Doc Bartok, the creator of Bardex, which is guaranteed to cure everything from tapeworms to the Big Knee, and Walking Mary Smith were strolling down memory lane. All I was doing was listening. Mary, the younger sister of Bessie Smith, was dressed in a flowing, flowery mumu with matching purse and headband and plastic fruit basket earrings. She wore diamonds in her teeth. She said, “We had us stars back then. Stars! Nowadays all a person’s got to do is scream a couple licks, and they got their own special on television ... I just don’t know what happened to people’s taste.”

Every year for more that 20 years, Doc and the Bardex Minstrels, with their comics, singers, dancers and musicians and a carload of Bardex, left Florida in April and followed the strawberry, bean, tomato and peanut crops north. They played every night except Sunday, and by August they would be deep in the Pennsylvania coal-mining country. After this, they turned around and headed back so they could work the tobacco farms and cotton fields in the Carolinas and Georgia before the rains and cold weather set in.

Doc and Mary talked about the comics they’d known and worked with. After listing Nipsy Russell, Red Skelton, Mickey Rooney, Stepin Fetchit (originally two men — Stephan and Fetchet), Redd Fox and a dozen others, they agreed that the best one of all was Sparky Anderson out of Albany, Ga. Doc said, “We had to have special heavy duty seats when he was on. People would tear up regular seats. They’d rare back and jump up and walk around and laugh so hard they’d wind up hugging one another. Blacks on one side, whites on the other. And we never had a lick of trouble.”

Mary told how wild and original Sparky was and how even Bojangles picked up a lot of his moves. They talked about the Bally Wagon, where the entire band rode into town stacked up 15 feet in the air on top of a horse-drawn wagon playing “Sweet Georgia Brown” while the local kids and the noon drunks would dance in the streets. Of the crazy acts in which a woman would drag a man down the street with a rope tied around his neck to attract a crowd. And they talked about the death of Bessie Smith outside Lulu, Miss.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, the movie houses couldn't compete with the free medicine shows, and many simply closed their doors until they rolled out and headed for the next town. Mary remembered it all. “We’d be playing a town of maybe two or three hundred, and along about first dark here they’d come. They’d be coming down the railroad tracks carrying their shoes tied about their necks. See, they’d be saving them for the show. The parents would be on the paths but the kids would be up there walking the rails. And they’d be bringing us iced tea and fresh flowers and pies and cakes. And if we were near an apron factory or an overalls mill, they’d be bringing us some of those things too. I tell you we were all they had. They treated us like kings and queens.”

Doc met his wife Betty at the Detroit fairgrounds when he was pitching medicine from the rumble seat of his Terraplane. Her father, Doctor Jacobs, had his own medicine show, with her mother billed as “Irene the girl with X-ray eyes.” It was a medicine show romance. Doc asked Betty, who was then 16, where their next show date was. Betty, in true showbiz fashion, told him the opposite direction. It was this that won the heart of Doc Milton Bartok, and he and Betty have been working together ever since.

Betty, who was exactly half the act when Doc was pitching, would move around the crowd feeling out when Doc should stop the pitch and start making the sales. Doc said, “It’s always best to keep your crowd on its feet. A man sitting down has a tough time getting at his wallet. You want him ready when you’re ready. Same with the women, you want those purses off the ground and in their laps.”

A typical show packed in 4,000 under the big tent while another 2,000 stood outside looking in the open side walls as Bessie Smith, Bojangles Robinson, Carmen Miranda, Leroy “Satchel” Paige and Mickey Rooney would belt out the new songs and do the new wild and crazy dances. They were big acts, bright and brassy acts. And the bands backing them up, dressed in flashy satin tuxedoes with matching top hats and checkered vests, have left sounds out there under the pecans and chinaberries that will be around forever.

But for me, one old curled and yellowed photograph, of a whole medicine troop at a railroad platform posing stylishly before their steamer trunks of costumes and medicine, caught it all. The women were wearing high-collared long dresses, fur muffs and veiled hats. The men, looking extremely pleased with themselves, were holding big cigars at rakish and sophisticated angles. Somehow, standing there in the slanting sun in front of the long-gone city of New Orleans, the cameraman had caught that fragile mixture of sly cunning and innocence reserved for skinny kids selling Chiclets. Doc was smiling, as he fingered the grained and faded print. “I guess you’d have to say they were simpler times back then. Simpler. People weren’t so overloaded and exposed to so many things. They still trusted everyone.” He paused, thought it over and agreed with himself. “Even strangers."