Happy Monday! I always look forward to Mondays. They’re my 52 Chances a year, to share Memories of My Mom with you.
Today’s National Tell a Story Day – another wonderful celebration for telling a story about Mom and her many creative talents. She was, in my biased opinion, a very gifted storyteller.
Mom raised five children, a husband, and various pets, while also working and homemaking in the throes of the Women’s Liberation Movement. She felt well-qualified to see the funny side of almost any situation. When it came to humor, her cup over-flowed with inspiration from some of the greatest comedians who ever lived.
Mom loved the comedy styles of gifted storytellers like… Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, Milton Berle, Rose Marie, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles, Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin, Tim Conway, Ruth Buzzi, and more.
Mom jokingly compared our family to TV’s Brady Bunch. Here’s Mom’s story, from the early years of the Recipe DetectiveTM, when Dan Martin of Newsday Wire Features wanted to come to our house in Pearl Beach to interview her about her bi-centennial cookbook, which he’d seen at The Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village.
According to Mom, it was just another day in the life of the “happy homemaker” – the kind of “stuff” from which country songs (and reality TV shows) are made.
My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, pp. 27-29).
[THE PITZER PACK RATS]
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 tagged with the [customer’s] name, phone number and date…
Two long tables, under the windows [along the east wall], were covered with freshly mimeographed 4×6 cards of recipes, spread out for the ink to dry. Several times a week, I printed up about 200 recipes, at 50 copies each. At that time, we sold these through our newsletter for 5-for-a-dollar or 25-cents each. We did very well with them too!
In the living room, Debbie’s friends had gathered with their driver’s 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 Girl Scout badge projects with some of their friends.
It was a mad house! Mr. Pipersack was shuffling in and out of the side porch door [off of the utility room], trying to unplug the bathroom pipes and clean out the septic tank for us.
In the back room, where the prehistoric furnace was located in the 80-year-old house, a man from the gas company was arguing with a man from [the electric] company about what was wrong with our furnace and why it wouldn’t work [and recommending that I hide Paul’s wrench!]…
Our oldest son, Bill, was hunting through the kitchen drawers for some tools… so he could get under the hood of his [car] 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 him…
[Furthermore,] the cat was having a litter of kittens under the sewing table and our police dog, Suzie, was about to have a litter of pups and was moping about, looking for comfort…
Had our life been made into a TV series, it probably would’ve been called ‘The Pitzer Pack Rats’! …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 pretend not to care for ‘The Brady Bunch’, because I envied their lovely lifestyle, where problems were solved without so much as a hair out of place or a tear shed in despair…
My husband… 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… for catapulting a meatball off of their fork and into [his] coffee cup the way our kids would!
I liked the way their stairway was always free of common household litter and their door wall never had fingerprints on it.
Their house plants flourished and when their phone would ring, it was always somebody… who had something pertinent to contribute to the entire 30-minute story…
When [the phone] rings in this house, it’s usually a lady calling long-distance, from Toledo, to tell me about an exciting new offer on my favorite… magazines at drastically reduced rates, or… my Avon lady… Mrs. Brady lived the kind of saccharine existence all mothers of my day dreamed of…
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 a record album with a 3-aspirin rating! And, I noticed, 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 and her Bridge Club. Have you ever noticed how their oldest boy 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 come out on top, knowing what was best for the youngsters and proving it, too!
We always felt lucky, on the other hand, 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… 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 [style] happily-ever-after world, but I did really like them… because [the story] didn’t tell it like it WAS, but how it COULD be!
A “raconteur” is a good storyteller skilled at telling engaging anecdotes or witty and humorous stories – sometimes called a “spinner of yarns”. That’s Mom. She had a way of taking our everyday life events and spinning them into exaggerated “fishing stories”.
Storytelling has been an interactive art form throughout history. It engages the audience’s imagination through spoken, written, or visual narratives. It’s a learned skill and craft that’s polished and improved with practice and experience.
Before television and cinema films, radio was the most popular source for telling and listening to stories. Mom wrote about her favorite radio program called “My True Story” (1943-1962), based on stories from “True Story” magazine, being replaced by Bob Allison’s “Ask Your Neighbor” program.
Mom came from a generation that grew up, listening to stories on the radio. TVs weren’t common household items until the mid-1950s. “Gunsmoke” was a famous Western that started as a radio program and then was later re-produced for television. Mom loved both versions.
Orson Welles’ “The War Of The Worlds” (1938) is regarded as the most famous storytelling radio program in history. It tricked many of its 6 million listeners into believing a real alien invasion was occurring.
Good storytellers are engaging and captivating, as well as eloquent and well-spoken. They have enthusiasm, energy, and confidence. They’re also creative and adaptable. They embrace vulnerability and authenticity, listening to and interacting with the audience, as well as creating strong connections.
Mom checked all the boxes. Her favorite part was listening to and interacting with her audiences – especially on all the radio programs, in which she participated. She loved to “empower” her listeners to get creative in the kitchen. She was a natural at creating strong bonds with the listeners and the show hosts.
Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – Best Of The Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 10). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition).]
HI, NEIGHBOR! – BOB ALLISON’S “ASK YOUR NEIGHBOR”
ONE OF THE NICEST things about being a writer is that you can work at home. Back in the late 60’s and early 70’s, as soon as my kids were out the door to the school bus, I set up my $39.95 Smith Corona portable typewriter at the kitchen table…
I was one step away from the stove, refrigerator and recipes I was curious to test and write about. The view from the kitchen table included the front yard and the North Channel of the St. Clair River (part of the St. Lawrence Seaway to everyone else) – the riverside was [called] the front yard and the roadside was the back yard.
The old house had its faults, I’ll grant you, but nobody could refuse a view like we had, living on the banks of that river! There was always something going on outside, sufficient to inspire a feeling of well-being, which every writer must have to do their job well.
In keeping with “write about what you know best”, I could put every economical recipe I used to feed my family of seven to good use, sharing the Secrets with others. One of my addictions in those days was a daily recipe radio show called Ask Your Neighbor, hosted by Bob Allison over the WWJ-Detroit radio airwaves.
He always opened his two-hour show by saying, “if you have a household problem you cannot solve, then call… (and he’d give a phone number) …and ask your neighbor!” I called him frequently with answers to his other listeners’ recipe questions, until I became “a regular” on the show.
With Bob’s generous help in mentioning my monthly newsletter, my subscriptions began to climb to 300, and 400. I was finally showing a profit! That gave my husband, Paul, some relief from his skepticism that I would eventually outgrow my obsession with writing.
From Bob Allison’s listeners alone, Paul and I had received over 1000 letters in one day! When, 106 months later, we closed our subscriptions to the monthly newsletter, we were already serving over 15,000 subscribers and had probably returned subscription requests to over 10,000 people…
That’s when, like Dick and Mack McDonald, we decided that we did not want to “get big!” It is as much a thrill for me today [1982], to hear somebody on Bob’s “Ask Your Neighbor” show request that Gloria, “The Secret Recipe Detective”, try to duplicate a recipe, as it was for me, decades ago, when it all began.
Mom loved doing radio show interviews not only because she could do it from the comfort of home but also because it was all “talk” – no “demonstrations” like the TV “talk” shows always wanted. Mom loved to talk (and tell stories). Additionally, she liked not having to look a certain way to appease the producers.
Radio was a major cornerstone in the success of the family business that Mom and Dad built. She always described her wonderful experiences with radio shows (as well as the people she got to know) in almost every book and newsletter issue that she wrote.
Radio felt like home to Mom. The audiences were close friends and the show hosts were extended family. It was her “listeners”, on Bob Allison’s “Ask Your Neighbor” show, who dubbed her “The Recipe Detective”. She developed and trademarked that persona into her brand.
Mom continues to inspire me every day – even from beyond – every time I read her works, every time I write an entry for this blog, and every time I hear from a reader who remembers her fondly and has a story to tell me, regarding their own memories of her. Please continue to send me your memories and stories of how Mom touched your lives.
IN CLOSING…
In honor of this week, being a part of two months – April, being National Fresh Celery Month, and May, being National Salad Month – here’s Mom’s secret recipe for “German Potato Salad – Pennsylvania Dutch Style”; as seen in… Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, p. 41). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret RecipesTM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3rd Edition)]. As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share it.
P.S. Food-for-thought until next Monday…
The month of April celebrates… National Month of Hope, Keep America Beautiful Month, Lawn and Garden Month, National Garden Month, National Humor Month, National Soft Pretzel Month, National Soy Foods Month, National Poetry Month, National Pecan Month, National Volunteer Month, Scottish-American Heritage Month, and more.
Today is also… National Babe Ruth Day, National Devil Dog Day, and National Prime Rib Day.
Tomorrow is… National Blueberry Pie Day, National Great Poetry Reading Day, and National Superhero Day.
Wednesday, April 29th, is… National Peace Rose Day, National Shrimp Scampi Day, and National Zipper Day.
Thursday, April 30th, is… National Adopt a Shelter Pet Day, National Honesty Day, National Oatmeal Cookie Day, and National Raisin Day.
Friday kicks off the month of May, which celebrates… American Cheese Month, Better Speech and Language Month, National Asparagus Month, National Stroke Awareness Month, Older Americans Month, National Barbecue Month, National Egg Month, National Get Caught Reading Month, National Hamburger Month, National Photography Month, National Preservation Month, National Recommitment Month, National Salsa Month, National Strawberry Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and more.
May 1st is also… National Loyalty Day, May Day, National Mother Goose Day, and National Chocolate Parfait Day.
May 2nd is… National Truffle Day. Plus, as the 1st Saturday in May (for 2026), it’s also… Kentucky Derby Day, National Fitness Day, National Scrapbook Day, National Homebrew Day, Join Hands Day, National Start Seeing Monarchs Day, and National Play Outside Day (which is also the 1st Saturday of EVERY month).
May 3rd is… National Garden Meditation Day, National Paranormal Day, National Chocolate Custard Day, National Raspberry Pop Over Day, and National Montana Day. Plus, as the first Sunday in May (for 2026), it’s also… National Lemonade Day.
Additionally, as the start of the first full week in May (3rd-9th for 2026), it’s also the start of… Small Business Week, National Wildflower Week, Screen-Free Week, and National Pet Week – which is the 1st Sunday through 2nd Monday of May (3rd-11th for 2026).
Have a great week!
…17 down and 35 to go.
