Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [35]
The funny thing about that incident back in the third grade was that as soon as my classmates heard of my new name, they all wanted to change their names, too.
“I want to be Helen.”
“I want to be Ralph.”
“I do not like Irene. I want to be Ruth.”
“From now on I am Donald.”
Everybody wanted to change his or her name. My name change made life easier for my mother, but it was tough on my teacher.
• • •
As I observed earlier, only two hundred people lived in Mission. There was no municipal government, no water system, no sewage disposal, no electricity, and most of the time, no doctor. We called the town the Paris of the Prairie.
There was an Indian boarding school about two miles east of Mission. Our high school basketball team played its games in the boarding-school gymnasium, and it was in that gym where I first saw the Harlem Globetrotters play. Cowboys, Indians, and town folks filled the gym to overflowing that night. They absolutely adored the Globetrotters! Who doesn’t?
I played my first organized basketball in the boarding-school gym. I played on the Mission Midgets. We didn’t have uniforms, so we wore undershirts—the kind Clark Gable made popular in It Happened One Night—and any kind of shorts we could dig up. The other mothers cut out numbers and sewed them on their sons’ undershirts. My mother sewed a question mark on mine. She thought that was pretty funny. So did everyone else.
Just down a hill south of Mission was Antelope Crick. That’s the way everyone in town pronounced it: “crick,” not “creek.” And about three miles west of Mission there was a large dam. We used to go down to Antelope Crick and swim as soon as the water was warm enough to get in. South Dakota summers are hot, and we would run down the hill and dive in the crick several times a day—six times in one day was the record.
Of course, we didn’t bother with swimsuits. We just tore off the few clothes we had on and dived in. We never wore shirts in the summer. We took our shirts off the minute school was out and didn’t put them on again until school started in September. That’s why I have paid for so many vacations for Beverly Hills dermatologist Steven Weiss. (I promised Dr. Weiss’s mother I would mention his name in my book.)
The only road into Mission from the south crossed the mighty Antelope, so, of course, there was a bridge over the crick and we thought it was great sport to dive from the bridge. Now, there never was a problem with gridlock, or anything resembling gridlock, on this one road into Mission from the south. But there was an occasional automobile, and occasionally it was driven by one of the ladies of the town.
It seems that these ladies resented seeing naked boys flying through the air as they drove over the bridge, and in desperation, they took their problem to the city fathers, one of whom came down to the crick one day and in no uncertain terms told us to cease and desist with the skinny-dipping or they—the city fathers—would see that we had to pick up every tin can in Mission. And there were a lot of tin cans in Mission.
We took the matter very seriously, and in the future we were careful to dive into the crick before a car got to the bridge. When the ladies of the town drove over the bridge, all they saw were happy little faces smiling up at them.
Which brings me to the dam. The dam west of Mission was great for ice-skating. It was a really large dam for such a small town, and in winter we took full advantage of it. We skated and played our version of hockey. One day I was trying to do something a little fancier than any of my friends had ever