Free Reba: My Story by Reba McEntire, Tom Carter Page A

honky-tonk? And anyway, it wasn’t any of my business.

    I NDIRECTLY, THE KIOWA HIGH SCHOOL COWBOY BAND BROUGHT me one of the first great highs of my career. The Harmon Jones Ford dealership in Atoka held a contest to choose“Miss Ford Country,” hiring our band to play for entertainment during the day. And I won the contest!
    My winning had less to do with my singing than with my writing, but that’s not what the band thought. They said I won because I was a McEntire, accusing the judges of favoritism toward my family. I lived with that one for a long time.
    The contest was actually an essay contest. Contestants were supposed to write why they thought they should win the use of a new Ford for six months. I wrote that because I was a singer and rodeo contestant, I’d drive the car all over the country. The car would carry the name of Harmon Jones Ford and be good advertising.
    The judges were convinced, and at sixteen years old, there I was tooling around on my own, showing off my prize. I put 18,000 miles on that car in six months.
    Mama, Daddy, Susie, my friend Kathy Mitchell, and I all piled in the car and took it to Cheyenne, Wyoming, for the annual Frontier Days Rodeo. As soon as we returned, I went with Debbie Boyd, Clark and Sue Rhyne, and their son, Jim Buie, who was two, to Colorado. I had a great time with that car.

    I MAY HAVE BEEN OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE A CAR OF MY OWN AND to perform in nightclubs, but of course, I was still a kid. As serious as us McEntires were about our music, none of us lost our sense of mischief once we got to high school. Pake still likes to tell the story about how one of Alice’s boyfriends, Jerry Wilson, talked me into trying chewing tobacco. I turned green and threw up, and Pake died laughing.
    He also reminds me of the time he and I went to a calf roping and jackpot barrel race. In a jackpot barrel race, ten or so girls who want to run barrels put up money. The winner of the race gets most of the money, depending upon the split that was agreed on. I was always nervous whilerunning barrels, and this time I got especially shaky when the announcer introduced me as Dorothy instead of Reba.
    So what did Pake do? He leaned over the rail, and as I rounded the last barrel, he began hollering, “Come on, Dorothy! Come on, Dorothy!”
    A little thing like that can be real distracting.
    I don’t know why Pake does such things, and he can’t understand why the women in the family get mad at him!
    Of course, there were times I got back at Pake, but nearly always, Pake got the last laugh.
    Once, Pake, Alice, and I went to a steer roping in Tucumcari, New Mexico, when Alice’s boy, Vince, was only two. Pake was a grown man who was supposed to be in charge of the group. Well, that grown man took a piece of a radiator hose off the pickup’s dash and put Vince’s arm in all the way up to his armpit.
    Then it wouldn’t come off.
    Vince was crying, Alice was cussing, and Pake, who was driving, wasn’t paying the right amount of attention to the road. And if Vince wasn’t upset enough, he became especially loud when his uncle Pake took out a pocketknife to cut the radiator hose off his arm. He probably thought Pake was going to amputate!
    Once the radiator hose was removed and Vince’s blood pressure was back down, we decided we should stop to eat. Afterward, Alice and Vince climbed into the camper, where she was going to try to get him to go to sleep. I had to go to the bathroom, so I was the last to come out of the café, and Alice had told Pake to be sure to wait for me.
    But Pake pretended he thought I was in the camper with Alice and Vince. He knew exactly what he was doing as he began to drive away, leaving me standing in a deserted New Mexico truck stop parking lot.
    I began to chase the pickup, yelling, “Pake, stop! Stop!”
    The closer I got to the pickup, the more Pake graduallyaccelerated. I was running as fast as I could while he acted like he didn’t notice me.
    I couldn’t tell