Georgia L. Cannon of Delmar seems like she would have been a good one to have on your side. In 1983, when Delmar councilman Ed Feeney was asked to resign, Cannon penned a passionate letter to the Salisbury Daily Times. “Thank the Lord for someone who will stand firm in his beliefs,” she wrote. “I have heard Ed Feeney pray many times in our church for his fellow councilmen. I wonder if any one of them has ever said a prayer for him?”
From newspaper articles, I have a hard time grasping the finer points of Feeney’s scandal. I only know that Cannon had his back.
In April of that year, she wrote to the paper to honor a neighbor who had died. “Josh [Gibbs] was a familiar figure around town mowing lawns and raking leaves for people,” she said.
And in October, she wrote another letter bringing attention to Lynn Bogardus, Delmar’s Miss Fire Prevention who went on to win Miss Delaware, and Lisa and Eva Jackson who won awards in a baton twirling competition.
Cannon clearly went out of her way to recognize others, but she also had some opinions on who could be doing better. In October 1981 she complained to the Times that a local police officer had taken the lord’s name in vain on television. In November she called out the Times for printing an image of a victim of a Haitian boat accident being pulled out of the water by one leg. “It looked to me as though the person was not important enough to be given a stretcher to remove his body from the water. Many of us would not treat an animal in this way… we are all ‘somebody’ in God’s sight.”
During the Clinton scandal in 1992, she again wrote to the Times to lament the state of the world. “Parents,” she wrote, “if you would like a real hero for your children to look up to, introduce them to the Lord Jesus Christ. He never lied, cheated or led anyone astray.”
Elsewhere on the Delmarva peninsula, Bernice O. Baine spent her days working as a foreman for the Perdue chicken company. She retired from Purdue and took a job at Salisbury State University. With her spouse Robert Baine, she had two daughters and two grandchildren.
Baine also loved Jesus, and served as a Deaconess at the Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist church.
Baine lived from 1937 to 2015. Cannon was born in 1929 and died in 2000. Their lives may have never crossed paths, from their two towns on the Eastern Shore.
In 1983, however, the popular “Party Line” show on WICO produced a cookbook, and Georgia Cannon and Bernice Baine submitted the same recipe.
“What is Cooking on Party Line” included two recipes for 7-Up Cakes. One is made with cake mix and topped with a glaze. Cannon and Baine’s version was more of a pound cake.
Cakes made with sodas for sweetness, flavor and leavening have been around since at least the 1950s, and were especially popular in the South. 7-Up is perhaps the most famous of these, especially in proportion to the popularity of the beverage itself. In 1965, the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina wrote of a clerk at a grocery store who was confused and surprised by the suddenly swift sales of bottles of 7-Up. The clerk didn’t know that a recipe for 7-Up cake had been printed in the paper.
I have a hard time finding 7-Up these days, so I tried baking with a different carbonated citrus beverage: the now-ubiquitous LaCroix seltzer. I figured I would appreciate the lessened sweetness and the flavor would be interesting. (I ended up glazing the cake after it came out of the pan with an ugly top.)
Upon closer inspection, 7-Up doesn’t seem to really be pulling its weight, flavor-wise. My 7-Up cake recipes call for things like lemon cake mix, lemon zest, or in the case of Cannon and Baines’ recipe, lemon extract.
“What Is Cooking on Party Line” became a local favorite, beloved by many on the Eastern Shore who fondly remember the radio show or who simply enjoy the recipes. For me, of course, it is a treasure trove of stories of the colorful characters who quietly and not-so-quietly lived lives in Maryland.
Recipe:
- 1.5 Cups butter
- 3 Cups sugar
- 5 eggs
- 3 Cups unsifted flour
- 2 Tablespoons lemon extract
- .75 Cups 7-Up
Grease and flour tube pan. Bake at 325° for 1 1/2 hours.
Recipe from “What is Cooking on Party Line,” 1983, WICO
