1956 Lincoln Nebraska
Barbara Riley
1948
Lincoln, Nebraska
Interviewed on January 28, 2026
by Olivia Ren
Your television in your living room was like a sacred piece of equipment. By the mid-1950s, a lot of people had televisions, and they were the size of small refrigerators. They were usually the center of the living room, the way a fireplace might be. A photographer came to our house to take a picture of my brother and me, and we posed on either side of the huge blonde television cabinet: us looking forward, a hand on a knob on either side of it. But we were just the bookends to the center of the picture, which was the television.
My first movie was called A Desk for Billie. It’s a television movie I would bet my house on that you’ve never heard of and certainly never seen. Frankly, I hadn’t thought of it in seventy years. I watched it at home sitting cross-legged on the floor, right in front of the television. I would have been seven or eight.
For some reason, my mother let me watch this movie. This was not common at all—what we call “screen time” now was unheard of. I must have been sick or staying home from school. “This is your treat: you can rest in front of the television”—it was probably something like that. I was watching it by myself. My brother, who was two years younger than me, would have been in school. Then we had a new baby brother, and my mother would have been taking care of him. Putting me in front of the movie was probably a way to deal with the kid who was home from school that day. I don’t know how she found the movie, but it stuck with me.
The movie was put out by the National Education Association. It is an inspiring movie about a girl in the 1930s whose whole family moves around in their car, staying in camps, never for very long at a time. And Billie—the little girl, the oldest of the four children—just wants to go to school, but she moves all the time, and her parents have no interest in sending her there. It struck me that she had really clean, shiny hair. The family lived in a tent and cooked on a fire. Theydidn’t have a kitchen or a bathroom. But she had beautiful, short hair.
The place she wanted was not a house. She wanted a desk. She wanted to have a school desk and books that were her own. You would see her in town after town starting to settle into her desk, and then you’d see the family on the road the next day. She was whisked away to yet another place.
I felt so terrible for Billie because I loved school. School was how you organized your life. Everything was planned around getting to school and being at school and coming home from school: what you wore, what lunch you took, and what you did there. If there’s such a thing as a very first politically conscious experience, this was probably it: that not everybody lived in a little suburb in Nebraska—that there were really hard lives out there.
It was a total revelation to me that there were people who didn’t have homes. I honestly did not know that there were people who drove around and found jobs where they could, and that those kids never had any stability or roots in their lives. It was a whole political education for me at age eight. I’m sure that is one of the reasons it stayed with me: the idea that, wow, I could have been Billie.
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Professor Barbara Riley is a Lecturer in English at Yale University. She is my residential college writing tutor and my mentor throughout my time at Yale.
