Priceless Memories

by Bob Barker; Digby Diehl

  In spite of his tragic accident, my father and mother were smitten with the state of Washington—so much so that when my father’s responsibilities on the high line were completed, he signed on for another job in Seattle. My mother said, “The tent city was a lot of fun, but I was ready for an apartment in Seattle.”

  • • •

  About this time, in 1924, my mother’s father, my grandfather Robert E. Tarleton, the minister, died back in South Dakota. My mother had younger sisters and a brother, so there were still two daughters and a young son at home with my grandmother, but she was now a widow, living in South Dakota. She decided she was going to southwest Missouri. It had actually been a dream of my grandparents to retire on a farm in Missouri, and now my grandmother was determined to do as she and my grandfather had planned. She bought a farm in Houston, Missouri. She was a strong-willed independent woman, just like my mother.

  The idea of her mother alone with her younger sisters and a brother on a farm in Missouri did not sit well with my mother. She and my father were both concerned about this arrangement. After a short while, my mother and father moved from Washington and went down to Missouri to help my grandmother and try to make this farm work. After a while, they convinced her that she was not cut out for farming, and my grandmother traded the farm for a house in Springfield, Missouri. My grandmother, ever enterprising, opened a grocery store down the street from her house. My mother and father stayed there with her for a short time, but my father was still working electrical jobs near Springfield and then in Texas and in Mexico.

  • • •

  Soon we moved to Pampa, Texas, and then to Brownsville, Texas, right on the border. My father would go across the border every day, where he was foreman on a job installing lines in Mexico. It was just across the Rio Grande in a town called Matamoros. I was still just a small child then, around four or five years old. I guess you could say I absorbed a certain amount of traveling in my blood because of my parents and their willingness to follow electrical jobs wherever they led. There definitely was a pioneering spirit in those days. People did what they had to do for work and for family.

  As a side note, I have a vivid memory from that Texas period of when there was a visit by Charles Lindbergh to the airport in Brownsville. He made his historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, so this was some time shortly after that. It made a powerful impression on me, because I can still remember it to this day. My mom and dad took me out to the airport, and my dad put me on his shoulders so I could see Lindbergh and all the hoopla. It was an unforgettable thrill for me.

  • • •

  After Texas, our family moved back to Springfield in 1928, again to be with my grandmother, and my father had a good job there. He had been appointed electrical inspector for the city of Springfield, and he went out to buy a new car because there would be a lot of driving in his work. He never worked a day as inspector. He was supposed to start on a Monday, and he became ill on the prior Friday. He was never well again. He died thirteen weeks later. The crushed hip had never healed properly, and ultimately it had rubbed up against his spine. As best as the medical profession could tell in those days, that is what killed him.

  My father died at home. I remember that I was sitting on my grandmother’s lap. She was reading me the funnies from the newspaper. My mother came out of the bedroom and over to me, and she said, “Billy, Daddy has gone up to live with Jesus.” I was only six years old, but I understood he had died. The manner in which my mother chose to tell me was beautiful. There was no crying, no hysterics, even though she herself had suffered this terrible loss. I was too young to realize it at the time, but with her gentleness and tenderness and by painting the picture that way for me, my mother had made the loss of my father more bearable for me.

  Never in the ensuing weeks did my mother ever cry in front of me. I am sure she cried alone, but she never cried in front of me, never lamented her fate. She just said to me that she and I were going to be partners, and this was going to work. It was 1929—the Depression had arrived and she was a young widow with a six-year-old son.

  My mother raised me on her own from the time I was six years old until I was thirteen, through the Great Depression and during the dust bowl in South Dakota. Those are very formative years. She would later remarry, but there was a long stretch of years when aside from some extended family, it was just her and me. Our bond, which was already strong, became even stronger.

  Although I was just a child at the time, I immediately recognized author Timothy Egan’s eloquent descriptions of the dust bowl when I read his book The Worst Hard Time (Houghton Mifflin, 2006):

  Earlier, the land had been overturned in a great speculative frenzy to make money in an unsustainable wheat market. After a big run-up, prices crashed. The rains disappeared—not just for a season but for years on end. With no sod to hold the earth in place, the soil calcified and started to blow. Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky; and rolled like moving mountains—a force of their own. When the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, well. A scoop shovel was needed just to clean the house in the morning. The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away; like a walk in space, tethered to the life support center. Chickens roosted in midafternoon.

  Mother and I experienced the misery of the dust bowl because after my father died, my mother turned to what she knew—teaching. She looked for a teaching job around Springfield and other nearby communities, but times were hard then and jobs were scarce. I can still remember the time she came home from an interview, and she said the superintendent of the school told her that she was qualified and that he had been impressed with her résumé. Then he told her that he had to give the job to a man because the man had a family to support.

  And my mother said, “I am a woman and I, too, have a family to support.”

  No luck.

  After that she wrote to my father’s older brother, who lived in Mission, South Dakota, and told him the situation. He got her a job teaching at Mission High School, and that’s why we moved to South Dakota. She was qualified and an excellent teacher. And she made the most of the opportunity. That was another thing she taught me, just an incredible work ethic—a resilient but steady march forward in the face of obstacles.

  Her college acting experience paid off in her teaching career. Mom directed plays both in White River and Mission. Those White River productions were before my time, but I had the best seats in the house when the Mission students trod the boards under Mom’s direction. The Mission High School plays were staged in the gymnasium at the Indian boarding school west of Mission, and the young actors played to full houses nightly—Friday and Saturday nights, that is. Monday through Friday the actors had to concentrate on their studies.

  After she taught at the high school for two years, she became the principal of the school, and then she ran for political office and became the Todd County superintendent of schools. She also wrote an excellent history text about South Dakota, Our State, which was used throughout the school system from the 1930s to the early 1960s. When I was hosting Miss USA, Miss South Dakotas frequently told me that they had studied Our State in school.

  • • •

  I attended school in South Dakota from the second grade up through the eighth grade, and it was a marvelous education. I never had my mother for a teacher, but she always checked my homework. She was always teaching me, guiding me, and stressing the importance of education. There was never any question of me going to college. It was just naturally assumed. She talked about my grammar school work as preparation for college. She always encouraged me in everything I tried to do.

  The respect and tradition of education that my mother established paid off in every aspect of my life. I learned to love reading from an early age because before I could read, she read to me. She got me a set of those classic children’s stories called Journeys Through Booklan
d that I still have. I loved to have her read to me and to this day—and I am eighty-four years old—I love reading. My appreciation of reading and books all came from her. She read to me until I learned to read.

  Surprisingly, the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of education was to get out of the first grade in Springfield, Missouri, and go up to South Dakota, where all the children in first, second, third, and fourth grades were in one room. Next door, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades were in another room. The moment I got there, my reading and learning took off—with my mother’s help of course.

  I had just started the first grade in Springfield, Missouri, about the time my father died. First grade was when you began to learn to read and write in the public schools of that era. It was my misfortune that the Springfield school system was experimenting at that time with their version of John Dewey’s progressive education. When I was learning to read in the first grade, we did not have phonics at all. We did not worry about the sound of letters. T was a man with a hat on, N was a haystack, M was two haystacks, and so on. I could look at the word table and I would not know whether it was a table or window or door. My mother would ask, “What is the sound of that word?” I did not know anything about the sounds.

  As soon as I got to South Dakota and that two-room schoolhouse, we were using phonics and my reading ability took off immediately. It was wonderful. There was also an Episcopal church with a library in the basement, and that library became my playground on many a cold winter day. Those cold winters up in South Dakota would include blizzards that shut down the school. So naturally, I stayed home and read. Sometimes there were two or three days in a row when you could not go to school because of the blizzards, and I would read some more. Had I stayed in Springfield with that nonphonics progressive education, I do not know if I would ever have learned to read.

  In addition to reading, my mother taught me how to drive. I remember she had a two-door Chevrolet when I was probably around eleven or twelve years old. I would drive it out on the highway occasionally, with Mom tensely watching my every move. In those days, there were no paved roads in South Dakota. The highways were all gravel, and they would leave a ridge down the middle, so if you were going to pass someone or go around, you had to carefully cross that little ridge. She never really lost her temper with me, but one time I found the car in front of her office with the key in the ignition—not unusual in Mission—and I decided to go for a little spin. Mother came out of her office just as I returned, and she was displeased, to put it mildly. I chose not to do that again.

  My mother eventually met my stepfather, Louis Valandra, while we were living in South Dakota. I was thirteen by then, and they got married. He was a kind man to both me and my mother. I got along very well with him. He and my mother had a son, my half brother, Kent. My brother and I immediately bonded, and we have been friends for a lifetime. He is fourteen years younger than I am, but we have always had good times together. When they were married, I had just finished the eighth grade, and we moved back to Springfield, Missouri, in 1937 so that my mother could be close to her mother. My stepfather went into the tire business there. I lived at home until I was nineteen. After that I joined the navy, and soon thereafter married Dorothy Jo.

  • • •

  My mother taught me so many things, it would be impossible to list them all. I would like to think I inherited her strong work ethic. I certainly did my fair share of traveling and some risk taking, as did she. She gave me a love of reading and a reverence for education. In her lifetime, she displayed a never-ending tenderness and affection for her mother and her family, which had a profound influence on me. She lost my father early, and she endured. I lost Dorothy Jo far too early, and I believe Mom’s strength helped me endure that loss. She shared her sense of humor with me, which no doubt helped develop one in me, and that humor served me well in my career. She took care of me when there was nobody else. Later on, I took care of her.

  My mother lived to be ninety-one years old. She lived with me in my home in Hollywood for many years before and after Dorothy Jo had passed away. She was a part of my life for over sixty-five years. In the end, things had come full circle. She fell when she was eighty-nine years old and shattered her wrist. Following surgery, she had a stroke. After the stroke, Mother was confined to a wheelchair and required nurses twenty-four hours a day. I had an elevator installed so the nurses could take Mother downstairs and out among the flowers she loved.

  We remained close all through life. How could we not? We had been close from the very beginning and from the years when it was just the two of us. In tent cities, on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, in small towns in Texas and Missouri, in snowbound freezing Dakota winters, and driving on dusty roads in a 1928 Chevrolet coupe with a rumble seat that she had when I was small. She lived to a good old age, saw almost all of the twentieth century, and died here in Hollywood. It was an incredible journey, and she was an amazing woman. She said we were going to be partners after my father died and things were going to be fine, and she was right. She made sure—with all her strength, tenderness, and intelligence—that things did turn out fine. Blessed, to be sure.

  7

  Up, Up, and Away as a Naval Aviation Cadet

  Today we look back and say that World War II was the last of the popular wars, and it is true. No one had any trouble making up his mind who was right and who was wrong in that war. I was a freshman at Drury College (a university now) in Springfield, Missouri, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Immediately, just about every young man in the country was ready to enlist in the military.

  The most popular subject of conversation among the boys at Drury was which branch of the service we were going to join. Some went into the U.S. Marines; some opted for the Army Air Corps, as it was called then; others chose the Coast Guard. And so it went.

  Me, I decided to become a naval aviator. Now I had never seen the ocean. I had never even been up in an airplane. And I certainly had never given any thought whatsoever to what was involved with landing an airplane on a carrier.

  • • •

  My decision to become a naval aviator was strictly a matter of vanity. One day I was paging through a glossy magazine and saw a full-page picture of a young, handsome naval aviator leaning against a sleek fighter plane. He was wearing his white dress uniform, the one with gold buttons, shoulder boards, a high collar, and a white hat with gold braid. Of course, his wings of gold were pinned prominently over his heart—and to top it all off, he had a deep tan. He was one terrific-looking guy.

  I took a long look at the picture of that great-looking naval aviator, and I thought, “If I am going to war, I want to go to war looking like that guy.” I went down to the post office that day and signed up to become a naval aviation cadet. When I finally had my wings of gold and my fighter plane, I used to go out and lean against it occasionally. Unfortunately, there was never a photographer around.

  I wasn’t commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy until two and a half years after I enlisted because the navy ordered me to remain at Drury for my sophomore year. You had to have completed two years of college to qualify to become a naval aviation cadet. I reported for active duty on June 9, 1943.

  The navy training regimen was pretty intense, but it was also a lot of fun. Over the course of eighteen months, I trained at eight different bases, met all kinds of different people, made new friends, and flew eight different airplanes, including the legendary Corsair. We worked hard, but we all wanted to be there. I don’t mean to imply that World War II was fun for anybody. I’m just saying I loved flying, and I enjoyed the camaraderie of the navy.

  • • •

  My navy training began at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, just outside of Kansas City. The first part of the cadet training was all ground school and athletics. We put in hours and hours of physical activity, conditioning, and sports. We were all young men in pretty good condition, but I’m talking four hours of hard-
core physical training during June, July, and August in Missouri. We did all this rigorous conditioning and athletic activity in the heat of the sweltering, humid summer. On breaks, we lined up at the drinking fountain, and guys would be yelling from the back, “You’ve had enough. Move on.” Sometimes they were not so good-natured.

  We played basketball, wrestled, boxed, did gymnastics, and ran track. Four hours a day of athletics and four hours of ground school. I never sweated so much in my life. Track was a particularly new experience for me. The navy had what was called military track. One day our platoon was scheduled to compete with another platoon in the quarter mile. Now, if you know anything about track, you know that the quarter mile is a tough race—that and the half mile—because you have to run fast the whole time. And a quarter mile is a long way to go. I had no experience in track and had never run a quarter mile in my life, but the physical training officer picked me out from our platoon and another guy out from the other platoon and told us to race each other.

  “On your marks. Get set. Go.” I knew nothing about pacing or anything about running technique; I just took off, not as fast as I could, but fast enough to be in the lead. I was still ahead of the other cadet about halfway around the track, maybe a little more. Soon, however, he sped by me. I tried to keep up with him, but I couldn’t. Pretty soon I was running as fast as I could to catch this fellow, and something happened that had never happened to me before: black started coming from the top and the bottom of my eyes. My vision was slowly closing down, and I realized that I was about to pass out. So I slowed down, and I could see more. As soon as I started running hard again, the black in my eyes returned. I was very close to passing out, but I kept running. Finally, I finished the quarter mile. He beat me, of course, and the men in my platoon were commiserating. I wasn’t concerned about losing. I was concerned about surviving. Then I found out that this cadet was the high school quarter-mile champion of Kansas. I was running the quarter mile for the first time in my life, and my competitor was the state champion. The guys in the platoon all had a good laugh about that. They thought it was hilarious. I considered it a near-death experience.