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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