Smack-dab in the middle of barbecue and baseball season, Bobby Wright is feeling pretty good.

        Along with her daughter, Jamese, the 69-year-old Dayton woman bottles and sells Mrs. Wright's Recipe — a spicy, all-purpose sauce based on an old family formula that goes especially well with brats, metts and other barbecue and baseball food. When we last heard from the Wrights in April, the sauce was available only at a few select Dayton and Cincinnati Kroger stores, Jungle Jim's Market in Fairfield and at Cincinnati Reds and minor-league Dayton Dragons home games. Since then, Mrs. Wright has persuaded all the Cincinnati-area Kroger stores to stock her sauce.

        “It's in Cincinnati and Dayton and just about everywhere in between,” she says with her big laugh.

        She calls her sauce a “darned good condiment” — thick and tangy, kind of like a cross between salsa and steak sauce. As good as it tastes, making and selling it may have actually helped saved the Cincinnati native's life.

        After her husband died suddenly in 1994, Mrs. Wright fell into deep depression, keeping her curtains drawn and rarely leaving home. Worried that her mother might not regain her emotional health, Jamese decided to ask for her help in learning to make the family sauce in 1998.

        “I knew that if she thought I needed her, it might pull her out of it,” Jamese says.

        While living in Austin, Texas, Jamese began bottling the sauce and selling it at food festivals. It sold so well, Mrs. Wright began helping her daughter, who moved back to Dayton in 2000.

        The next year, Mrs. Wright took barbecued ribs, chicken and samples of her sauce to Sports Service, the company that handles concessions for the Dayton Dragons. The company was so impressed, it began serving the sauce at Dragons' home games. Next, she persuaded a few Dayton Kroger stores to carry it. Earlier this year, Sports Service at Cinergy Field began offering Mrs. Wright's Recipe at Reds games, and by late April, more than 30 Cincinnati-area Kroger stores were on board.

        Business is so good, Mrs. Wright was able to hire a distributor, which means she no longer has to deliver the sauce from the trunk of her Oldsmobile. Now she has started knocking on doors at Bigg's stores.

        Her long-range plan is to approach Sports Service, which just placed another sauce order for Cinergy Field, to sell her sauce at other stadiums in the East. From there, she hopes to branch out to stores in each city.

        “I used to wake up wondering if I wanted to live,” Mrs. Wright says. “Now it's: "Who am I going to sell the sauce to next?' ”

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