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
W
HILE
M
R.
M
ILO
S
HIPP
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
A
FTER 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.