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

he had me in the corner of his eye.
    I finally got close enough to pound on the driver’s window. Then Pake finally looked around.
    “Oh, Reba!” Pake said, pretending to be surprised. “I thought you were in the back of the truck.”
    I won’t tell you what I said to him.

    P AKE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL THREE YEARS AFTER THE BAND was formed, and shortly thereafter, the Kiowa High School Cowboy Band disbanded. It has never reassembled. Clark went on to become principal of Kiowa High School, and a few months before his retirement in 1993, he explained why he never put together another group.
    “Our average class size runs twenty-five kids,” he said. “So we’re talking 150 kids in school. And how many times, in a school that small, do you find someone who becomes Alan Jackson’s bass player? How many times do you find Pake, who had his own band and traveled and got songs in the Top Ten? His first song on RCA went to number five. And Reba’s super stardom? Plus the Raiburn boy, who plays professionally around Dallas. My brother, Kelly, is playing part-time, and has traveled hitches with Reba on the road. Now how many times are you going to find that much talent in a school that small? It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”
    I agree. I truly think the unlikely formation of a band that successful from a school district that small was an act of God. But, while I do have sentimental memories about the group, I can’t really vouch for its musical greatness. Recently someone said to Pake, “That band was popular, but was it any good?”
    “We thought that Nashville was going to be coming into that cafeteria and signing us all any day,” Pake said.
    “Did you ever make a demo or anything?”
    “No,” Pake said, “but we made a tape one time.”
    “Have you listened to it since?”
    “I listened to it about five or six years ago,” Pake said. “It sounded like a train wreck.”

CHAPTER 5
    A LONG WITH SINGING, BASKETBALL, RODEOS, AND school, I still helped out on the ranch, as we all did. My responsibilities continued even after I left for college. Not that I minded—as you know by now, it takes a lot of hands to run a ranch, and besides, I understood that a college tuition would put my folks under considerable economic strain. I did get some financial aid—fifty dollars a semester—but Daddy and Mama had to pay the rest. Although they would eventually reach a level of financial comfort as Daddy parlayed his rodeo earnings into new tracts of land and more cattle, it was a slow build and I wanted to do my share.
    I went to college in Durant at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where my major field of study was elementary education and my minor was music. I received my bachelor’s degree, but never taught school as my Mama and Grandma had done before me, except for student teaching.Alice earned a degree in home economics and Susie in business. None of us ever worked a day in our fields of study.
    Pake dropped out of college, but it was just as well. The only degree he could have earned would have been in partying.

    D URANT IS ONLY ABOUT FIFTEEN MILES FROM CADDO, OKLAHOMA , where Daddy ran two or three hundred steers on some land he leased. “Reba,” Daddy said, “it’s more handy for you to drive fifteen miles every other day to feed those steers than it is for me to drive forty-five.”
    I said I would do it.
    Daddy bought me a black Ford pickup when I graduated from high school. It had an orange and black interior and looked like a mobile pumpkin. It had a standard transmission, AM radio, but no air-conditioning. Every other day, I would load about thirty fifty-pound sacks of feed into that truck by myself and feed Daddy’s steers.
    I never lost one steer in the three and a half years it took me to earn my undergraduate degree.
    The most fun I had while taking care of the cattle was when my roommates and buddies would go with me. One of my roommates, Cindy Blackburn, was a beautiful girl who was