Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 18, 1992 TAG: 9201180398
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LORI DODGE ROSE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: POPLAR BLUFF, MO. LENGTH: Medium
SHE HONORS HOMETOWN IN A FLAMBOYANT WAY
You've probably heard of more folks from this southern Missouri town than you think.There's Danny Hogg, Shimmy Boyet and Tommy Clarkson, for instance. And then there's Bonnie Wolpers and Janie Barber.
Names don't ring a bell? They might if you'd been paying closer attention to CBS' hit sitcom "Designing Women."
The Monday night series, created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a Poplar Bluff native turned Hollywood writer, has been dropping local names since its start in 1986.
To Ed Dust, the executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, it's invaluable publicity - even if it comes at his expense. "Ed Dust" popped up on an episode as the name of a man in charge of the circus.
"She does more in a one-second deal on Monday nights than I can do all year long," Dust said. "It seems like everywhere I go across the state, people are always talking to me about `Designing Women.' "
Bloodworth-Thomason also sprinkles the names of family friends and classmates in her other series, "Evening Shade."
"She just loves her hometown," said her uncle, Howard Bloodworth, a 73-year-old lawyer. "She's a genuine country girl. She's just as Poplar Bluff-ish now as she was when she was a cheerleader out at the high school."
Roughly halfway between St. Louis and Little Rock, Ark. - and a long way from her California home - Poplar Bluff, population 17,000, also lies deep within Bloodworth-Thomason's heart.
She estimates she's used 50 to 100 real names in her shows.
"There are names that you just can't make up, like Irna Wallingsford," she said in a telephone interview from California. "Out here, you might have someone named Herschel, but in Poplar Bluff, you'd have Hirthel.
"One of the main reasons for doing this is I want the characters to seem real," she said.
Bloodworth-Thomason has even had two of her characters on "Designing Women," Charlene and her sister Carlene, hail from Poplar Bluff.
She seems to relish her inside jokes.
One of the regular characters on "Evening Shade," for example, is Herman Styles, a short, wimpy nerd who hikes his pants up to his chest - not at all like the real Herman Styles, who runs the Bonanza restaurant here.
"When `Evening Shade' first came on, I heard through the grapevine that I was going to be in it," Styles said. "Everybody was poised and ready that night here at the house. I bet like in three minutes I had six or seven people call and they were just absolutely hysterical because I'm 6-foot-6 and 220 pounds.
"My wife thinks I come across a little nerdy, though," he added.
Danny Hogg, who owns Barlow Furniture, took quite a lot of ribbing after his name was casually dropped on "Designing Women" as a boy a hometown friend of Charlene's had lost her virginity to in high school.
"I wrote Linda and told her I never met that girl," joked Hogg, a childhood friend of Bloodworth-Thomason. "I wasn't watching, but my mother was. She was sure surprised, to say the least."
The other names belonged to a bank president, a judge and a preacher, Howard Bloodworth said.
"I said, `Linda, you're going to get your bee-hind sued.' It was the talk of the town for four or five months," he said in his southern Missouri drawl.
She pokes a little fun, but Bloodworth-Thomason also pays tribute to her roots by providing college scholarships and other incentives to young women in the financially depressed Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas, birthplace to her her parents and her husband and co-producer, Harry Thomason.
"My father told us from the time we were born that this was the garden spot of the world, and I thought I was extremely lucky to get to grow up like Scout in `To Kill A Mockingbird,' " she said. "I had no idea until I went to college that that could be considered a drawback."
Bloodworth-Thomason's Claudia Co., a non-profit organization named for her late mother, was set up two years ago to help enrich the lives of Southern women. Backed by people such as Hillary Clinton, the first lady of Arkansas, and Helen Walton, the wife of Wal-Mart's Sam Walton, she's put the Claudia Co. to work in three areas important to her: college scholarships, literacy and domestic violence.
"We're all proud of her," Styles said. "Probably the most important thing that she does is she hasn't forgotten where she came from and who she is. It would have been so easy for her to take the money and run."
Instead, he said, "She came back and said, `Use the success that I've had to help you become successful.' "