A Desk for Billie

Once upon a time, I was in grade school. I KNOW. Crazy. We had to walk uphill in the dinosaurs BOTH WAYS to get to the bus.

Now, my memory of this school is pretty hazy, because it was somewhere in the 2nd to 4th grade range, and there’s nobody alive for me to ask “was this what I think it was.”

I seem to recall that every six or eight weeks, we had to switch teachers. Like, there was a break in school for a couple of weeks (?) and I know it had to be longer than a weekend, because my dad would put me on a plane (YES! A CHILD! ALONE!) from Florida and my grandparents would pick me up when I landed in New York, and there’s no way that would have happened for just a weekend. And I remember having to pick up chairs and desks and move books and stuff to the next “room” — it was a really large room, divided into four quarters, and we’d rotate from one quarter to the next. Sounds like a fever dream, right?

And there would be an assembly, once a week or so, where the whole grade would gather, maybe in the library? and watch a movie. I remember watching Thomasina, and Pollyanna, and Free to Be You and Me… and I could have sworn there was a movie about a – and I’m sorry for using this word, but it’s what they used in the movie (and this will be important later) – a gypsy family.

It was mostly about a girl who wanted to go to school, but her family moved around too much, and didn’t have any money, and nobody trusted them. There was something about a pair of shoes… and something about a pair of glasses… and at the end, something about a school dance. I remember she was wearing a red dress at the dance, and her date took her home, and dropped her off at a lovely big old house… and after he drove off, she walked off, and took off her shoes, and walked off back to her g-word home somewhere down a long dirt road.

Fever dream, right?!

Ever since searching the Internet for random shit became a thing, I have been looking for this movie. Did I dream it? Was it a real movie? Was I thinking about more than one movie, combining it into one?

Nothing I ever searched for helped me to find this movie. No key word searches on g-word girl, on g-word with red dress, on g-word girl with bad eyesight goes to school, on g-word girl goes to school dance, nothing. I would either get a thousand hits, none of which looked right, or no hits. Nothing. It got to the point where I thought I absolutely must have dreamed this movie. Of course, if I did… did I dream Thomasina? Did I dream Darby O’Gill and the Little People? (By the way, the banshee in that movie was fucking HORRIFYING to a child my age.) If I dreamed that one, did I dream all these others that I saw when I went to that school? No. Those are real movies that really exist. So what about this one?! What the hell??? What were they putting in the water in schools in 1975???

Well. Y’all.

I don’t even remember what I was looking for online the other day – I think I was looking up houses used in haunted house movies in the 70s, and that lead me to a weird thread on Reddit about “hey I barely remember this movie if I tell y’all about it will someone out there know what it was” and in reading the thread? A MOVIE ABOUT A MIGRANT WORKER FAMILY WITH A DAUGHTER WHO HAD BAD EYESIGHT AND WAS ABLE TO GO TO SCHOOL AND EVENTUALLY TO HER SENIOR DANCE.

It’s called “A Desk For Billie” and it’s a 1956 movie by the National Education Association, based on the book “I was a Hobo Kid” by Billie Davis, who grew up to be an educator. She grew up in a migrant farm worker family (one of the first line in the movie is something like “we were gypsies, hobos” which is why all this time I thought they were, you know, the word she said… which is why I could never find it!) in the Depression, and various teachers saw something in her that shone, and they helped her out as best they could. She eventually became a professor at Evangel University.

Y’all.

I’m not crazy. Well, about seeing that movie, anyway, haha. I can’t believe I fucking found it! It’s on YouTube, it’s not even an hour long, I’ve watched it twice since I found it last week. Mostly because I can hardly believe it actually exists.