Priceless Memories

by Bob Barker; Digby Diehl

  One time I was playing golf at Bel Air, and I hit a ball out-of-bounds. I said out loud to myself, “Oh, G-8 would have been disappointed with that.” My golfing partner shot me a look of disbelief.

  “Did you just say G-8? Did you read G-8?” he asked. He, too, had been a boyhood believer, and after that, we talked the whole rest of the round about G-8 and His Battle Aces.

  • • •

  As a boy, I loved baseball. I never wanted or even thought about going into show business when I was little. I have often said all I ever wanted to do was pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals professional baseball team, and the only thing that stopped me was a complete lack of talent.

  In 1983, I was in St. Louis to host the Miss Universe pageant at the Kiel Auditorium, and someone in the Cardinals office had read or heard an interview in which I had said that my boyhood ambition had been to pitch for the Cardinals. So he invited me out to the ballpark.

  Whitey Herzog was the manager of the Cardinals at that time. He gave me a handsome Cardinals jacket that I still wear and a Cardinals bag that I carried until it was in tatters. When my Cardinals bag finally disintegrated, Sue MacIntyre, coproducer of Price, called her mother, who lived in St. Louis, and had a new one rushed to me before I went into a depression. In addition to giving me my Cardinals jacket and bag, during my visit to the ballpark, Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog signed me to a contract with the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. Under the terms of the contract, I receive a dollar a year from the Cardinals, so long as I do not pitch. Whitey said that if he sees me even warming up, the contract is null and void.

  Naturally, my father’s dying young was a tragic blow to me and my mother, but nevertheless, I still look back on my childhood as a wonderful time, and I have many vivid memories of marvelous activities and lasting friendships. My first friend that I can remember, from a very young age, was a little fellow named Jesse Goins. This was actually before we moved to South Dakota. We were still in Springfield, Missouri, and I was younger than six years old. Jesse was a year older than me, and he lived near my grandmother. He was a lot of fun. He was not only bright but extraordinarily talented. He could play the guitar and sing, even at that young age. This was southwest Missouri. Plenty of music around there, and this boy could really play. He was hardly able to hold the guitar, but he was so good that he went on the radio when he was in the third grade. He became a successful country-and-western musician. Very successful with the ladies, too, I guess. Jesse died at an early age, and his mother said, “It was the women who did it. The women just wouldn’t let Jesse alone.”

  Jesse was also the first person, the first of many I might add, who told me I could not sing. I remember he was at my house one time, and he had his guitar. He was singing and playing, and he said, “Sing with me.” So I started singing. When we stopped, he looked at me, and he said, “Billy, you don’t sing, you talk the words.” I suppose that was his way of saying I was way out of tune. He was absolutely right. I could not sing then. And I never could sing.

  Another time, after we had moved to South Dakota, my mother and I went to the Episcopal church. My grandfather had been a Methodist minister, but there were only three churches in town for us to choose from—Catholic, Episcopal, and Lutheran. Anyway, I went to Sunday school, and the church decided it was going to have a choir. They had no auditions or anything. They just said, “Go on, Billy, you are in the choir.”

  I carried the cross into the church and led the choir into the church, and one day the minister, Reverend Barber, said he wanted the choir to stay after church and sing a hymn. So we stayed and he gave us a hymn, and we all sang it. He went by and listened to each little boy who was singing. He was apparently satisfied because he soon let everyone go, but after the others left, the reverend came up to me and said, “Billy, you can stay in the choir. You can still carry the cross. But when the others sing, you just move your lips.”

  I never sang again. (I used to be a frequent guest on The Dinah Shore Show and Dinah tried constantly to get me to sing. No dice.)

  • • •

  It was not all school and play back then. As I grew older, I did start to work at various jobs. My first job as a boy was pumping water for Shorty O’Connor’s café in Mission. There was no water system, and I pumped water out of an artesian well for him. That was my first job ever. I also sold magazines, Collier’s and Boys’ Life, and newspapers, the Minneapolis Tribune and the Omaha Bee News.

  But my favorite job as a kid came later, when I was in high school in Springfield, Missouri. About sixty miles south of Springfield, there is a summer resort on Lake Taneycomo called Rockaway Beach. It is in Taney County, Missouri (hence “Taney Co-MO”—get it?). Charlie White was a teacher at Central High, and he managed Hotel Taneycomo down there at the lake every summer for a man named Merriman. Mr. Merriman was with the Armour Food Company in Chicago. He owned this beautiful hotel, and he had a lovely home on the beach as well. As the manager of the hotel, Charlie would take five boys every summer to go down to Rockaway to work as bellhops. I went down there for three years, after my sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school.

  We bellhops lived in a tiny little cabin called the Owl’s Roost. The hotel itself had a long beautiful lobby, appropriately rustic. There were cottages all up the hillside. We were paid only $10 a month, but we got room and board and our tips. I made enough there every summer to last me through the next school year. I had some great friends on that job with me. Jim Brown went on to become a successful surgeon. Jim Calloway was another friend. He became a naval aviator and flight instructor. Walter Baker became very successful in the cement business in Memphis.

  In addition to being bellhops, for a brief time, Jim Brown and I were involved in another caper. At that time you could not buy liquor on Sundays. People would check into the hotel and want to buy liquor, but since it was Sunday, they were out of luck. Being the enterprising young men that Jim and I were and always looking to provide service to the guests, we decided that we would buy the liquor and then resell it to the guests at a very profitable margin. This worked splendidly for about three weeks. We had said it was capitalism at its best. Then Charlie White told us one day that the owner of the liquor store wanted to see us. We went over there, and the gentleman explained to us that we could call it whatever we wanted, but, he said, we were bootlegging, and if we did not stop, we were going to be incarcerated. He was polite, but he was very effective. Jim and I immediately abandoned that business endeavor.

  All of us bellhops had a grand time working at Rockaway Beach. Dorothy Jo came down to visit me sometimes. Sometimes I hitchhiked home to see Dorothy Jo, or I would get a ride with the mail truck. Often she and I would go hear a big band play at the Shrine Mosque—among them Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. At the end of the weekend, she drove me out to the highway, and I hitchhiked back to the hotel.

  The job of bellhop at Rockaway Beach was a coveted assignment that every boy at Central High School would have liked to have had. We had as much fun, if not more, than the guests. There was a dock and a pier with lots of room to lie in the sun. We had the best tans on the beach.

  Johnny Kidd and His Louisianans played every night at the dance pavilion, and the bellhops got in free. Dorothy Jo and I danced away many a night there. She was a great dancer. I didn’t dance very well… but I danced better than I sang.

  I got a lot of mileage out of telling my friends about checking singer/actor Tony Martin into Hotel Taneycomo, and like all bellhops, I remember his generous tip.

  I look back at bellhopping at Hotel Taneycomo on Rockaway Beach with the fondest of memories.

  • • •

  I am eternally grateful to my mother for seeing to it that I had an active and educationally rich childhood. She was devoted to education and to me, and she made sure I got the maximum benefits out of my schooling experience in the South Dakota school system. Both of my parents contributed significantly to my love of nature, my love of sports, and my love of animals
. They were dynamic, physically active people who loved to travel, loved to read, and were always kind to other people. They taught me to believe in myself and to treat people with dignity and respect. When I look back on my childhood and my youth, I am immediately reminded that it was all made possible by the love and care provided to me by my mother and father, for the few years he had with us.

  6

  Tilly–What a Mom!

  I have often said that the three most influential people in my life were Dorothy Jo, Ralph Edwards, and my mother, Matilda, or Tilly, as she was called. I have written about Dorothy Jo and some of the wonderful years we had together, and of course, Ralph Edwards gave me my first opportunity on national television and became a dear friend. But first there was my mother. She was the one who raised me single-handedly from a young age after my father died. She was an extraordinary woman, and she taught me, loved me, encouraged me, and instilled in me values and principles that have carried me and benefited me throughout my life and career. As I have said, I have lived a blessed life—and without a doubt, one of the most profound blessings of my life is the love and upbringing I received from my mother.

  • • •

  My mother, Matilda Kent Tarleton, was born on October 18, 1898, in Eminence, New York, the daughter of a Methodist minister. He had come over from Ireland and had met my grandmother in Eminence, New York, where he had a church and preached regularly. They had five daughters and a son. One of the daughters had a respiratory problem, and the doctors suggested that they move to a drier climate. They chose South Dakota. The winters are very cold there, but South Dakota is dry. He preached in Miller, South Dakota; Arlington, South Dakota; and ended up in Hot Springs, South Dakota—which is out in the Black Hills, an absolutely beautiful part of the state.

  Once I asked my mother why my grandfather moved from church to church as he had. She laughingly replied, “Maybe he did it so that he could use his best sermons more than once.” I don’t know whether she was kidding or not.

  Mother told me about a young male goat that her father brought home one day. She described the goat as a real character. Immediately upon arrival, the goat considered himself a full-fledged member of the family, and that’s the way everyone treated him.

  When the children ran and played outside, the goat joined in and enjoyed every moment of it. Although he continually tried to come into the house, apparently my grandmother drew the line at that. However, the goat did find a way to check up on what was going on in the house. He learned to get up on the chicken coop and watch the family through a large living-room window.

  One day my grandmother made grape jam and threw the grape skins out into the trash, where the skins fermented. This curious goat found the fermented grape skins, and of course, he ate them. A bit later, someone looked out a window, and said, “Quick, come look at this goat.”

  My mother said the goat was prancing around on its hind legs, waving its front hooves in the air. She said he looked every bit as if he were dancing. My grandfather must have had some idea of what was wrong with the goat. He went straight to the trash and confirmed that the fermented grape skins were missing. My grandfather turned, came back into the house, and said, “That goat is drunk!”

  When my mother graduated from high school in Arlington, South Dakota, where she was valedictorian of her class, she left home permanently. She went to college in Mitchell, South Dakota, at Dakota Wesleyan University. Her decision to leave home and seek educational achievements was typical of my mother. She was very independent, and she always put a high value on education of all kinds. While she was in college, she worked in a grocery store, paying for her room and board, and she always garnered good grades. Mother was the oldest of the six children in her family, and her father could not afford the college, but my mother would never let anything stop her when she had her mind set. She was just a kid herself, a teenager, but here she was, living away from home and working while attending college. She was that kind of woman.

  Mom may have had to work to pay her room and board, and it may have been tough finding enough time to study so she could make excellent grades, but I also think she had time to thoroughly enjoy college life. I have looked through a couple of her college yearbooks and a book of photographs taken with an old Kodak box camera during her years at Dakota Wesleyan. Both the yearbooks and photographs reflect lots of friends and lots of fun. Mom belonged to several organizations and clubs, both academic and social. She played roles in some of the university’s dramatic productions.

  In perusing Mom’s college yearbooks, I also learned that she had been quite an athlete at Dakota Wesleyan. I was particularly impressed with a picture of her running the hurdles. I said, “Mom, you look great in that picture.”

  Mom smiled and said to me with mock indignation, “Young man, I’ll have you know that at the time that picture was taken, my measurements were exactly the same as the measurements of Miss America that year!”

  One of Mother’s friends at Dakota Wesleyan was Francis Case, who later represented South Dakota in the United States Congress from 1937 until his death in 1962. He spent the years 1937 to 1950 in the House of Representatives and 1951 to 1962 in the Senate. I remember being with Mother one day when she was campaigning for the office of Todd County superintendent of schools, and she crossed trails with Francis Case someplace out on the prairie. He was campaigning for the first of his terms in the House of Representatives. During their conversation, Mom mentioned that I enjoyed reading military books and that I thought I would like to go to West Point someday. Senator Case told me, “Billy, you study hard, and if I am still in Congress when you graduate from high school, I’ll see to it that you have an appointment to West Point.”

  Not only was Francis Case still in Congress when I graduated from high school, he was still in Washington, D.C., when I took Mom and Dorothy Jo back there on a sightseeing trip in about 1955. Senator Case made sure we saw and did everything a tourist should see and do in Washington. With apologies to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, et cetera, one of the highlights of our journey was having a bowl of the famous Senate bean soup with Senator Case in the Senate Dining Room.

  • • •

  After Mother finished college, she again set out on her own and became a high school teacher in White River, South Dakota. She really had a love and respect for education, and that is something she instilled in me from a very early age. I was not around yet, but later I heard stories about some of the remarkable things my mother had done during these early years. For example, while she was teaching in White River, the great worldwide flu epidemic struck in 1918. In addition to her teaching duties, my mother also nursed people all around White River, South Dakota.

  Not many people today are aware of the danger and the damage of the flu epidemic of 1918. Unlike the recent versions of the flu, this was nothing to be held off by an inoculation. More than 28 percent of the U.S. population contracted the flu, and it killed 2.5 percent of its victims. What did this mean in terms of historical impact? To quote Gina Kolata’s excellent book Flu (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999): “The epidemic affected the course of history and was a terrifying presence at the end of World War I, killing more Americans in a single year than had died in battle in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.”

  My mother opened a clinic in White River with beds for twelve people. At a time when entire towns were wiped out by the flu, she faithfully brought medical attention to everyone in or near White River. She helped people all over the county, out on the farms, in the small villages, everywhere. In some instances on farms, she found people with the flu living in mud huts and lying in an inch of fetid water.

  My mother had at one time wanted to be a doctor, but medical school was out of the question, so she studied biology and taught biology in school. She had learned about medicine as well, and later she would say during that whole epidemic, she never lost a patient. She was very proud of that, as well she should be.
It is an incredible record considering that more than an estimated one hundred million people died of this terrible scourge worldwide. For more than fifty years after the epidemic, Mother received letters of thanks from people she had nursed.

  • • •

  It was during that period in 1918 to 1919 that my mother met my father. Byron Barker was a rugged outdoor kind of guy, an adventurous man who had grown up on a ranch in South Dakota with cattle and horses. He was working in the electrical industry when he met my mother. Electricity was in its infancy then. It was quite a pioneering and exciting time for the field. He and my mother married in 1920, and Mom accompanied him on various jobs. After a year and a half or so, my father became foreman on the high line through the state of Washington. They were living in a tent city near a little town called Darrington when I arrived. The tent city was created because this was still the Wild West. There simply were no towns near the rugged area where the electric lines were being installed. I was born on December 12, 1923. They went to a doctor’s house in Darrington where my mother gave birth, and a few days later they returned with me to the tent city. Mom said, “It was a perfect place for an Indian father and his papoose.”

  One early evening while my father was working on the high line in Washington, a problem developed high on a tower. All of my father’s men had left for the day, so he decided to handle the problem himself. Unfortunately, his “hooks”—which are spiked climbing irons used by linemen to provide footholds—were not at the tower, but several pairs belonging to the men who worked for my father were located. Although they didn’t fit him perfectly, my father selected a pair and climbed the tower. But the hooks slipped. My father came crashing down and sustained an injury to his hip joint that affected his spine in a manner that proved fatal six years later.