Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [43]
Her college acting experience paid off in her teaching career. Mom directed plays both in White River and Mission. Those White River productions were before my time, but I had the best seats in the house when the Mission students trod the boards under Mom’s direction. The Mission High School plays were staged in the gymnasium at the Indian boarding school west of Mission, and the young actors played to full houses nightly—Friday and Saturday nights, that is. Monday through Friday the actors had to concentrate on their studies.
After she taught at the high school for two years, she became the principal of the school, and then she ran for political office and became the Todd County superintendent of schools. She also wrote an excellent history text about South Dakota, Our State, which was used throughout the school system from the 1930s to the early 1960s. When I was hosting Miss USA, Miss South Dakotas frequently told me that they had studied Our State in school.
• • •
I attended school in South Dakota from the second grade up through the eighth grade, and it was a marvelous education. I never had my mother for a teacher, but she always checked my homework. She was always teaching me, guiding me, and stressing the importance of education. There was never any question of me going to college. It was just naturally assumed. She talked about my grammar school work as preparation for college. She always encouraged me in everything I tried to do.
The respect and tradition of education that my mother established paid off in every aspect of my life. I learned to love reading from an early age because before I could read, she read to me. She got me a set of those classic children’s stories called Journeys Through Bookland that I still have. I loved to have her read to me and to this day—and I am eighty-four years old—I love reading. My appreciation of reading and books all came from her. She read to me until I learned to read.
Surprisingly, the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of education was to get out of the first grade in Springfield, Missouri, and go up to South Dakota, where all the children in first, second, third, and fourth grades were in one room. Next door, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades were in another room. The moment I got there, my reading and learning took off—with my mother’s help of course.
I had just started the first grade in Springfield, Missouri, about the time my father died. First grade was when you began to learn to read and write in the public schools of that era. It was my misfortune that the Springfield school system was experimenting at that time with their version of John Dewey’s progressive education. When I was learning to read in the first grade, we did not have phonics at all. We did not worry about the sound of letters. T was a man with a hat on, N was a haystack, M was two haystacks, and so on. I could look at the word table and I would not know whether it was a table or window or door. My mother would ask, “What is the sound of that word?” I did not know anything about the sounds.
As soon as I got to South Dakota and that two-room schoolhouse, we were using phonics and my reading ability took off immediately. It was wonderful. There was also an Episcopal church with a library in the basement, and that library became my playground on many a cold winter day. Those cold winters up in South Dakota would include blizzards that shut down the school. So naturally, I stayed home and read. Sometimes there were two or three days in a row when you could not go to school because of the blizzards, and I would read some more. Had I stayed in Springfield with that nonphonics progressive education, I do not know if I would ever have learned to read.
In addition to reading, my mother taught me how to drive. I remember she had a two-door Chevrolet when I was probably