Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! Read Free

came home and married Doc and taught school for a while until she had her first child, Anna Lee. Anna Lee had a few health problems, nothing serious, just a little asthma, but enough so that Neighbor Dorothy thought it was best to stay home with her and Doc agreed. While she was home all day she wanted to keep busy so she began baking cakes—and more cakes. Tea cakes, lemon, banana, caramel, cherry, chocolate, maple, and jelly roll cakes. You name it, she baked it. But her specialty was theme cakes. You’d give her a theme and she’d make you the cake to go with the occasion. Not that she couldn’t make a mean noodle ring or anything else you wanted but she was known for her cakes. There was not a child in Elmwood Springs orthereabouts who had not had a pink and white circus cake with the miniature toy carousel on top for her birthday party. Which is how she came to be at the Mayfair Auditorium over in Poplar Bluff on Home Demonstration Day giving out the recipe for her circus cake on the radio. She just happened to mention that she used Golden Flake Flour for all her cakes and the next day, when Golden Flake Flour sales doubled in four states, she was offered a show of her own. She told the Golden Flake Flour people thank you, but she could not leave home every day to drive the twenty-something miles to the station in Poplar Bluff and back, which is how the radio tower came to be put up in her backyard in the first place and how her youngest child, Bobby, happened to grow up on the radio. He was only two years old when Neighbor Dorothy first went on the air, but that was over ten years ago and he does not remember a time when there wasn’t a radio show in the living room.
    When she first asked Doc what he thought about the idea, he laughed and said, “Well, you might just as well talk on the radio, you talk on the phone all day anyhow.” Which was not quite true, but true enough. Dorothy did love to chat.
    Although radio station WDOT is only a 200-watt station, because the land is flat, on cold, still days when the skies are crystal clear, and it is really good radio weather, the signal from WDOT can tear a hole straight through the midwest all the way up into Canada and on one particularly cold day was picked up by several ships at sea. You can’t say her show is clever or sophisticated or anything like that, but one thing you can say for sure is that over the years she’s sold a heck of a lot of Golden Flake Flour and Pancake Mix and anything else she advertises.
    Neighbor Dorothy’s house is located on the left side of First Avenue North, and has the address written in big black letters on the curb so you can’t miss it. It is the last house on the corner with a wraparound porch, a two-swing front porch, one swing on one end and one on the other. It has a green and white canvas awning all the way around to the side of the house.
    If you were to walk up the porch stairs and look to your right you would see written in small gold and black letters on the window WDOT RADIO STATION, NUMBER 66 ON YOUR DIAL . Other than that it looks just like everybody else’s house, without the call letters on the window and the big radio tower in the backyard, of course. No matter what time of day you come to the front door you are going to find it open. No point in closing it. Too many people in and out all the time. The milkman, the bread man, the ice man, the gas man, her twelve-year-old son, Bobby, who goes in and out a hundred times a day, and of course all her many radio visitors, who often come by the busload and are always welcomed with a fresh batch of special radio cookies she makes every day for the purpose. As you walk in, to the right is a large room with a desk with a microphone on it that says WDOT . The desk sits in front of the window so she can always turn around and look out and report what the weather is doing firsthand. Mother Smith’s organ is to the left, and about ten chairs are set up so people can come in