A Ticket to the Circus Read Free

to go with him, they could get married. By then she knew he was not the owner of Davis Groceries, as he had kind of let her assume in the beginning, but she liked him anyway. He was sweet. So, two months after they met, on January 18, 1947, they got married, packed up the old car, and headed to the Northwest toMoses Lake, Washington. They lived in a tiny homemade trailer with a bed resting on orange crates, and no fridge, but what the heck? They were newlyweds.

    James and Gaynell in Washington state.
    After a couple of years, I came along, and they were entranced by me even though I arrived with red hair, which totally threw my father for a loop. He was expecting me to be blond and blue-eyed like him. They named me Barbara Jean, after the little girl who lived next door, and when the dam was completed, we moved back to Little Rock, where Daddy got a job building roads. When I was three, my mother saw a sign in a store advertising for little girls to compete in the Little Miss Little Rock contest, so she entered me and I won. I was by all accounts an adorable handful. On the health checkup we all had to take, Igot good in all the categories except deportment, which was marked “poor.”

    My health card for Little Miss Little Rock.
    (In my defense, there was a category on the card marked “genitalia,” for which I got a “normal.” If indeed some strange doctor was examining my genitals, it’s no wonder I pitched a fit and earned a “poor” rating in deportment. Examining a little girl’s genitals should have been outlawed, but it was 1952 and nobody thought anything about things like that in those days. If it was a doctor doing it, it must have been all right.)

    Me, the year I won Little Miss Little Rock.
    My mother had a great time getting me all dolled up in a yellow chiffon dress with rhinestones, white patent leather Mary Jane shoes, and socks with ruffles. The mistress of ceremonies, a former beauty queen in a purple evening dress, handed me the golden trophy and put the crown on my head, and when the audience clapped and cheered, I loved it so much that I wouldn’t leave the stage. The woman in the purple dress tried to take my hand to lead me off, but I ran from her, and let me tell you, it was hard work for her to catch me in those high heels.The audience went crazy. I still have the trophy, my only beauty contest win. That gave me a taste for the spotlight, and my daddy, red-faced with embarrassment, had to drag me off the stage at church because I climbed up there to mimic the preacher. I liked the way he waved his hands around, and I wanted to get up and wave mine, too. I deservedly got my bottom tanned a few times when I was little.
    A lot of memories of my third year of life are as clear as glass. My daddy worked nights, and my mother, always nervous and delicate, was terrified of staying home alone with me. She was afraid I was going to get hurt, or some man was going to kidnap me, and I unfortunately thought it was a fun game to hide from her, or to run off in department stores. Once, in Woolworth’s, I was riding up and down the escalator when she found me talking to a drunk man who was trying to get me to go home with him.
    Things got worse for my mother after my fingers were smashed. I was playing in the yard with my toy cooking set when the dough roller somehow rolled off the sidewalk into the sewer. My father, who was at home during the days, lifted the manhole cover and climbed down to rescue it, and I had my hands on the edge of the hole, peering in, when the iron cover slipped and crushed my two left middle fingers. My mother, who was hanging out wash, heard my shrieks and came running. She wrapped my bloody hand in a white organdy pinafore she was holding, and we rushed to the doctor, who bandaged them up and told us babies didn’t have bones in their fingers, only gristle, so they didn’t need to be set. Those fingers have served their purpose all my life, although they are a bit crooked