Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [28]
We met at Central High School in Springfield, Missouri. Jim Lowe, who has remained a loyal friend for all these years, is the one who introduced us. He and I were pals, and in those years he lived just a few blocks from Dorothy Jo. They had grown up together and were good friends. He was going to take someone to see an Ella Fitzgerald concert, and he suggested I ask Dorothy Jo to be my date. I had not met her, but I had seen her, and she was exceptionally pretty and popular. I didn’t think she would be interested in going out with me, but Jim said that she would. So I asked her to be my date for the Ella Fitzgerald concert, and she said yes. I was surprised and flattered and proud to be seen with her. We were together from that moment forward. And how about going to hear the great Ella Fitzgerald as a way to start a romance?
Dorothy Jo used to say if Bob Barker has anything, it is tenacity, because I did all those shows, pageants, bake-offs, and parades for so many years. But she was tenacious, too. Also bright, loyal, and loving. My brother Kent surprised me once. He was talking with someone else, and he said he thought Dorothy Jo was the smartest woman he had ever known. I didn’t realize that he had figured that out. I knew that she was smarter than I was before the Ella Fitzgerald concert was over.
• • •
I remember another concert we attended back in those days at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield. The band was Tommy Dorsey and his swinging crew. There was a big dance floor and bleachers for sitting. Dorothy Jo and I were sitting up in the bleachers listening to the band when Dorsey announced: “I have a young singer singing with the band for the first time tonight. I hope you all enjoy Mr. Frank Sinatra.” And out comes Sinatra. He sang a song called “Indian Summer.”
Now, I am tone-deaf. I don’t know good from bad, so I turned to Dorothy Jo, and I said, “How is he?”
And she said, “He’s pretty good.” She was right, wasn’t she?
Little did I know that in 1980 I would talk about this very evening with Frank Sinatra himself. I was one of the CBS anchors for the famous Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade for twenty-one years and I always pretaped an interview with the grand marshal of the parade. The pretape was shown as the grand marshal rode by during the live telecast of the parade on New Year’s Day.
Frank Sinatra was grand marshal of the Rose Parade in 1980. As usual, we did our pretaped interview, and afterward we sat and chatted for a few minutes. I told Frank that Dorothy Jo and I had the pleasure of being in the audience that evening at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, Missouri.
“Frank, was that really the first time you sang with the Tommy Dorsey band?” I asked.
Frank said, “Could’ve been. Could’ve been.”
Frankly, I have a hunch that Tommy Dorsey did the same introduction for Frank in every city on that series of one-nighters across Missouri. For years, folks my age in Joplin, St. Joseph, Kansas City, St. Louis, et cetera, et cetera—into Oklahoma and points west—have probably been telling their grandchildren and anyone else who would listen that they heard Frank Sinatra the very first time he sang with the Tommy Dorsey band. When quizzed, Frank chose to say, “Could’ve been. Could’ve been.” Very nice of Frank—not to disillusion us, I mean.
• • •
In high school, I played on the Central High School basketball team and Dorothy Jo was a cheerleader. In my junior year (1939–1940), our basketball team went to Lebanon, Missouri, to play in a regional tournament. It was the highlight of my basketball-playing days. Not only was I the high point man for our