Wandering Minstrel

Barbara Thome Bagri ’61 sings the praises of many lands

By Jillian Cohan

If she were to write her memoirs, Barbara Thome Bagri ’61 could pen a thick volume. In her lifetime Bagri has been an opera diva, a world traveler, a single mother and a teacher of all kinds.

The prologue to her life story began her senior year at Dickinson, when Bagri and her studious roommate, Betty Keat ’61, applied for Fulbright fellowships.

“ Our friends teased us,” Bagri remembers. “They said ‘Oh sure, you’re going to get Fulbrights.’ But I said ‘What’ve we got to lose—just some time filling out applications and a stamp.’ And we had the last laugh.”

Actually, Bagri rarely stops laughing. Her throaty chuckle warms the cozy limestone cottage she recently moved into in Mount Joy, Pa. She retired to her hometown in January, after teaching for 20-some years at nearby Columbia High School. There was a time when she couldn’t imagine staying put for so long.

“ My mom said every time the windows got dirty, I moved,” she says.

The first move was to Dickinson, the second to Germany on the coveted Fulbright. In the next 40 years she settled in a handful of states and left her mark on more than 30 countries.

She always was a wanderer, Bagri says. She went off to college with the idea that she’d study something scientific, perhaps biology, following in her father’s and her brother’s footsteps. But her sophomore year she took Professor Harold Weigel’s advice to study with his colleague, German Professor Friedrich Sandels, and everything changed.

For a moment the memory of her mentor stills Bagri’s laughter. She knew about the skin grafts from his internment at a Nazi death camp, but Sandels never spoke bitterly. In exile, he championed German culture and urged Bagri to apply for a Fulbright in Mainz, his hometown. “He didn’t say anything to get me to change majors, but it was because of him that I did,” she says, wiping away tears that threaten to spill over. “He paved my way.”

After a year in Mainz, where she earned credit toward a master’s degree from Middlebury College, Bagri began a new chapter, pursuing her dream to become an opera singer. She’d always been musical, she says, despite her mother’s assumption that she’d be tone deaf like the rest of the Thome clan.

At Dickinson, choirmaster Jack Jarrett had recognized her talent and passion. He insisted she take voice lessons at the Peter Cornelius Conservatory while she was in Germany. The connections she made there led to several years on the choral circuit in Milan and a stint with the Vienna Chamber Opera. Her travels as a singer satisfied Bagri’s theatrical side—she performed in imperial palaces and sang arias on Tuscan hilltops—but nowhere could hold her for long.

Her vagabond nature might be genetic, she says. Her great-great-great uncle Jake (that’s millionaire Jacob Tome of Tome Scientific Building to the rest of you) never could stay put, either. His wandering ways, and his general orneriness, alienated him from the rest of the Thomes. They still think he dropped the “H” in his last name out of spite.

Bagri isn’t quite as prickly, but just as restless. When she returned from Austria, she brought along fiancé Balbir Bagri, an Indian Sikh, and continued her adventures stateside. She taught high school for a while, then entered a doctoral program at the University of Southern California.

“ I’ve traveled many places, but none so interesting as L.A. in the ’60s,” she says, remembering the bomb scares and racial tension that marked the university at the height of the antiwar and civil-rights movements. Even after her European travels, in comparison to her Bohemian students Bagri was, she adds, “so square, I was cubical.”

After a few years on the left coast, she decided academe was not for her and returned to Pennsylvania. In the early 1980s the Bagris had a son, Jaspaul, but caring for the infant didn’t slow his mother down. She maintained her international connection by teaching English to Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian refugees. “As soon as they were off the plane, they enrolled in the program,” she says.

When Jaspaul was a toddler, Bagri landed her job at Columbia High School. For two decades she entertained students with stories from her gypsy days, like the time she thanked an Italian dentist for taking care of her cavity because the “penis” was killing her. She meant to say pena, the Italian word for pain, but her Yankee pronunciation changed the meaning.

Over the years, teaching about foreign cultures made Bagri itch for her walking stick. In the mid-’90s she took a sabbatical and continued her travels. Though divorced from his father, she brought Jaspaul to India to meet his paternal relatives, then trekked the Himalayas with her 13-year-old son. The following spring they toured the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

“ We followed the path of Moses, although we didn’t part the Red Sea. We did it a more conventional way,” she says, smiling at the memory.

There are more memories—of smart-talking students, community-theatre productions and the challenges of single parenting—but Bagri hasn’t time to recount them all. She’s in a hurry to meet a friend. On Wednesdays they sing together at the Mount Joy senior center. Later on she has an audition for summer-stock theatre. But keep asking her to share her stories. If you’re lucky, one day she’ll put them down on paper. There’s no telling what the final chapter will hold.