Education
Education has always been pushed at us as a great thing. Later in life, I totally agree, and have made life-long learning one of the things I just do. But as a kid, yes, I learned, but it didn’t seem that important to me.
After hearing snippets of my dad’s growing up years from him, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother, I finally understood why it was so important to him. James Calvin Baker was born in 1934 in a tiny, tiny town in Indiana. By fall of 1938, Jimmy and his younger brother Carol had lost their dad (my grandmother didn’t marry again until my dad was a senior in high school). They spent their childhood in a small home with my grandmother or the short period they lived at my great-grandparents’ farm.
My dad helped supplement the family income in the summers by working on area farms. And of course, he was an avid student the remainder of the year. But in his free time, apart from playing the drums for a time and playing the e-flat flugelhorn (don't ask me) in his high school marching band, he loved to read. He often talked of reading the entire set of used encyclopedias his mother had on hand, and he loved the Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley.
When he was old enough, he entered the Army, where he served in as a translator in Korea after the Korean War. But when he came back, he used the G.I. Bill to start his college education. In a period of about a decade, he had earned a Bachelor of Science (majoring in International Business and minoring in Finance, Marketing, Economic Development, and Applied Economic Analysis), a Masters in Business Administration (M.B.A.), and a Doctorate in Business Administration (D.B.A.). His doctoral dissertation was titled The German Securities Exchanges: Origin, Operations, and Problems.
So, he had gone from a relatively poor farmhand to someone with
the word Doctor in front of his name.
And that’s why education was so important to him.
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