Saluting 'The Breakfast Show' queens

May 26, 2005

Dear Julie,

Next month they're putting my mom in a museum. Sort of.

In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, she and two friends were known locally for singing in a trio called the Mamanettes. For years they sang regularly on the local TV station's program called "The Breakfast Show," in an annual civic club production called the Follies, before civic clubs and at an Air Force base in the Bootheel.

They were all pretty, looked a lot alike and were talented singers. They patterned themselves after the McGuire Sisters, who were nationally famous from performing on Arthur Godfrey's morning show and No. 1 hits like "Sincerely" and "Sugar Time."

This was in the days when TV viewers could receive only the local channel unless they had an antenna on their roof, in which case two more channels could be pulled in.

Along with newscasters like Merle Emery and Don McNeely on KFVS, the Mamanettes and a country and western duo called Tom and Lee were the closest thing to stars Southeast Missouri had at the time.

A colorful local bandleader named Jack Kinder dubbed them the Mamanettes because Virginia Boren, Virginia Hill and my mother had nine children between them. Most of those children were present at the Mamanettes' rehearsals because mothers back then were mothers first, and mothers second and singers maybe third.

But the Mamanettes were serious about it. They rehearsed twice a week and, because they always dressed alike, made their own costumes.

As a kid, I thought everybody's mother sang in a trio. Millie, Rush's Limbaugh's late mother, sang in a different group that performed on "The Breakfast Show," too. Mary Frances Kinder, mother of our lieutenant governor, was in the same group, which may have missed out on similar notoriety because they never gave themselves a snappy name.

The Mamanettes remained a trio until the late 1970s. By then the Follies had fizzled out and "The Breakfast Show" no longer presented entertainment. Virginia Hill, the fun-loving one, died suddenly a few years after the group disbanded.

Now the River Heritage Museum is mounting an exhibit of photographs of the Mamanettes and the costumes they wore.

After we married, I discovered that DC and her two sisters sang in a trio when they were teenagers. They were sometimes called the DC3 and other times the 3D's and entertained for civic clubs, Christmas parties, school functions and local festivals.

Their mother made their matching dresses, their father accompanied them on piano.

I think we have a theme.

A year or so ago the activity director of a nursing home invited me to come speak to some of the men living there about my job. They paid as much attention as you'd expect 80- and 90-year-old men to pay a relative whippersnapper like me. Then the activity director mentioned that my mother was a Mamanette. Smiles, not all of them toothy, broke out around the room.

Doubtless DC can look forward to similar longstanding favor.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.