Is it true she’d walk around with a big hatpin sticking people if they misbehaved?
Oh, yes. She stuck me many times with it! We’d hang out there. And the old Clarkson Hotel, over on 7th and Union. They had the National Life and Accident Insurance building there and next door was the Clarkson Hotel, and they had a coffee shop. And we’d hang out in there a lot because we did a lot of the Friday night Oprys, and they did a lot of the morning radio shows there like Flatt & Scruggs. It was a hangout there. But it was a fraternity, everybody knew each other. It’s so different now. But you know, times change. Do you have any idea back then that this industry would become what it has? Even in the slump that we’re in now country music is still a billion dollar industry. Oh yeah. Well, you know, back then there wasn’t many albums, it was the singles. You sold singles. And then later on, if you sold 25 thousand albums at $40,000 you had a hit. But in those days — in the mid-’50s, early ’60s — there was less than 300 radio stations that were playing country music and a lot of th
