Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [36]
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Those years in the tiny school in Mission, South Dakota, were some of the most educational of my life. It all came together then. Those seven years were the foundation of my education. My mother was an educator. I was in a small schoolhouse with several grades grouped together, whites and Indians. There was no discrimination then as I remember, and I had white friends and Indian friends. We all played sports together and played on teams together. It was a simple life, but it was an environment that fostered and satisfied my love of both sports and reading. There was something about that South Dakota geography—that territory of blue skies, mountains, and rivers, and the rugged terrain—that produced excellent athletes. There were some Indians in that school and in that area who were splendid athletes. We ran. We swam. We played basketball, baseball, and football.
My uncle owned a pool hall in Mission, and that was the center of social activity in the town. I remember that my uncle taught me to play pool, and for a while I was the best seven-year-old pool player in that part of South Dakota. I was pretty small, so I had to get up on a stool or something, I remember. But I was good.
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The harsh winters also offered me plenty of opportunity to read, and I developed a voracious appetite for young adventure books. I read all the Rover Boys books. I read all the Tom Swift books. I read Tom Sawyer, and I started to check out The Hunchback of Notre Dame, thinking that it was a football story. The kindly librarian straightened me out. I liked books on sports. I enjoyed adventure stories, and I liked to read about military heroes. I never cared for comic books, but I liked sports magazines and Western magazines. There were some great sports pulp magazines.
Another of my favorite series was the Boy Allies books. They were written about two American boys who volunteered for the French army during World War I. My favorite pulp magazine was G-8 and His Battle Aces. They were pilots during World War I. G-8—that was his designation because in addition to being a splendid pilot who shot down countless Germans, he was also a spy. Nippy Weston was G-8’s wingman, and Bull Martin, an all-American football player, was the other. G-8 was always doing marvelous things with makeup and disguises. He carried makeup with him, and he would get behind enemy lines and transform himself. He would knock some guy out, and then reappear looking identical to him. It was a pulp magazine that came out once a month, and I could not wait to get up to the print shop and see what adventures G-8 and his battle aces had pulled off. Those were such exciting stories.
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.
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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