Priceless Memories - Bob Barker [44]
My mother eventually met my stepfather, Louis Valandra, while we were living in South Dakota. I was thirteen by then, and they got married. He was a kind man to both me and my mother. I got along very well with him. He and my mother had a son, my half brother, Kent. My brother and I immediately bonded, and we have been friends for a lifetime. He is fourteen years younger than I am, but we have always had good times together. When they were married, I had just finished the eighth grade, and we moved back to Springfield, Missouri, in 1937 so that my mother could be close to her mother. My stepfather went into the tire business there. I lived at home until I was nineteen. After that I joined the navy, and soon thereafter married Dorothy Jo.
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My mother taught me so many things, it would be impossible to list them all. I would like to think I inherited her strong work ethic. I certainly did my fair share of traveling and some risk taking, as did she. She gave me a love of reading and a reverence for education. In her lifetime, she displayed a never-ending tenderness and affection for her mother and her family, which had a profound influence on me. She lost my father early, and she endured. I lost Dorothy Jo far too early, and I believe Mom’s strength helped me endure that loss. She shared her sense of humor with me, which no doubt helped develop one in me, and that humor served me well in my career. She took care of me when there was nobody else. Later on, I took care of her.
My mother lived to be ninety-one years old. She lived with me in my home in Hollywood for many years before and after Dorothy Jo had passed away. She was a part of my life for over sixty-five years. In the end, things had come full circle. She fell when she was eighty-nine years old and shattered her wrist. Following surgery, she had a stroke. After the stroke, Mother was confined to a wheelchair and required nurses twenty-four hours a day. I had an elevator installed so the nurses could take Mother downstairs and out among the flowers she loved.
We remained close all through life. How could we not? We had been close from the very beginning and from the years when it was just the two of us. In tent cities, on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, in small towns in Texas and Missouri, in snowbound freezing Dakota winters, and driving on dusty roads in a 1928 Chevrolet coupe with a rumble seat that she had when I was small. She lived to a good old age, saw almost all of the twentieth century, and died here in Hollywood. It was an incredible journey, and she was an amazing woman. She said we were going to be partners after my father died and things were going to be fine, and she was right. She made sure—with all her strength, tenderness, and intelligence—that things did turn out fine. Blessed, to be sure.
7
Up, Up, and Away as a Naval Aviation Cadet
Today we look back and say that World War II was the last of the popular wars, and it is true. No one had any trouble making up his mind who was right and who was wrong in that war. I was a freshman at Drury College (a university now) in Springfield, Missouri, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Immediately, just about every young man in the country was ready to enlist in the military.
The most popular subject of conversation among the boys at Drury was which branch of the service we were going to join. Some went into the U.S. Marines; some