Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [40]
In perusing Mom’s college yearbooks, I also learned that she had been quite an athlete at Dakota Wesleyan. I was particularly impressed with a picture of her running the hurdles. I said, “Mom, you look great in that picture.”
Mom smiled and said to me with mock indignation, “Young man, I’ll have you know that at the time that picture was taken, my measurements were exactly the same as the measurements of Miss America that year!”
One of Mother’s friends at Dakota Wesleyan was Francis Case, who later represented South Dakota in the United States Congress from 1937 until his death in 1962. He spent the years 1937 to 1950 in the House of Representatives and 1951 to 1962 in the Senate. I remember being with Mother one day when she was campaigning for the office of Todd County superintendent of schools, and she crossed trails with Francis Case someplace out on the prairie. He was campaigning for the first of his terms in the House of Representatives. During their conversation, Mom mentioned that I enjoyed reading military books and that I thought I would like to go to West Point someday. Senator Case told me, “Billy, you study hard, and if I am still in Congress when you graduate from high school, I’ll see to it that you have an appointment to West Point.”
Not only was Francis Case still in Congress when I graduated from high school, he was still in Washington, D.C., when I took Mom and Dorothy Jo back there on a sightseeing trip in about 1955. Senator Case made sure we saw and did everything a tourist should see and do in Washington. With apologies to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, et cetera, one of the highlights of our journey was having a bowl of the famous Senate bean soup with Senator Case in the Senate Dining Room.
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After Mother finished college, she again set out on her own and became a high school teacher in White River, South Dakota. She really had a love and respect for education, and that is something she instilled in me from a very early age. I was not around yet, but later I heard stories about some of the remarkable things my mother had done during these early years. For example, while she was teaching in White River, the great worldwide flu epidemic struck in 1918. In addition to her teaching duties, my mother also nursed people all around White River, South Dakota.
Not many people today are aware of the danger and the damage of the flu epidemic of 1918. Unlike the recent versions of the flu, this was nothing to be held off by an inoculation. More than 28 percent of the U.S. population contracted the flu, and it killed 2.5 percent of its victims. What did this mean in terms of historical impact? To quote Gina Kolata’s excellent book Flu (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999): “The epidemic affected the course of history and was a terrifying presence at the end of World War I, killing more Americans in a single year than had died in battle in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.”
My mother opened a clinic in White River with beds for twelve people. At a time when entire towns were wiped out by the flu, she faithfully brought medical attention to everyone in or near White River. She helped people all over the county, out on the farms, in the small villages, everywhere. In some instances on farms, she found people with the flu living in mud huts and lying in an inch of fetid water.
My mother had at one time wanted to be a doctor, but medical school was out of the question, so she studied biology and taught biology in school. She had learned about medicine as well, and later she would say during that whole epidemic, she never lost a patient. She was very proud of that, as well she should be. It is an incredible record considering that more than an estimated one hundred million people died of this terrible scourge worldwide. For more than fifty years after the epidemic, Mother received letters of thanks from people she had nursed.
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It was during that period in 1918 to 1919 that my mother