LEE CANNON

THE house is modest — small from a McMansion perspective — a reflection of 1957, the year it was built. Lee Cannon sinks into a low armchair in a cozy corner of her den. Her feet barely touch the floor.
“I’m sorry I didn’t dress,” she says. But she looks festive, almost elegant, in her teal blouse, black skirt, silver beads, and earrings. From her perch she can see her narrow kitchen with its low-slung seven-foot counter and a built-in bookcase crammed with well-worn cookbooks: “The Joy of Cooking,” “Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook” are there with fancier volumes from Williamsburg and Italy. Stuffed in among them and held together with rubber bands is “The Southern Living Quick and Easy Cookbook” published in 1979 — just one of the cookbooks she’s written in a career that’s covered all things entertaining: Teaching about food, whipping up a stream of parties, writing about food, and playing a pioneer role as a television hostess entertaining a statewide audience with the help of Bob Hope, Vincent Price, and scores of others both famous and obscure.
The unassuming house, the cramped kitchen, the dining room/living room with four chairs hugging a rectangular table: Not exactly what you’d expect of Auburn’s foremost hostess, the woman who for more than a half-century has been Auburn’s Entertainer Extraordinaire.
“Before there was a country club, there was Lee Cannon,” says Dave Herbert, once the band director at Auburn Polytechnic Institute (today’s Auburn University).
On a recent mild October night, Lee is not the one throwing the party: She is the reason for it. Several hundred guests stream through the yard and home of her daughter Leigh Allbrook. Their chatter abates as State Senator Ted Little reads the Alabama Senate resolution marking the day: “Whereas, in accordance with a lady’s right to conceal her age, the people of Auburn have gathered to congratulate Lee Cannon, the Hostess with the Mostest.”
“Whooo-hoooo!” a rebel yell fractures the reading. “You go, Granny!”
“That’s my daughter, following in my footsteps,” Lee says. She’s dazzling tonight in pink and black, chatting and laughing with a parade of well-wishers. It’s been three hours, and she’s yet to sit.
“Let me bring you a chair,” someone offers. “You must be exhausted.”
“I can’t sit down,” 90-year-old Lee protests. “People might think I’m old.”

She’s not often the guest of honor. Her first birthday party took place when she was a sophomore in college. “I asked my mother if I could have one, and she said, ‘Oh sure. How many people?’
“‘Maybe twenty.’”
“‘That’s fine,’ and she pushed back the table in the dining room and said, ‘You can dance here.’”
Instead eighty people showed up at the Ferrara home, including the entire football team. “We were playing post office in the basement. My mother came to the basement landing and said, ‘What are they doing down there?’” The guests found the wine her father made every year and helped themselves. Her father probably wouldn’t have minded, she said. But then they failed to close the barrels tightly. “One hundred and twenty gallons of wine went down the drain that night. My father was so hurt he couldn’t even say anything. He never said a word to me about it. It was my last birthday party.” Every year he gave the wine to friends as gifts. He never drank it himself. That year, he had no gifts to give.
Despite that perhaps too-successful entre into entertaining, Lee took to parties like kids take to a playground. It started when she and her husband, Bob, arrived in Auburn in 1947, just as the G.I. Bill boom hit town. “I kind of missed being back home with everybody around, so I just kept them stirred up here,” she says. “I was always brewing something.”

Her first Christmas Eve in Auburn she was pregnant and unable to travel. Everybody in Hare Apartments, where they lived, was leaving to spend the holiday with family. Lee felt a little abandoned. In an attempt at festivity, Bob suggested they make eggnog and invite the folks who were home. They thought eggnog was Southern.
They got out the cookbooks to begin experimenting, with a neighbor and his wife acting as guinea pigs. The man was an especially avid taster. Later, as he staggered out the door, Lee went into labor. She never did get any eggnog that Christmas. She got a baby instead, Emilie.
A couple of weeks later, her neighbors moved away. “About ten years ago I got a letter from the husband and he said, ‘I am now finally able to say the word eggnog without getting sick.’ I sent him the recipe.”

Super Egg Nog

Separate eggs. Combine yolks, sugar, milk and bourbon. Whip cream to very soft peak and fold into the egg mixture. Whip egg whites to soft peak and fold into egg mixture. Serve in punch cups with freshly grated nutmeg. Serves 10-12 (4 ounce) servings. Recipe can be doubled.

That was sixty years ago, and Lee still has an annual Christmas Eve eggnog party, using one of the recipes she discovered the night of Emilie’s arrival. She doesn’t send invitations. Anybody can come, and she tells friends to bring everybody they know.
When Bob died in 2001, Lee’s son-in-law, William Allbrook, took over the eggnog-making duties. “People stop by from church, and the Catholics stop by on the way to church. Some of them won’t miss it,” she says. She may host twenty-five, she may host a hundred. They just make the eggnog as they go so they don’t have to worry about it.
It sounds just like the kind of gathering her parents would have thrown in Morgantown, West Virginia.
“Everyone was at our house at Christmastime,” Lee recalls. All kinds of people dropped in, including the folks from the little holy roller church down the hill. They’d arrive caroling, and her parents would invite them in too.
You can see Lee’s parents reflected in her.

“My mother never complained, ever,” Lee remembers. “No matter what happened, she’d say, ‘Things could be worse.’ She was just so delighted to have her children in America.”
She recalls a college friend of hers bursting into her room. “‘Oh, I’m so shocked,’” her friend blurted. “‘Your mother is down in your kitchen drinking wine with a black preacher and a Jewish Rabbi.’ And I said, ‘That’s my mother.’”
In the late 1960s her mother’s influence was telling. Lee had read about a man she thought would make a good guest for her show — she no longer remembers his name — and wrote to him saying if he was ever in Alabama, she’d love to have him on “Today’s Home.” He wrote and said he’d travel to Alabama just to do the show. He enclosed an article he wrote. “Then I noticed his picture. He was black.” Integration was new. “I wrote back immediately and said I’d be delighted to have him.” Lee arranged for him to stay at a local motel. “He came on Monday and stayed through Friday — all for a thirty minute show.” She took him around all week and made sure he had a good time.
Lee nods her head slowly, grinning. “People tell me that I act like my mother.”
Her parents’ arrival in the United States is a tale in itself. When Lee’s mother was 13, a man came to the home of her parents in Italy (Lee’s grandparents) and promised to take their daughter to the United States, a land of opportunity, where he would see to her education. But the youngster’s life in New York City turned out to be a sort of indentured servitude she was powerless to escape. Two years later the man returned to Italy and approached the parents of a 16-year-old boy with the same offer. The two young people worked in the man’s grocery store seven days a week, from eight in the morning until eleven at night. Three years after that boy arrived, Lee’s mother and that young man ran off in the middle of the night and married. These are Lee’s parents. No one knows what happened over the next few days, but the young couple eventually returned to the grocery store and said they would stay if the owner paid them.

A few years later they struck out on their own, opening a grocery store in Morgantown. That store put all eight Ferrara children through college, including four through medical school. Lee earned a master’s degree and pursued a doctoral degree in nutrition sciences at the University of Wisconsin. That’s where she met Bob.
The couple moved to Auburn when Bob took a job as a professor of animal dairy science at API. Lee quickly found a spot in the API School of Home Economics. A few years later, she was railroaded into the television business.
It was 1955 and the extension service wanted to change the image of its television show on the newly created Alabama ETV, the nation’s first educational television network. The chiefs at extension weren’t happy with the show’s host and his overall-clad, rough-and-ready persona. Lee remembers him as a sweet, smart, man, but extension wanted him gone.
Lee didn’t know any of this when she got a call from API President Ralph Draughon saying she was to report to his office in twenty minutes. “I told him I had a class in thirty minutes, and he said, ‘Come right now.’ So I hiked up the hill, thinking, What in the world do they want?”
When she arrived, he was direct: “You’re in a hurry so we won’t waste any time. This is your salary, this is your office, this is what you’ll be doing.”
She said no. She didn’t want the television job. She wanted to keep teaching.
“I don’t even own a television. I have no idea what to do!” she told them.
Her protests were ignored.
She hurried back to her classroom. While she lectured, the dean of home economics, Norma Compton, strode into her room and in front of her wide-eyed students declared: “You have your nerve applying for another job.”
“I didn’t apply for the job, and I didn’t accept it,” she told the dean. But the dean held a memo saying that Lee Cannon was transferring to the extension service, and her teaching load reduced from three classes to two.

If there was ever a moment of doubt, the memo made it clear there would be no wiggling out of this new assignment. What’s worse, this was Friday. Her first show would air on Tuesday.
To cram for the show, she sought out a neighbor who owned a television set. An hour of watching Liberace didn’t really settle her growing sense of panic. “The next morning the kids were home — I was really a nervous wreck. I looked out front door. There was my son full of blood. Somebody had hit him with a rock. He was 6 years old.” She and her husband rushed their son to the emergency room.
As they drove home, her son’s head patched with a simple Band-Aid, Lee remembered the bacon she’d left cooking in her new electric frying pan. She’d be lucky if it was only burnt.
But the bacon was fine. The event inspired the idea for her first show: How to choose a home appliance. “I used that as an example. It worked.”
For thirty years she kept the show going.
“I didn’t get a dime for my TV program. I was relieved from teaching one class to produce and host a live television show for thirty minutes. And if you don’t think that was hard and a lot of work for somebody who didn’t even own a TV set. …”
“Today’s Home’s” popularity grew. “I was on TV every hour of the day somewhere in Alabama,” she says. The show changed her parties, too. Now they featured the well-known people she interviewed: Dr. Benjamin Spock, Ralph Nader, Dean Rusk.
“I felt responsible after a show to invite the guest to my home and have somebody in for drinks.”
In between she continued to teach, write food columns for four newspapers — including the Montgomery Advertiser, and the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer — and pen so many cookbooks she’s lost count of the number.
“I only wrote two big ones,” she says.
Her “Southern Living Quick and Easy Recipes” went into seven printings and sold more than 30,000 copies.
“I got practically nothing writing the Southern Living cookbook. I got $700. Money didn’t mean anything to me. I would have done it for nothing.”
The 1995 “Menu Celebrations,” originally written as a textbook, includes a menu for every day of the year, plus recipes, and tips for beginning cooks. Then there were the smaller cookbooks — about fifty she guesses.
Whenever Lee put together a cookbook, she tested every new recipe. She’d cook all afternoon and serve it to her three children: Emilie, Bobby, and Leigh.
“My kids would come home from school and they’d say ‘What’s for dinner?’ and I’d say, ‘Four salads and shut up.’ They had to eat whatever I was testing. Sometimes it was four desserts.

Her life was a whirlwind, but she is a good organizer. She’s had to be, making every second count. “I made all my clothes. If I had ten minutes, I’d sew or work on something. I never, ever wasted a minute. I wasn’t a big television follower either. For a while I was testing recipes till two o’clock in the morning — for my class and my television show. And I was writing a newspaper column.” For twenty years she went to bed at three and got up at six on weekdays.
And through it all, Lee continued to have lots of parties, including her “brown bag party,” which continued her parents’ tradition of Christmas giving. Each guest goes home with a brown bag with a special treat.
Over the years, the gifts have changed. At first, it was sugared pecans and cereal with white chocolate. Then she started making her famous hot pepper jelly — she calls it “jamelly” because it is neither jam nor jelly. Lucky guests get a jar in their brown bag.
Lee just finished making this year’s supply.
“You’d be surprised what it does to my house when I can four hundred jars in one day. It takes two days to get the paraffin cleaned up. Sometimes I have to scrape it off the floor and ceiling.”
But it’s worth it. “It’s just a nice thing to be able to give somebody something.”
Making a guest list is the step one in Lee’s party planning g itinerary. That helps her decide what to serve. Then she chooses her menu and makes a market order. Usually the menu revolves around things she can make ahead of time and keep fresh without freezing.
People freeze too often, she says. It ruins food.
After shopping, she starts cooking. The last step is preparing food that has to be done the day of the party.
But she doesn’t fuss, doesn’t decorate, doesn’t even buy flowers. If she can’t bring the blooms from the yard, she goes without.
“I think it’s foolish to invest a lot on flowers. I’d rather put that money in food. And I always pay someone to play the piano.”
She never worries before a party.
“I’m not a perfectionist,” she says, “and I never admit a mistake.”
The first time Vincent Price came to her house, she improvised the whole thing.

“It was a Sunday night and my house was — well you know how it is if you know nobody’s coming.” She had been told Price never accepted invitations to private homes. But he’d enjoyed the time on her show and afterwards surprised her by accepting an invitation.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, what does the house look like? What do I have to eat?’ The thing I remember about that night was that I had to borrow bourbon from my neighbor, and I didn’t have any hors d’oeuvres.”
She looked in the refrigerator and found some spaghetti sauce and meatballs. That went in a chafing dish, and she passed them off as hors d’oeuvres. “People were eating it up. No one ever knew.”
The second time he visited, she was ready for him. Among the dishes served was an artichoke dip. Now, every time she serves it she tells her guests, “This is the recipe Vincent Price loved so much, he called and asked me for it.”

My VP Spread
(Vincent Price asked me for this recipe)

Combine artichoke, mayonnaise, sour cream, 1/4 cup parmesan cheese, Cheddar cheese, garlic salt and Tabasco sauce; mix well. Spread in a 11 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 2- inch greased baking dish (2 quart). Sprinkle top with 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese and dust lightly with curry powder (optional). Bake in a 325 degree oven for 20 minutes. Serve warm with king-sized corn chips or crackers.

Another time Dean Rusk, U.S. secretary of state from 1961 to 1969, was a guest on the show. As he came down the driveway to Lee’s home, the electricity went dead. They were in total darkness.
“So I said, ‘Light every candle you can find. Everything!” As the party progressed Rusk told her, “You know Lee, I think this party with candlelight is just charming.” He never knew the power was out.
But even the most unflappable hostess can’t hide a calamity. Lee had friends coming over for a drink before the Heart Ball. Minutes before they were due, she lit candles on the dining room table and touched up the arrangement of artificial flowers beside them, pushing a sprig back into place. The phone rang and Lee went to answer it. The sprig moved. By the time she got back, the table was on fire and so was the chandelier above it. Most of the food was already on the table, and it went up in smoke. She put the fire out, but not before the ceiling burned. When her guests arrived, there was no hiding what happened.
“It was a mess — all because of one artificial sprig. Of course, people are always more jovial when a disaster happens. So everybody had a wonderful time.”
Lee wasn’t able to move a tray of strawberries from the table quite fast enough as guests arrived and one person managed to grab one. “You know those strawberries, they looked good, but they tasted funny.” Probably because what looked like powdered sugar was actually ash.
When the university sponsored a seminar on pornography, the station gave her $90 to host a cocktail buffet after the show, and of course she invited everyone involved in the seminar, including an editor from “Screw Magazine.” She doesn’t think it was the magazine’s infamous founder, Al Goldstein. The editor put a stack of the raunchy tabloids on a little round coffee table during the party and later asked Lee if she’d seen one. She hadn’t. When he went to retrieve one for her, they were all gone. He brought in another stack in from his car. That vanished too. Lee never saw anyone take one.
“The men were hiding them under their coats,” she says.
It takes practice and élan to pull off some of the parties she’s given. She’s had as many as three hundred people at some events. She entertained the boys from Sigma Chi fraternity — her husband was the faculty sponsor — during parents’ week. “They’d bring their grandmothers, and aunts and uncles. You could look down from the porch, and the patio was solid — just tops of heads.”
The night of Lee’s 90th birthday party, the crowd is nearly as big. It seems like everyone she ever met is here. There’s even a group from her days at the Hare Apartments.
“The thing I remember most is the eggnog parties,” says Gloe Herbert Dyne, who spent part of her childhood in the Hare Apartments. “People kept coming all night long.”
“Don’t forget the dress-up parties and the jitterbug,” says Bill Sherling, another former Hare resident.
“Lee was born social and never changed,” Ellen Sherling says.
A few weeks later, Auburn Mayor Bill Ham caught up with Lee as she had breakfast with friends and presented the girl from the West Virginia grocery store the key to the city.
She already possesses the keys to many hearts charmed by a personality that’s a happy mix — contradictory but never clashing. She’s playful but hard working; celebrated yet humble; energetic but relaxed; passionate but calm. Then there are the parts that have no opposite: She is forever funny and charming.
“Everybody agrees that you’re the hostess with the mostest,” I say.
“I don’t know why I’m noted for throwing parties,” Lee says. “I didn’t do it lavishly. I just had a lot of fun.”