Mondays & Memories of My Mom – Happy Humor Month

Happy Monday, again. I LOVE Mondays, as they’re my 52 Chances a year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with you.

April is National Humor Month. Humor feeds our hearts, souls, and minds with happiness. Mom had an insatiable sense of humor. It’s one of the things that made her Secret Recipes^TM Detective interviews so successful. Long before then, Mom was a satirical columnist and cartoonist. By the way, April 18^th observes National Columnists’ Day.

Almost all of her work resonated with homemaker humor. In writing about what she knew, there was an endless source of material from being a working housewife, homemaker, and mom who was sitting on the fence of women’s liberation.

Mom’s comic sense was inspired by the “Greats of all Time” – Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin, Betty White, and Mary Tyler Moore; as well as George Burns, Dick Van Dyke, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, and others.

To me, she was just “Mom” but, to the world, she was “The Secret Recipe Detective”. She was a trail-blazer, carving out a unique niche in the food industry. She was such a gifted writer, publisher, artist/cartoonist, crafter, homemaker, cook and more.

There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do – except operating the VCR/DVD player and understanding Dad’s love for football. Her taste buds and culinary skills, combined with her creative writing skills and satirical sense of humor, developed into a kind of super power.

#GloriaPitzersCookbook

https://www.balboapress.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-001062253

From 1973 through 2004, Mom wrote and self-published hundreds of newsletters and about 40 cookbooks filled with thousands of her “secret” recipe imitations, which she developed herself. Between the recipes, she incorporated her humorous stories and anecdotes, cooking and household tips, and information about the companies/products imitated.

Mom’s cookbooks stood out for their crafty designs and subject matter – filled with food-for-thought ideas and editorials, food-for-the-soul inspirations, AS WELL AS food-for-the-table recipes and tips – all garnished with humor-for-the-heart. No other cookbooks at that time offered such a combination, let alone imitations of food industry dishes and products.

#NationalNoHouseworkDay

Besides it being National Humor Month, today’s also National No Housework Day – just the kind of thing at which Mom enjoyed poking humor. She often made fun of herself when it came to cooking and housework. In her cartoon panels, she created her own caricature that struggled at both, while working and raising 5 kids and a husband.

Mom often wrote about her and Dad’s matrimonial “bliss” with five children, using satirical twists combining two popular TV shows, “The Brady Bunch” and “Married With Children”. Did you know that Frank Sinatra, one of Mom and Dad’s favorite performers, sang the latter show’s theme song, “Love and Marriage”?

My Cup Runneth Over And I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, pp. 27-29)

[THE LITTLE STEPS]

IT IS GOOD, SOMETIMES, in looking back at how far we have come from the first steps that were to lead us into a bright direction… In our office, I have a file drawer that is full of newspaper clippings that have been written about us and our recipes.

These go back to 1974 when, before I ever wrote the ‘Secret Recipes Book’ [in 1976], I [had] assembled a small volume of American dishes to celebrate the bicentennial. Several copies of that little book, ‘The American Cookery Cookbook’, were purchased by the Henry Ford Museum at Greenfield Village in Dearborn [Michigan].

A curious young reporter, who was going through the Museum’s collection of new books, came across mine. He tried to purchase a copy, he later told me, by contacting every bookstore in the area. No one had even heard of me. I was not even listed in the ‘books in print’ directory.

So he returned to the museum to copy down the address from the cover of my book, looked us up in the phone directory and gave us a call. Once Dan Martin of Newsday Wire Service Features saw what the production of our monthly newsletter was like, he lost interest in that little bicentennial cookbook.

When he knocked on the door, that day, it was like inviting him into a Jean Kerr production of ‘Please Don’t Eat the Daisies’. There were a dozen baskets of ironing here and there in the large dining room, each [one] tagged with the name, phone number and date promise to the customer who left [it] with me to be ironed.

Two long tables under the windows were covered with freshly mimeographed 4” x 6” cards of recipes, spread out for the ink to dry. Several times a week, I printed up to 200 recipes and about 50 copies of each. At that time, we sold these through our newsletter for five-for-a-dollar or 25 cents apiece. We did very well with them too!

In the living room, Debbie’s friends had gathered with their drivers’ training manuals to quiz each other for the big day coming up when those six teenagers would be taking their driving tests. In the kitchen, Cheryl and Lorie were working on [Junior] Girl Scout badge projects with some of their friends.

It was a madhouse! Mr. Pipersack was shuffling in and out of the side porch door, trying to unplug the bathroom pipes and clean out the septic tank for us.

In the back room, where the prehistoric furnace was located that heated our 80-year-old house, a man from the gas company was arguing with a man from the Edison company about what was wrong with our furnace and why it wouldn’t work.

They finally asked me if my husband owned a screwdriver. I told them, ‘of course!’ They looked at each other and then looked at me, then one of them said, ‘hide it!’

Our oldest son, Bill, was hunting through the kitchen drawers for some tools at that moment, so that he could get under the hood of his Mustang out in the driveway and then let Mr. Pipersack pull his truck into the yard.

Mike, our next oldest, was on the phone trying to convince a girl that the things she had heard about him weren’t true and if he could get his dad’s car on Saturday, would she go to the movies with them.

The cat was having a litter of kittens under the sewing table and our police dog, Susie, was about to have a litter of pups and was moping about, looking for comfort. I now wonder how any serious writer could have found inspiration in that kind of environment.

I almost wish we had given the impression that we were like the Brady Bunch so that the article the reporter was going to write would have reflected better on our being normal and average; but frankly, I think I like the Brady Bunch because we could all learn so much from their faultless fantasies about family life.

THE BRADY BUNCH WE’RE NOT

Had our life been made into a TV series, it probably would’ve been called ‘The Pitzer Pack Rats!’ That was based purely on the unfounded talents of our five kids to keep our house looking like it was just about to be condemned by HUD!

I pretended not to care for the Brady Bunch, because I so envied their lovely lifestyle, where problems were solved without so much as one hair out of place or a tear shed in despair.

But it wasn’t until the Brady Bunch was canceled one night and replaced by a TV documentary on the mating habits of the North Alaskan sea otter that I realized just how much we liked them, after all. Our kids reacted as if somebody had just canceled Christmas!

My husband was crushed with disappointment. He loved the way the Brady’s bathroom mirror never got steamed up from somebody’s shower and how Mr. Brady never had to threaten a child with physical violence for catapulting a meatball off their fork into father’s coffee cup the way our kids would!

I like the way their stairway was always free of common household [clutter] and their door wall never had fingerprints on it, their houseplants flourished; and when their phone would ring, it was always somebody on the other end who had something pertinent to contribute to the entire 30-minute story segment for that night.

When it rings in THIS house, it is usually a lady calling long distance from Toledo to tell me about an exciting new offer on my favorite leading magazines at drastically reduced rates, or it would be my Avon lady wanting to know if she could leave my latest order and a bus locker at the uptown station rather than risk running into our kids.

Mrs. Brady lived the kind of saccharine existence [upon which] all mothers of my day dreamed, for she never had to explain why they had Coca-Cola stains on the ceiling or how she blew the food budget on a pot roast for Sunday’s dinner…

Or why she had to take down phone messages in the dust on the end table because she could never locate a pencil and paper when she needed it, like I did! Her kids did not spend hours on the phone with a friend just listening to each other breathe, nor did they waste their allowances on record albums with three-aspirin ratings!

And I noticed that the Brady kids never used a windowsill for a foot rest, a lampshade for a coat rack or a younger brother for a punching bag. Mr. and Mrs. Brady never argued with each other over his bowling night or her bridge club.

Have you ever noticed how their oldest boy he never stood around cracking his knuckles when he was bored? Ours did. Everything that happened to them was an object lesson with a happy conclusion, where the parents always came out on top, knowing what was best for the youngsters and proving it too!

We always felt lucky if Paul and I could only get the cherries out of the fruit cocktail before the kids did! And while all of the Brady kids uttered adorable little sayings that caused 500 people who were somewhere close by, to burst into laughter and sponsors to rush forth, renewing their contracts for another season…

We would sit there in stunned disbelief, fearing for our sanity, while our teenaged son explained how he had just initiated his new chemistry set by concocting nitroglycerin in the utility room. The Brady Bunch may have lived in a Walt-Disney-happily-ever-after-world, but I did really like them.

I finished Mom’s “Secret Recipes^TM Master Index” (compiled from all of her cookbooks and newsletters that I have). It was a long project to create and post but I hope it helps those who are looking for one of Mom’s recipes. Many of her out-of-print, self-published cookbooks can be found on Amazon, E-bay, and other used book sources.

IN CLOSING…

In honor of National Coffee Cake Day, here’s Mom’s secret recipe for “The Good Samaritan Coffeecake” (from her recipe for Herman, The Sourdough Starter); from her self-published cookbook, Make Alike Recipes (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; Oct. 1991, p. 12)… Asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share it.

#NationalCoffeeCakeDay