(She really liked to find some good family entertainer who had an inspirational story or some expert knowledge. She had yet to find anyone who had all three.) She especially liked singers who had once been alcoholics and got cured by God, or comedians who’d had a gambling problem but got cured by God, or just plain folks who had had something horribly wrong with them and got cured by God. Not that the show was overtly religious; they were always very careful about not specifying which particular God did all this curing-it could be either a Christian or a Jewish God. She also liked to have women ex-convicts on the show-especially the ones who had had kids while in prison-and then have an expert on at the same time to teach them money management and how to stay within a budget instead of stealing things.

Candy planned the menus for the kitchen segment, making sure that each and every meal was both wholesome and economical, although she did splurge a little bit on her annual “Romantic Dinner for Two When the Kids Are Spending the Night at Grandma’s” segment. Mostly she specialized in “stretcher meals”-making that Sunday roast last through Tuesday, or the chili that you could eat as just chili, or chili over spaghetti, or chili on a baked potato-not, as Jack had once joked on the air, meals that you ate before you got carried out on a stretcher.

Candy gave makeup tips (she noticed that women ex-convicts either wore too much makeup, which was unattractive to men, or no makeup at all, which was also unattractive to men, although she suspected that some of these women weren’t interested in attracting men at all), and weight-loss tips (a can of Budweiser and a chocolate doughnut do not a breakfast make), and even tips on how to keep the passion alive in your marriage (a filmy negligee behind a locked door doesn’t necessarily make you a prostitute).

While Candy knew that some people-perhaps thousands of people-made fun of her, she also knew that her work did some good for thousands of others. There were people out there who had sought help because a show had set an example for them, there were families who had made it through the week on her tuna casserole, and there were marriages that were better off just for the fact of having sent the kids to Grandma’s for the night.