Billie the Hobo Kid
It may take years or even decades to fulfill your purpose, but you can get there.
Wow… waaay back to 1962. I was a 9-year-old 4th grader at an intermediate school in California’s Central Valley. We had a movie day at school every other week or so. Teachers would share a 16 mm projector on a cart laden with reels of film in metal cans on a lower shelf. This was high tech back in the day. I remember watching Disney’s “Johnny Appleseed” and a science movie featuring the Dyna-Soar spacecraft. It looked a lot like today’s space shuttles, and it was designed to glide to earth while being flown by a pilot. This was 25 years before the space shuttles started flying. However, the movie I really remember because it had a profound affect on my life was “A Desk for Billie.”
It’s a story about a migrant family in the 1930s and the eldest daughter, Billie Clare Davis. She was an inquisitive girl and desperate to learn, but her parents were against her spending time in school when she could be working. Eventually, her mother and father relented, and she started school at 8-years-old. She attended a couple of dozen schools as a girl because her family was always on the move following the harvest seasons on the West Coast. Against all odds… Billie graduated from high school in Bakersfield… with honors. She became a missionary, teacher, writer, and completed PhD studies at 59-years-old. Billie was also a passionate advocate for public education. She wrote about her struggle to get an education in a 1952 article for the Saturday Evening Post titled, “I was a Hobo Kid.” A movie followed four years later. It was very inspiring, and at the end of the movie, she credited overcoming so many challenges on the path to get an education to her teachers. I watched that movie more than 60 years ago, and Billie’s struggle just to go to school… for the love of learning… has always stayed with me.
The NEA made the movie… they would not make it today… it would not serve certain political agendas. In the 1960s, “A Desk for Billie,” was routinely shown to aspiring teachers while they were still in college. Teacher credentialing programs don’t show “A Desk for Billie” these days.
Fast forward to 2007… forty-five years later. I am a teacher. One of those special people who can change lives. One day after school, while sitting at my desk, I thought about Billie Davis and checked online for information about her. I was surprised to learn she was living in Springfield, Missouri, and still active in education. I wrote to her and thanked her for telling her story so many years ago, and for inspiring me forty-five years later. I was a teacher!
Billie wrote back. She sent me one of her books on teaching and a copy of her 1952 article along with a personal note. Billie told me that a teacher has to love his or her students because students will want to learn when they know a teacher really cares about them. That is the core value of teaching.
I could see that core value in action watching my wife who teaches piano. She didn’t study teaching like Billie, but she intuitively integrates a sincere caring for her students when she teaches. She inspires a love of music in her students and they are better for it. Even if my wife’s students stop playing one day, they will always remember how much fun they had learning with a teacher who cared.
Billie passed away in August 2019… just before the start of a new school year. We need teachers like her more than ever.
Copyright © 2023 by Ray Fowler
