Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [37]
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