Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Epilogue

Elmwood Springs, Missouri

1987

In the early eighties, something wonderful happened, thanks to Norma Warren’s “Elmwood Springs Is a Good Place to Live” campaign. USA Today ran a story naming it one of the ten best places in America to live. Suddenly, yuppies and others who were trying to get away from big-city crime and back to small-town America came pouring in. New schools were built, downtown was restored, the Elmwood Springs movie theater reopened and sometimes showed a foreign film. Nordstrom’s bakery was taken over by a young couple from Boston and renamed Bread & Things, and Macky over at the hardware store had a cappuccino machine. A junior college sprang up and Gerry became head of the psychology department, and did not have to commute to Kansas City anymore. And Dena actually signed up for a cooking class and liked it.

Every day, of course, there were thousands of newspapers, and news shows screaming and shouting murder, scandal, conspiracy, doom and gloom. And every day between Malibu and Manhattan, millions of nice people, happy and good-natured, were quietly living their lives, and not paying much real attention to them. As a matter of fact, many had begun to turn off their television sets or to watch old movies. But perhaps the best news locally was that in 1986, a radio tower was put up in Neighbor Dorothy’s backyard and a woman whose voice sounded familiar started to broadcast from her home. It wasn’t much of a show, merely lots of different things—news, guests, interviews, even recipes. But even though WDOT was only a 700-watt station, because the land was flat, on cold, still days when the skies were crystal clear and it was really good radio weather, its signal could tear a hole straight through the midwest, all the way up into Canada, and on out to all the ships at sea. And the news was mostly good.