed or sofa, do you?”

Dorothy was put on the spot because the woman had just agreed to appear on her radio show. She glanced over at the young girl in the group, who looked to be about fifteen or sixteen, and said, “Ahh . . . well, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Oatman, we have a girl just about your daughter’s age and I’m sure she would be just tickled pink to have her stay with us.”

Minnie looked up to the ceiling and sang out, “PRAISE JESUS!” and looked back at Dorothy and said, “I tell you, Mrs. Smith, the Lord just drops good people right in our path every day.” She sang out again in a loud voice, “THANK YOU, SWEET JESUS!” Dorothy was a little taken aback at this display and quickly added, “But now, Mrs. Oatman, just so you know, we’re not members of the Church of Christ and I don’t know if that matters but—”

Minnie waved her hand and dismissed the idea.

“Oh honey, that don’t matter a whit just as long as you’re Christian and don’t drink alcohol or smoke or gamble.” Before Dorothy could say anything one way or another Minnie yelled, “Ferris, we already got one placed in Ash Hill,” and then turned back to Dorothy. “That’s real kind of you, and of all of us, she’s the leastest trouble, hardly eats a thing, you won’t even know she’s there.” She waved the long white handkerchief at her daughter. “Betty Raye, come over here. This nice lady wants you to stay with her when we’re over there in Missouri.” Betty Raye, a pale thin girl with light brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a lavender dress exactly like her mother’s, came over somewhat reluctantly.

Dorothy smiled at her. “Hello, Betty Raye. We’re looking forward to having you with us. We have a daughter about your age and I know she’s going to be very happy you are coming.”

Minnie nudged Betty Raye. “Tell the lady thank you.” The girl blushed and said something but she spoke so softly Dorothy could not hear what she said.

Later, after Dorothy returned to the table and realized what she had just done, she said to Doc, “Anna Lee is going to kill me.”

Dinner on the Ground

THE OATMAN FAMILY was just one of the many white gospel groups traveling all over the South and Midwest that year. Groups like the Spear Family, the Happy Goodman Family, the Statesmen, the Harmony Boys, the Weatherfords, the LeFevres, the Dixie Four, the Tennessee Valley Boys, and the Melody Masters made their living by traveling and appearing at small churches, singing conventions, revivals, all-day sings, and dinner-on-the-ground events. The roots of what was now called southern gospel music had actually started in New England in the 1700s, when early colonists brought hymnbooks from the Old World. Gospel was the dominant musical style in America for a long time and was very popular at churches and camp meetings all over the country. However, after the Civil War the style of singing known as Sacred Harp or shape-note music lost its popularity in the North but was kept alive in the rural churches of the Deep South. In 1910 a man named James D. Vaughan published his first songbook, Gospel Chimes. To promote it he sent out the Vaughan Quartet, the first all-male southern gospel group in America. Eventually, he started the Vaughan School of Music in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. Soon other schools opened, and by the 1930s southern gospel groups featuring men and women and children were springing up everywhere and crisscrossing the South, Midwest, and as far north as Iowa. The more successful gospel groups began to appear and thereby advertise over the radio and were able to promote a good crowd at their appearances.

But in 1946 radio appearances were a fairly new thing for the Oatmans. Ferris and his brothers, Floyd and Le Roy, had all been raised on a hardscrabble dirt farm in northern Alabama by strict Pentecostal parents. Because of his upbringing Ferris believed that just listening to the radio, much less singing and preaching over it, was a sin. As Minnie put it, “Ferris is bad to think the devil is behind everything.” However, in 1945, after seeing how the other groups were attracting so many people to their appearances by using broadcasts to tell people where they would “be at,” he prayed about it. A week later he said, “Minnie, the Lord spoke to me and said he wants us to go on the radio,” and so it was settled.

Minnie Varner, the fourth child of an Assembly of God preacher, was born outside of Shiloh, Georgia. The Varners were a musical family and Minnie was playing piano in church by age nine. She met Ferris Oatman when she was twelve and he was twenty-four. She had been at an all-day sing and dinner on the ground playing for the Harmonettes, an all-girl gospel group from Birmingham. That day Minnie saw Ferris, with all that black curly hair, she fell in love. Ferris must have felt the same. That night he told his brother Le Roy, “I just met my wife today.” Two years later, when she was fourteen, she ran off with him, ignoring the warnings of her parents and older brothers about marrying into a traveling gospel group. They said if she did she would be living in the back of a car hawking songbooks out of the trunk all her life. So far they had been right. But Ferris Oatman, who had worked picking cotton to send himself through the Stamps-Baxter School of Gospel Music in Dallas, felt he had a real calling. From the age of six all he ever wanted to be in life was a gospel quartet man. All Minnie wanted from age twelve was to be his wife and so she joined the group and went on the road.

After the two boys, Bervin and Vernon, and later Betty Raye were born, Minnie’s parents bought them a small, two-bedroom house a few miles from where she was raised. They wanted the children to have a home base but they were hardly there long enough to do anything but wash and iron all their clothes and take off again. It was a hard life. During the Depression they lost Ferris’s brother, Le Roy, their bass singer, who ran off to join a hillbilly band. Aside from the few dollars they made selling songbooks, they performed for free-will offerings, which could range anywhere from five dollars to ten dollars a night, depending on the size of the congregation. Money was scarce. Minnie said the only consolations were knowing they were doing the Lord’s work, and the food. Most of the churches were in the country and there was always plenty to eat. In the homes where they stayed and at the numerous dinner-on-the-ground all-day singing events, even during the Depression, they were well fed. Fried chicken, ham, pork chops, fried catfish, fresh vegetables, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, biscuits and gravy, cornbread, fresh buttermilk, honey, jellies and jam, homemade bread, cakes, pies, and cobblers. They ate so much rich food it began to look like a lot of the gospel singers had been picked out by the pound. One man in Louisiana who had been an eyewitness to a car wreck outside of Shreveport involving a well-known gospel group remarked, “Why, they must have pulled out two thousand pounds of gospel singers in that one car alone. Of course the advantage of all that padding was that not one of them had been hurt.” The disadvantage was, as Minnie put it, “Gospel singing is good for the soul but bad on the gallbladder.” In the Oatman family only Betty Raye was thin and they couldn’t understand it. But there were many things about Betty Raye they did not understand.

Home Again

Dorothy and Doc got back from the convention late Sunday night and Monday at 9:30 she was back on the air as usual. She opened the show with a “Good morning, everybody, I hope it’s a beautiful day where you are but I’m mad at the weather over here—it’s an old gray drizzly day. But rain or shine I am glad to be home again and especially to be back with all my radio friends. Our trip to Memphis was wonderful and we saw quite a few sights. Not only was there a family of ducks living in our hotel lobby, right across the street there was a hot dog stand that was open twenty-four hours a day. I said to Doc I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting a hot dog in the middle of the night but I guess they do. Anyhow, Memphis is lovely but . . .” Mother Smith played a few bars of “There’s No Place Like Home” and Dorothy laughed. “That’s right, Mother Smith, and by the way, we are so glad to have Mother Smith back with us this morning and she reports that her sister Helen is doing well and is on the mend, as we say . . . and we send out our special good wishes to her this morning and to all our precious little shut-ins everywhere. And speaking of special, I have an exciting announcement for all of you gospel fans coming up later, but first . . .

“Let me ask you this: can you make biscuits that make your family say ‘yummy’? If not, I want you to get yourself a bag of Golden Flake Lite-as-a-Feather Flour, guaranteed to make your entire family say ‘yummy.’ And before I read the winning letter of our How I Met My Husband Contest, I need to say a great big hello and thank-you to our radio homemaker friend Evelyn Birkby, whose show Down a Country Lane is heard on KMA all the way up in Shenandoah, Iowa, for the sour-cream raisin pie recipe she has sent along. And let’s see what else do I have. . . . Oh, Fred Morgan called and says he just got in a new shipment of brand-new Philco console radios, so come on down. I hate to say it, but I’m so old I can remember homemade radios, crystal sets made out of oatmeal containers and an old cigar box. What? Mother Smith says she remembers when we didn’t have radio at all. Well, I’m glad we are living now instead of then because I love visiting with all my radio neighbors by way of the airwaves but how it works don’t ask me. With so many of us on the air at the same time, why radio shows don’t crash into one another up in the sky is still a mystery. I often wonder if a show disappears into thin air after it is heard or if it just keeps on floating around up there, but if you know don’t tell me—I’m sure it would just scare me to death.

“Beatrice is here and has a song for all my Kentucky listeners, ‘Starlight on the Blue Grass,’ but first to our contest winner. Mrs. Boots Carroll of Enid, Oklahoma, writes,

“Dear Neighbor Dorothy,

“I met my husband at Alcatraz. No, he was not a criminal; he was a prison guard. My church group was on a tour and when he saw me and I caught his eye, he followed us back to the tour bus and found out where we were staying and called me that night for a date. Although he was a guard he was handsome in his uniform and we have four grown children.

“Well, Mrs. Carroll, you win the prize hands down, so look for your certificate for a free five-pound bag of Golden Flake Flour.” After Beatrice sang and Dorothy did a few more commercials, she made her announcement. “You know I’m always looking for good entertainment for you and while Doc and I were in Memphis I was lucky enough to see and hear a wonderful singing group, the Oatman family, and they will be here live on our show next month. I’ll keep you posted on the exact date for all of you out there who love gospel music. Be sure to tune in, because you are in for a big treat.”

Some of Neighbor Dorothy’s audience in the towns may not have been aware of the Oatmans, but many others out in the country were happy to know they were coming. Particularly Norma’s Aunt Elner Shimfissel, who had heard them on Gospel Time, U.S.A. She was just beginning to lose the hearing in her right ear and loved a group that sang loud.

After the show, as Dorothy was in Anna Lee’s room admiring her new saddle oxfords and hearing all about how impossible Bobby had been while they were gone, Dorothy tried to find a way to gently drop the news about the houseguest that was coming next month. She pretended to be preoccupied with fluffing the curtains. She started off with a casual “And oh, by the way . . .” but it did not work.

“A Church of Christ gospel singer?” Anna Lee screamed. “In my room for an entire week? I can’t believe it!”

“Now, sweetheart, I’m sure you will like her when you meet her. She seemed very nice,” said Dorothy hopefully.

Anna Lee wailed and fell back on her bed in agony. “Oh, Mother, how could you do this without even asking me?”

“Well, it just sort of happened. Mrs. Oatman asked me if we had an extra bed . . . and you weren’t there to ask. . . . I thought you wouldn’t mind. She’s about your age and, besides, you might enjoy meeting someone a little different.”

“Different! Mother, those people don’t even go to the movies or dance or wear makeup or anything!”

Dorothy remembered what they had looked like and had to confess, “Well, probably not. But that’s their religion, so we’ll just have to respect the fact. You can give up going to the movies or a dance for just one week, can’t you?”

Anna Lee looked at her mother in horror. “Why do I have to give it up? I’m a Methodist.”

“I just don’t think it would be very nice to do something that she couldn’t do.”

“How am I supposed to entertain her if she can’t do anything?”

“You can introduce her to some of your friends. I’m sure you can find a lot of things to do.”

“Name one.”

“Well, take her to the swimming pool or . . . maybe we can plan a little party for her in the backyard. Take her on a picnic.”

“What else?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Anna Lee, I’m sure you’ll come up with a lot of things to entertain your guest while she’s here.”

“She’s not my guest—I’m just the one who’s going to be stuck with her night and day. What if she goes through all my things?”

“Don’t be silly. She’s not going to go through your things. She’s a very sweet girl and I’m sure it will all work out just fine and it’s not going to kill you to be nice to someone for one week. We’ll talk about this later. Right now I’ve got to go and get supper started.”

Dorothy was almost out the door when Anna Lee added, “All right, but if she shows up here wearing some tacky homemade dress I’m not taking her anywhere. She can just stay home.”

Anna Lee had not really meant it but that last statement stopped Dorothy cold.

Her mother rarely got upset with her but Anna Lee knew in an instant she had gone too far. Dorothy turned around and looked at her for a long moment. “Anna Lee, don’t tell me that I have raised a daughter who has turned out to be a snob. If I thought for one minute that you would ever be unkind to anyone, much less some poor girl who is probably looking forward to coming here and meeting you, it would just break my heart. I told that girl you would be happy to have her here but I guess I was wrong.”

Anna Lee immediately felt terribly ashamed of herself. “I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t mean it.”

Dorothy stood there thinking about what to do, then said, “I’ll get in touch with Mrs. Oatman tonight and tell her they will have to make other plans. . . .”

“No, don’t . . . I’m sorry, Mother.”

But Dorothy turned and left the room. Anna Lee ran after her mother, pleading, “No! Please don’t. Mother, please!”

“I’m not having that girl come where she’s not wanted.”

“But I want her to come. I promise I’ll do anything she wants. Please let her come! I’ll kill myself if you don’t let her come.” With that she collapsed on the floor in full-blown teenage-girl hysteria. “Please! Please! She can have my entire room, she can wear all my clothes, I’ll sleep with Grandma. I’ll entertain her night and day, I promise, please don’t call!”

Dorothy had seen these histrionics before and was not convinced. “All right, Anna Lee, get up. I won’t call today. But I’m not promising anything. Let’s just see how you feel about it tomorrow.”

From that day forward Anna Lee made it a point at dinner to mention that she was so looking forward to Betty Raye’s visit and just couldn’t wait for Betty Raye to get there.

Although it was not quite true, Anna Lee would rather walk through fire than ever disappoint her mother again.

The Reluctant Houseguest

A MONTH LATER, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, a dusty old four-door green Packard, packed full of people, songbooks, and clothes, with sound equipment piled up on the top and on the running boards, drove up to the Smith house. A hand-painted sign on the back read THE OATMAN FAMILY—TRAVELING FOR JESUS.

Dorothy called out from the living room, “Anna Lee, Bobby, Betty Raye is here.” All day Anna Lee had practiced smiling and looking happy for the arrival but when the beat-up car pulled up she secretly hoped nobody would see it.

The car door opened and three people stumbled out, and just as Anna Lee had feared the girl was wearing a light blue homemade dress with some sort of ugly green zigzag piping around the neck and sleeves. One of the Oatman boys untied a small brown cardboard suitcase from the running board and handed it to her and got back in the car.

Minnie was in the front seat by the window waving her handkerchief. “Here she is, Mrs. Smith,” she said, then looked up at the house and exclaimed, “Oh, just look at what a pretty place you got. Look at all them nice shrubs and your pretty little flower beds—this is probably the nicest house she’s ever stayed at.”

Dorothy thanked her. “Won’t you and your family come in and have a cold drink or a sandwich? I’ve made cookies for you.”

“Oh no, honey, we can’t, we just drove all the way from Oklahoma packed in here like sardines and my legs is all swelled up so bad I need to get where we’re going. Besides, if we was to all get out now, no telling when we’d get everybody back in. The boys is bad to wander off whenever we stop . . . but we will take us a sack of them cookies if they’re handy.”

“Of course,” Dorothy said. “Anna Lee, you and Bobby run in and put some wax paper around the cookies and wrap up the sandwiches.” Minnie motioned for Dorothy to step over to the car and whispered, “Mrs. Smith, like I say, she won’t eat much. . . . The only trouble you might run into is that she’s a-liable to sit in a corner and not talk but don’t take it personal. She’s just real timid like and I don’t know why or where she gets it from. Lord knows none of the other Oatmans is one whit timid. We’ve been praying she’ll get a healing . . . but no luck so far.”

After they got the cookies and the sandwiches, Minnie said, “I’ll bring your plate back in the morning. We’ll be here at nine sharp for your show, so don’t you worry,” and they drove off, leaving Betty Raye standing alone on the sidewalk.

A little too brightly Anna Lee said, “Hi, I’m Anna Lee, welcome.”

Dorothy pulled him over and said, “And this is Bobby.”

Bobby said, “Hello.”

Betty Raye looked down at the sidewalk and nodded. There was an awkward moment when they all just stood there but Dorothy jumped in with “Come on in and let’s get you settled. Bobby, take her suitcase.” Bobby, who had been fascinated, staring at her odd dress, said, “Oh . . . O.K.,” and took it from her, immediately asking, “Hey, is this made out of cardboard?”

Dorothy shot him a look. “I was just wondering,” he said.

Betty Raye, who was used to staying with strangers wherever she went, seemed resigned to the situation and followed behind them, waiting to be told where to go. She said nothing until she was taken to Anna Lee’s room. Dorothy opened the door and announced, “And this will be your room while you’re here.”

The large sunny room with the big white-lace canopy bed and the floral wallpaper looked like something out of a magazine. Anna Lee and Dorothy had worked all morning to get it ready. Dorothy had washed and starched the curtains to make the room as nice and as cheerful as possible for her arrival. They all waited for her to go on in first, but Betty Raye did not move from the doorway. Then she looked up at Dorothy, almost cringing, and asked in an apologetic voice, “Mrs. Smith, do you have anywhere else I could stay?”

Dorothy was completely taken aback. This was the last thing in the world they had expected to hear. “Oh,” she said. “Don’t you like this room? Is there anything wrong?”

“No, ma’am.”

Dorothy was at a loss. All she could come up with was “Oh dear.”

Bobby jumped in with a bad idea. “Hey, you can stay in my room if you want to. I’ve got all kinds of stuff in there.”

“No, Bobby, she’s not staying in your room. I’m just trying to think of where else you might like. We can take a look around if you like.”

Betty Raye cringed again and almost whispered a scared little “Would you mind?”

Thoroughly flustered, Dorothy said, “No of course not, you’re our guest. We want you to be happy.”

As the three of them followed behind Betty Raye like a small parade all over the house from room to room, Dorothy glanced over at her daughter and threw her hands up and shook her head, as if to say silently, “I don’t know what she’s doing, do you?” But Anna Lee was suddenly enjoying this strange turn of events and did not respond. Instead, she just looked up in the air and innocently batted her eyes with an attitude that translated as “Don’t look at me, you’re the one who invited her.” And at that moment Dorothy could have pinched her head off.

Betty Raye had almost gone through the entire house when she opened the door to the little sewing room off the sunporch. She looked in and pointed to the daybed that was against the wall, covered with old scraps of material and patterns. “Can I stay here?”

Dorothy, crushed, said, “Why yes, I suppose you can . . . but it’s just a little hole in the wall no bigger than a closet. There’s not even a place to hang your clothes. Wouldn’t you really feel better having a nice big bedroom with your own bathroom?”

But Betty Raye said, “No, ma’am, this will be fine.”

Dorothy tried to be cheerful. “Well, all right, we want you to be happy while you are here. Anna Lee, help me get all this stuff off the bed, and let’s fold up the ironing board.”

That night at dinner Betty Raye hardly ate a thing. She spoke only when spoken to and even that was minimal.

Doc had just gotten home in time for dinner and tried to chat with her. He asked pleasantly, “So, Betty Raye, how do you like your room?”

Bobby piped up. “She didn’t like it. She’s sleeping in the sewing room.”

Doc looked at Dorothy. “Why is she sleeping in the sewing room? I thought she was going to stay in Anna Lee’s.” There was a pause you could have driven a truck through as Dorothy tried to come up with a tactful answer. But Bobby, oblivious to the awkwardness of the moment, noticed that their visitor did not have much of an appetite and took this opportunity to inquire, “If she doesn’t want her dessert, can I have it?”

After dinner, without saying a word, Betty Raye went to the kitchen and stood by the sink, ready to help wash dishes. When Dorothy realized what she was doing she said, “Oh no, dear, you are a guest. You run on and enjoy yourself. Mother Smith and I will take care of this.” Betty Raye seemed surprised but went straight to her room and closed the door. When Anna Lee, who had been dragging games out of the closet so they could play, came in and asked where she was, Dorothy said, “I’m not sure but I think she’s already gone to bed.”

“But it’s only seven o’clock.”

“Maybe she’s tired from her trip, honey,” Dorothy said.

“Well,” said Anna Lee, “I guess we won’t be playing Monopoly, will we?”

Later, before Dorothy had joined them on the front porch, Mother Smith confided to Doc, “She’s an odd little person, isn’t she?”

Is It Any Wonder?

THAT FIRST NIGHT Mother Smith had thought Betty Raye was odd, but the next morning, after having encountered the entire Oatman clan in all its glory, including mystery man Uncle Floyd Oatman, complete with his Scripture-quoting ventriloquist’s dummy named Chester, who wore a cowboy hat and proceeded to sing “Jesus Put a Yodel in My Heart,” she changed her mind. Once she had seen the rest of the Oatman family, she quickly realized that Betty Raye was the best of the lot.

After they left and Betty Raye went back to her room, Mother Smith whispered to Dorothy, “Good God, no wonder she’s a little peculiar. Who can blame her?”

At exactly 9:15 they had all piled out of the car and banged into the house like an invading army, and had eaten every one of the six dozen cookies in the entrance hall in less than ten seconds. During their segment on the show Minnie took over Mother Smith’s organ and almost pumped it to death. After the group had done three songs, Chester the dummy announced in his high squeaky voice, “Don’t forget, folks, starting tonight we’re all gonna be at the Highway 78 Church of Christ annual dinner on the ground and tent revival all week—there’s gonna be a whole lot of good singing . . . good eats . . . and soul saving, so come on out!” And then they all piled back in the car and left. The rest of the living room audience that day had thoroughly enjoyed their singing, particularly Beatrice Woods, the Little Blind Songbird, who had loved every song they sang and had clapped her hands in delight when Chester the dummy had yodeled. Mother Smith, not quite so enthralled, was glad to get her organ back in one piece. The fact that Betty Raye wore homemade clothes or was a gospel singer didn’t make a bit of difference to Bobby. He was delighted to have another person in the house.

It gave him someone new to show off in front of. The second morning he waited until he saw Betty Raye go into the kitchen for breakfast. Just as she sat down at the table with Dorothy and Mother Smith, they heard a strange eerie whistle coming from down the hall. Then, wearing his father’s long overcoat with the collar turned up over his ears and a big gray felt hat pulled down over his eyes, Bobby appeared in the doorway and in an odd voice announced to the room, “I am the Whistler and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes . . . I know the nameless terrors of which they do not speak!” And then he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared, laughing maniacally all the way down the hall.

Betty Raye had been somewhat startled by this odd behavior but everyone else at the table just kept eating. The only thing Dorothy said, as she buttered a piece of toast, was “If he would spend as much time with his schoolwork as he does listening to his radio shows he’d be a genius.” Betty Raye glanced out the window and saw a woman in sunglasses holding on to a clothesline coming across the backyard and up the back steps as a frazzled woman in pin curls wearing a hairnet ran in the front door to the kitchen and asked, “Have you seen Momma?”

Dorothy looked alarmed. “No, she hasn’t been here. Is she missing again?”

“Yes . . . I turned my back for five seconds and off she goes. If you see her, grab her.”

After the woman left Mother Smith said, “Poor Tot, that’s the second time this week.”

Dorothy shook her head. “Poor Tot.”

Mother Smith turned to speak to Betty Raye, but she had disappeared, leaving most of her breakfast uneaten. A second later they heard the lock on her door click shut. The two women looked at each other in surprise.

“Well,” said Mother Smith.

“Well,” said Dorothy. “I don’t know what to think, do you?”

“No.”

Anna Lee came in for breakfast. “Is she up yet?”

“Yes, been here and gone. You missed her.”

Betty Raye never came back out of her room until it was time to go to the revival and then she slipped out the front door without anyone hearing her and stood on the sidewalk and waited to be picked up by the family. Later, when Dorothy knocked on her door and there was no answer, she went into the room to see if Betty Raye was all right but she was gone. She didn’t mean to pry but she could not help but notice that the dress Betty Raye had arrived in was on the bed and the open suitcase on the floor was empty. Dear God, she thought, that little girl only has two dresses to her name.

Her first impulse was to run downtown and buy her an entire new wardrobe. That night she talked it over with Doc. Throughout the years they had both quietly supplied people with clothes and food or sent them money anonymously when they needed it. But Betty Raye was a different situation. She was a guest in their home. How could they do it without seeming to regard her as a charity case and maybe take a chance on hurting her feelings?

It was a dilemma that tugged on Dorothy’s heart every time she saw her in the same threadbare dress, day after day.

The Revival

EVER SINCE the Oatmans had come to town and appeared on The Neighbor Dorothy Show, Anna Lee, Norma, and Patsy Marie were just dying with curiosity about the revival and having a fit to get out there and see it. All three girls had been raised in town and had never really wanted to go to one, until now. Dorothy, however, was immediately suspicious about their sudden interest in tent revivals.

“Now, Anna Lee, I don’t want you girls going out there and making fun of those people . . . do you hear me?”

“Mother!” said Anna Lee, shocked at the idea. “Why would you think something like that?”

“Because I know how silly the three of you can act.”

Finally, Anna Lee was able to convince her mother to let her go but Ida, Norma’s mother, was adamantly against it. “I will not have you going out there to that thing. There’s no telling what sort of people will come crawling out of the backwoods and start babbling in tongues. . . . Besides, we’re Presbyterians—we don’t believe in that sort of primitive carrying on.” But Norma told her mother that she was spending the night with Patsy Marie and went anyway.

On the second night of the revival Norma got her boyfriend, Macky, to drive them out to the country. They started around six but before they left town Norma made Macky go into the Trolley Car Diner and get them all hamburgers to go. She pointed to the flyer with the map that advertised TENT REVIVAL AND DINNER ON THE GROUND. “I’m not eating anything off the ground; if I got sick my mother would know exactly where I’d been.” As they turned off Highway 78 and onto a dirt road they saw crude signs pointing the way that said THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH, ARE YOU SAVED? PREPARE TO MEET YOUR MAKER, and GOD TAKES ALL CALLS PERSONALLY—HE HAS NO SECETARY. Patsy Marie observed, “They misspelled secretary.” About forty-five minutes later, when they got close to the spot called Brown’s Pasture, behind the Highway 78 Church of Christ, they could see a large round tan tent with red and white triangle banners hanging from the ropes, way off in the distance. The sides of the road were lined with cars and trucks and tractors already and they had to park about a half mile away. The place was teeming with people, all carrying plates and baskets. When they finally got closer to the tent, they saw long tables and benches set up everywhere, laden with food the families had brought to share. Norma was surprised to see that “dinner on the ground” did not literally mean on the ground but dinner on tables covered with tablecloths made out of newspapers. When the others saw the piles of fried chicken, homemade macaroni and cheese, plates full of fresh corn on the cob and watermelon, they were sorry they had listened to Norma and had only hamburgers to eat. Norma defended herself as they walked, saying, “Well, how was I to know—it didn’t say dinner on the table!”

By the time they got inside the big tent, most of the wooden folding chairs were already taken and they had to sit toward the back, which is where Norma wanted to sit anyway. The ground was covered with sawdust and it smelled like the circus, with almost a circus excitement as well. Instead of acting serious like they were in church, children were allowed to run up and down the aisles and make all the noise they wanted. It was a festive atmosphere with a feeling of anticipation. Anticipation of what, the Elmwood Springs girls did not know yet. The place was packed with people they had never seen before: Pentecostal; Church of Christers; hard-shell, foot-washing Primitive Baptists; you name it, all come together for a good time.

The men were in clean overalls and the women all had on the same kind of homemade dresses that Minnie and Betty Raye wore. It was a hot night and the ladies, most with their hair done up in buns at the back of the neck, sat there fanning themselves with cardboard fans, a picture of the Last Supper on them, which the church had provided, and chatted happily with one another. The round stage in the middle of the tent was bare except for a piano and sound system and one artificial fern in a stand-up basket. While they waited for things to start, Anna Lee, Patsy Marie, and Norma sat around punching one another and giggling as Macky pointed out an old lady dipping snuff and spitting it back out in a tin can she had brought with her. Just then a large, big-boned, sweet-looking lady and a small man in overalls walked past. Norma looked up and immediately dropped to the floor and hid under a chair.

Macky looked at her. “What are you doing, Goofy?”

Norma whispered, “It’s my aunt Elner! If she sees me she’ll tell Mother.” Norma, who at the time was wearing dark sunglasses and a scarf, was to spend the entire evening bobbing and weaving behind the people in front of her, terrified that her aunt might somehow turn around and pick her out of a crowd of seven hundred. But Norma’s chance of her aunt Elner seeing her that night was to be the least of her worries.

At exactly 7:00 P.M. the Highway 78 Church of Christ preacher came out. In a few moments, after a lengthy prayer, he introduced the Oatman Family Gospel Singers and they filed onstage to thunderous applause.

Patsy Marie nudged Anna Lee. “Which one is Betty Raye?”

“The skinny one.”

Patsy Marie noticed that she was also the only one of the Oatmans that did not have thick coal-black hair and commented, “She doesn’t look a thing like the rest of them, does she?”

Norma said under her breath to Macky, “Who would want to?” In a few minutes, after the Oatmans got the evening started with a rousing, foot-stomping, hand-clapping rendition of “Give Me That Old-Time Religion,” they continued on with “Are You Washed in the Blood?,” “Tell Mother I’ll Be There,” “I’ll Meet You by the River,” “I Believe in the Man in the Sky,” and just when they had the audience shouting and rocking in their seats, the visiting preacher and revival leader, the Reverend Stockton Briggle, straight out of Del Rio, Texas, came running down the aisle, jumped up on the stage, and with Bible in hand danced and shouted, “I feel the spirit moving tonight!” He proceeded to put on a show the likes of which the four of them had never seen. Reverend Briggle had been saved by the famous evangelist Billy Sunday and was determined to return the favor. He hopped on one foot, then the other, and warned those in the audience who had not been saved about the eternal fires of hell. He raved on about fighting the devil for souls, yelling, “I’ll fight him with a shovel . . . I’ll fight him with an ax . . . I’ll fight in the morning . . . I’ll fight him in the night!” He got himself so worked up he was red in the face. He was so upset and agitated over the devil that he started to spit every time he shouted and the people in the front row were dodging back and forth. Macky thought this one of the funniest things he had ever seen and suddenly laughed out loud and then tried to pretend he was coughing. Anna Lee and Norma lost control and got the giggles so bad they almost choked. But Reverend Briggle did not let up until several women jumped to their feet and started dancing and shouting in an unknown tongue. Soon the sinners in the crowd began to sweat and squirm in their seats and after about an hour of ranting and getting everybody all worked up and scared to death about going to hell he finally called out for all the unsaved to come forward, confess their sins to the Almighty God, and be saved from eternal damnation. About three hundred people jumped up, some who always got up to get saved over and over, others for the first time, all headed up the aisle toward the altar, amid shouts of “Praise Jesus” and “Hallelujah!” One man down at the end of their row jumped up and did a dance right there like he had just stuck his finger in a light socket.

Norma and Macky and Anna Lee had been so busy watching him they didn’t notice that their friend had suddenly gotten up and started marching down the aisle with the crowd, headed for the altar. When she looked over and saw her Norma screamed, “Oh my God, Macky, there goes Patsy Marie—grab her!” But it was too late; she was already halfway to the front. An hour later, after they had pulled a dazed Patsy Marie out of the tent and were heading home, she tried to explain. “I was just sitting there and before I knew it I was up out of my seat and going down the aisle. It was like someone had picked me up and was putting one foot in front of the other, and I couldn’t stop myself.” She said, “After that I don’t remember a thing, so I must have been saved.”

Anna Lee, who was fascinated and somewhat in awe, asked, “What’s it like to be saved, Patsy Marie? Do you feel any different?”

Patsy Marie thought it over for a moment and then answered sincerely, “I don’t know . . . but my headache’s gone.”

Macky laughed but Norma did not find Patsy Marie’s recent experience with salvation even slightly amusing. “It’s not funny, Macky.” But then she said to Patsy Marie, “If you go crazy and start babbling away in some strange tongue, I swear I’ll never speak to you again.”

Alarmed at that thought, Anna Lee looked more closely at her friend. “Do you feel like you want to babble in the unknown tongue, Patsy Marie?”

Patsy Marie gave the question serious thought. “No, I don’t think so . . . not yet, anyway.”

Norma rolled her eyes. “Oh, great . . . now we are going to have to watch her like a hawk night and day. This is your fault, Macky.”

Macky said, “Me? What did I do?”

“If you had grabbed her when I told you to, she wouldn’t have gone up there in the first place.”

“Norma, I couldn’t . . . she was already way up the aisle. Why didn’t you go after her? You were the closest.”

“And have Aunt Elner tell my mother she saw me? Do you want me grounded for the rest of my natural life? You know Mother—she would have a fit if she knew Aunt Elner had been to a Church of Christ revival, much less her own daughter.”

The Party

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, on the way over to the Coke party Anna Lee was having for Betty Raye, Norma got Patsy Marie to make a solemn promise that if she felt in the least bit strange or as if she might start speaking in the unknown tongue she was to leave at once. “If we want to be cheerleaders next year, we can’t afford for you to have a relapse and get all religious.” Then, more considerately, she asked, “How is your headache today?”

Poor Patsy Marie, who had been stared at by Norma for the past twenty-four hours, said, “I think it’s back.”

This was good news to Norma. Perhaps Patsy Marie was unsaved.

The party was to be held in the little clubroom over at Cascade Plunge. Anna Lee had warned her friends in advance that Betty Raye’s religion did not allow dancing and so that was out. They all squawked but they showed up anyway. The party was supposed to take place from three to five but the family who drove Betty Raye out to the revival every night came and picked her up at four. It was just as well. They had all been on their best behavior but the minute Betty Raye left, they ran to the jukebox and the jitterbugging began.

When Anna Lee came home her mother was in the kitchen having a meeting with the local chapter of the Red Cross, discussing the upcoming annual drill. Anna Lee was returning some plates she had borrowed. Dorothy, who had been anxious all afternoon, asked, “How did the party go?”

Anna Lee made a face and motioned for her mother to come out on the back porch. Dorothy excused herself and closed the door. Anna Lee whispered, “Oh, Mother, it was just awful. Everybody tried their best to be nice but all she did was stand over in a corner and shake.”

“Oh no.”

“She dropped an entire plate of food all over herself. I felt so sorry for her, I didn’t know what to do. All the boys tried to talk to her but she just doesn’t know how to act. Do you think there’s something wrong with her, that she’s retarded or something?”

“No . . . of course not. She’s probably not used to going to parties, that’s all.” But secretly Dorothy was concerned and wondered.

The next afternoon, after Betty Raye had been picked up, Anna Lee said, “I think she just hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you, honey,” Dorothy said.

“Well, she sure doesn’t like me much. I invited her to come to my room so we could talk and try to get to know each other better but all she did was sit there and act like I was holding her prisoner or something.” Anna Lee was sincerely baffled. “I don’t understand it, Mother, everybody else likes me. . . . I was voted the most popular junior . . . and every time she sees Bobby she turns around and goes the other way.”

Mother Smith laughed and said, “That I can understand.”

“And poor Jimmy,” Anna Lee continued. “The other day, when he came in the kitchen and said hello, she backed all the way into the pantry and hid behind the door until he left.”

“It’s like living with a little mouse in the house, isn’t it?” Mother Smith mused. “I hear her late at night scurrying into the bathroom, washing out her little things; then she scurries back to her room. She tiptoes around almost like she’s apologizing for living, scared to make a sound. I think she would mash herself into the wall and just disappear if she could.”

“I know,” said Dorothy, “it just breaks my heart. But all we can do is keep trying to make her feel at home and be as sweet to her as possible.”

For the rest of the week Mother Smith and Anna Lee tried their best to make conversation the few times they saw her, but without much luck. At the end of her visit, Dorothy and Princess Mary Margaret seemed to be the only ones Betty Raye might have felt somewhat at ease with. She never came out of her room when the radio show was going on. But a few times in the afternoon, if no one else was around, she would quietly slip into the kitchen and sit in the corner, petting the dog and watching Dorothy cook. Dorothy wanted to chat, but did not push her to talk and just let her be. But on Betty Raye’s last morning there, Dorothy felt she just had to say something, and she went into the little sewing room and sat down on the bed.

“Sweetie, come over here and sit and talk to me for a minute, will you?”

Betty Raye sat down. Dorothy took her hand and looked her in the eyes. “I know it’s none of my business but I’m worried about you. You know, you really mustn’t be so timid and afraid around people. We all like you very much but if you won’t talk to us, we don’t know if you like us.”

Betty Raye’s cheeks turned red and she looked down at her lap. Dorothy continued: “I know it’s probably just because you are shy—and believe it or not, when I was your age I felt the same way. But, sweetheart, for your own good you need to understand that you are a perfectly lovely girl and people will always want to be your friend if you let them.” Dorothy patted her hand. “I know you can do it . . . will you promise me to at least try?”

Betty Raye nodded, big tears welling up in her eyes.

Good-bye

WHEN THE OATMANS came to pick up Betty Raye, the Smiths all walked out to the car with her. Minnie leaned out the window and said to Dorothy, “I hope she weren’t no trouble to you, Mrs. Smith.”

“Not at all—we loved having her.”

“I told you she wouldn’t eat much.”

“Mrs. Oatman,” Dorothy said, “could I trouble you to come inside for just a minute? I have something for you.”

Minnie said, “Sure,” and turned to her husband. “Turn the motor off, Ferris, you’re burning up the gas.”

When they were inside the kitchen, she could see that Dorothy had prepared a huge basket of sandwiches and cookies for them to take on their trip.

“Well, ain’t this nice of you. We sure loved them other cookies you give us, we just enjoyed them to the highest.”

Dorothy closed the door and said, “The truth is, Mrs. Oatman, I wanted to get a chance to talk to you privately. Could we sit for just a second?”

“Sure, honey.” Minnie sat down at the table. “And, by the way, thank you for letting us advertise over the radio. We never had so many people to show up . . . they had to bring in a hundred more chairs and benches to fit them all in.”

“You are certainly more than welcome.”

“And thanks again for taking my little girl in.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Mrs. Oatman. . . . I know this is none of my business, but are you aware that Betty Raye shakes?”

Minnie nodded. “Oh yes. She been doing that for I don’t know how long, ever since she was five or six, I guess.” She glanced up at the kitchen window and exclaimed, “Oh, look at your pretty little curtains and all them plants in them little glass fiddles in the window . . . I swear I’ve never seen nothing like that before.”

“Do you know why she shakes, Mrs. Oatman?”

“Call me Minnie, honey. No, I haven’t an idea in the world what makes her to do it. Maybe she’s just too thin for her own good. She’s got all them delicate little bones just like a bird.” She laughed and held up her arm. “She sure don’t take after me. Look, even my wrists are fat. Momma says when your wrists is fat then you know you’re fat.”

“Mrs. Oatman . . . Minnie . . . I know you know best, but considering she’s so shy I just wonder if all this traveling from place to place could have something to do with it.”

“You know, you might be right, Mrs. Smith.” Minnie leaned forward and lowered her voice as she confided to Dorothy, “It pains me to say this but I don’t think gospel singing is in her blood. It just don’t come natural to her. We have to just about drag her onstage and even then she won’t sing out and I can’t understand it for the life of me. She’s got gospel singing on both sides of the family, the boys couldn’t wait to jump on the stage, but Betty Raye . . .” She shook her head sadly. “She was always real different and it’s been hard on all of us, especially her.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

Minnie sighed. “Mrs. Smith, I know she don’t like traveling and I know she hates singing but what can I do?” Just then Ferris blew the horn and Minnie got up. “Well, I better go. We got to be in Humboldt, Tennessee, for an all-night sing by seven but I sure appreciate you putting her up and all the nice food you made for us.”

As they walked to the car Dorothy said, “We’d be happy to have her back anytime, Mrs. Oatman.” She looked in the car to say good-bye, but Betty Raye was already lost in the crowd in the backseat. Anna Lee and Bobby and Mother Smith all stood and waved good-bye as they drove away.

Mother Smith said, “Lord, those country people love to travel in a pack, don’t they.”

As the car turned the corner, Dorothy felt a wave of sadness and had to fight back tears. There was something about Betty Raye that touched her. She had given Betty Raye their address and asked her to write but she wondered if she would ever see her or hear from her again. When they were out of sight, Dorothy put her arm around Anna Lee. “You were very sweet to her, and I appreciate it.”

Bobby piped up behind them. “I was sweet to her. I gave her one of my best rocks.”

“Did you?” said Dorothy and put her other arm around Bobby, which is what he wanted in the first place. They walked back to the house together. Bobby added, “Yeah, and it was probably worth a hundred dollars, too, or maybe even more!”

Anna Lee asked her mother, “Do you think she had a good time while she was here or did she just hate it?”

“I don’t know, honey,” Dorothy said. “I hope she enjoyed herself. But I really don’t know.”

What They Didn’t Know

FOUR HOURS LATER and a hundred and seventy-eight miles from Elmwood Springs, the Oatmans were crossing over the Tennessee River. Betty Raye was mashed between her older brothers, Bervin and Vernon, who were hitting at each other, and as usual everyone in the car was talking at the same time. Minnie was fussing at Ferris because he had not stopped at the last gas station so she could go to the bathroom. Chester the dummy was out of his box, yammering away at Ferris and complaining because Floyd had also wanted to stop at the gas station and get himself a cold Dr Pepper. But Ferris, who was determined to drive straight through without stopping, ignored them and started singing his favorite hymn, “Oh for a Thousand Tongues.” Betty Raye sat in the back with her eyes closed, holding on to the small rock Bobby had given her, and tried to shut the noise out all the way to Humboldt.

What the Smith family did not know and she had been unable to tell them was that theirs was the nicest house she had ever stayed in. Compared with the hundreds of sofa pads on the floor and the lumpy beds she had shared with as many as four or five children, to her the little sewing room had been as grand as the Mansion on a Hill her mother was always singing about. The reason she had not wanted Anna Lee’s room was not because she did not like it. It was the most beautiful bedroom she had ever seen, in fact, much too nice for her. The real problem was its size. She would have been scared to stay in such a big room. She was used to staying in the small homes around the various country churches where they usually sang. If the Smiths thought she ran to her room every time she got a chance because she had not liked them, they were wrong. It was just the first time in her life she had ever been able to go in a room and shut the door and be completely alone—the first time she could remember not being surrounded by family and by strangers. If they had wondered what she had been doing in her room, they might have been surprised to know that she had done absolutely nothing but sit quietly for hours at a time. And as far as not liking Anna Lee, nothing could have been further from the truth. She thought Anna Lee was wonderful and was in awe of her and her friends. If she had not talked much it was only because she could not think of anything to say. She had liked everyone she met, particularly Dorothy, who had been so nice to her. On that last morning it had taken all her strength just to keep herself from begging them to let her stay. She had only been in Elmwood Springs for one week but it had been the best week of her life.

But by this time next week the Oatmans would be headed to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for another revival and dinner on the ground, and Elmwood Springs would be farther and farther away.

Stargazing

THE FRIDAY AFTER Betty Raye left, Bobby’s Cub Scout troop was supposed to have gone on a field trip to the Indian mounds outside of town to look for arrowheads. The trip was canceled because of rain. But Bobby did not mind. He loved to go sit on the porch on warm rainy days and listen to the sounds of the cars swishing up and down the wet streets. Everything was green and lush and wet. He daydreamed all afternoon until about four o’clock, when the sun came back out as bright as ever. But the rain had left the air fresh and cleared away some of the mugginess of August. This was Monroe’s turn to spend the night with him, and after dinner, as usual, they all started to wander out onto the porch. Mother Smith walked over to the edge and looked up at the sky and announced, “I’m going out and look at the stars. Anybody want to come with me?” Bobby and Monroe said they would go and all three headed out to the backyard. Mother Smith sat in a wooden chair and Bobby and Monroe lay on the lawn beside her to enjoy the show. “It’s so clear tonight,” Mother Smith said. “Have you ever seen so many pretty stars? Look, there’s the Big Dipper and Venus. I’ll bet we see a shooting star before the night’s over.”

Bobby loved to be with Mother Smith like this, watching for shooting stars and asking her questions.

“Grandma, what was the world like when you were little? Was everything real different?”

“Well, it was a different time.”

“Did people look different than we do?”

“No, people looked pretty much the same but we didn’t have a lot of things you do today. Don’t forget, that was way back in the eighteen hundreds.”

“During the Civil War?” asked Monroe, wide-eyed.

“Not that far back. But I can remember my father talking about it and when I was little we had this sword hung over the mantelpiece.”

“A sword?” said Bobby. “A real one?”

“Oh yes. He was a Confederate soldier during the war.”

“Did he kill people with it?”

“Oh, I doubt it. I think it was mostly for show.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No, that was years ago. I think my brother took it or maybe it got lost.”

Bobby said, “But he was a real soldier though, wasn’t he?”

“Absolutely, and so was your Great-grandfather Smith on your daddy’s daddy’s side, but he fought for the Union. Both from the same town. But that’s how it was back then.”

Bobby was amazed. He could not imagine that his grandmother had been alive so long ago. “Were there stars back then?”

She laughed. “Yes, honey, when I was your age I saw the same stars and moon that are up there now. Nature doesn’t change, just people. New ones are born every year but the stars and the moon stay the same. We just didn’t have cars or movies or radios or electricity yet.”

“What was that like?”

“Very quiet.”

Monroe made a face. “That must have been terrible.”

“Yeah,” Bobby agreed. “You must have been bored.”

“Not really. We had other things. We had books and we played games and sang and went to parties. You know, you don’t miss what you don’t know.”

“What did you want to be when you grew up, Grandma?”

Mother Smith smiled. “Believe it or not, at one time I thought I’d like to be a famous scientist like Madame Curie, maybe find a cure for some terrible disease.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“My father could only afford to send one child to college, so Brother was the one to go and there went my dreams of being the next Madame Curie.”

Bobby said, “Tell us about where you went on your honeymoon and that hotel.”

“Bobby, you’ve heard that story a hundred times.”

“I don’t care, Monroe hasn’t heard it. Tell it again.”

“I haven’t heard it,” said Monroe.

“Well . . . after your grandfather and I were married we got on the train and rode it all the way to North Carolina for our honeymoon. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. He wanted it to be a surprise and all he would tell me was that it was a famous hotel overlooking the most beautiful lake in the world. I’ll never forget that first night we were there. After dinner we walked out on this wide veranda overlooking the lake and they had all these pretty different-colored little paper Chinese lanterns strung all from one end to the other. Then, around eight o’clock, as soon as it got really dark, everybody in the hotel came out on the porch and said, ‘Look out on the lake.’ ”

On cue Bobby asked, “Then what happened?”

“Well, all of a sudden this huge sign made up of a thousand golden light bulbs lit up that said HOTEL LUMINAIRE right out in the middle of the lake.”

“Whoa!” said Monroe.

“Then we all went down and got into canoes and rowed all the way out to the sign. I don’t know which was a prettier sight, looking back at the hotel and seeing all those little green and red and yellow Chinese lanterns glowing in the dark or paddling right through the words HOTEL LUMINAIRE reflected in the water. It was a magical night, I can tell you that.”

“Now tell him about going to Coney Island.”

“I will. So . . . from there we went to New York City but it was so hot that every day we would ride the trolley way out to the ocean to Coney Island and walk around and see all the sights.”

Bobby punched Monroe. “Just wait till you hear the next part.”

“And we went to this big amusement park called Dreamland, so big that they had an entire little town in there, called Midget City. You could go in and nobody lived there except hundreds of tiny midgets.”

“Whoa!” said Monroe.

“They had their own little houses and stores and their own little midget mayor and tiny midget policeman. When we went through we met the nicest little married midget couple who had two normal-sized children that lived in New Jersey.”

“Oh, wow,” said Monroe, impressed out of his mind. “I’d give anything to see a town full of midgets.”

“It was a sight I’ll never forget.”

“What else do you remember in olden times that was great like that, Grandma?”

“Well, let’s see. I remember at the turn of the century, January the first, 1900—that was a big event.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, there were parties everywhere and at midnight of 1899 everybody in Independence went out in the street and rang bells and blew whistles and set off firecrackers and stayed up all night ringing in the next century. We thought the twentieth century was going to be the best one, but not more than fourteen years after that World War One started, so there went that dream out the window.”

After a moment Mother Smith said, “Well, boys, it’s getting late, so I’m going to leave you two to the stars and head on in.”

“Good night, Grandma.”

“Good night, Mrs. Smith.”

After she had gone Monroe said, “I guess she’s the oldest person I know.”

“Yeah,” agreed Bobby. “Just think, she’s a whole century old. . . .”

They lay there staring up at the stars. Bobby asked, “I wonder what it’s going to be like when it gets to be the year 2000?”

“I don’t know but I’ll bet everybody will be riding around in their own spaceships, going back and forth to Mars.”

“How old are we gonna be in the year 2000?”

Monroe sat up and counted on his fingers. He looked at Bobby incredulously. “We’re going to be sixty-four years old!”

Bobby sat up. He could not believe it. “Nooo!”

“We probably won’t even be alive, we’ll be so old.”

The prospect of being as old as the men who sat around the barbershop all day was a sobering thought. After a while Bobby said, “Monroe, let’s make a pact. If we’re both alive in the year 2000, no matter where we are, we will call each other up and say, Hooray, we made it, O.K.?”

“O.K., shake.”

They shook hands and lay back down. They both wondered where they would be and what they would look like but they could not even imagine it. To them the distance from this night, August the ninth, 1946, all the way to the year 2000 seemed as far away as Elmwood Springs was to the moon.

They stayed out in the yard and kept looking to see a falling star until Dorothy called to them and said they had to come in.