She went from learning her three "R's" in a boxcar to being one of the first black children to integrate Tucson schools.
A few years later, she became the first black teacher at the exclusive Bellagio Road School in Bel-Air, Calif., where her teaching style set off a furor within the John Birch Society β and support from a movie star's wife.
"Burt Lancaster's wife, Norma, was the president of the PTA. She came down and got the story from me. Then she held a fundraiser and brought the first bus load of black kids to Bellagio," says Shirley Robinson Sprinkles, whose work in the classroom was captured in a Time Life photograph.
That photo now splays across the cover of Sprinkles' new book, "From Dunbar to Destiny," which she will be signing in Tucson on Saturday.
Sprinkles, 70, holds a doctorate in educational administration and works in Austin as an intervention consultant for the Texas Education Agency.
Texas is also where her life began, born to a 17-year-old mother and a father with a third-grade education.
Yet over and over she gives credit to her family for her successes in life β along with her teachers at Tucson's all-black Dunbar School and its indefatigable principal, Morgan Maxwell.
"He walked on water," says Sprinkles. "We were his pride and joy, never second-class. He would say, 'You are the finest boys and girls in the whole world.' "
Laura Banks-Reed, who was Sprinkles' fifth-grade teacher, says her pupil certainly lived up to that role: "Shirley was smart as a whip and always wanted to be the best she could."
Sprinkles was 4 when her family moved to Tucson, then bustling with World War II activity. Three generations lived in a one-room rental.
"My grandmother's husband worked at the base. He would bring home steaks the officers had not finished eating. We had a feast."
For a time, the family lived at Jaynes Station, northwest of Tucson, where Sprinkles' stepfather worked at a dairy.
School was held in a boxcar, where two white spinsters taught a dozen kids of all races. "It was my first experience with integration," says Sprinkles.
But her stepfather's health was poor, and he soon lost his job. The family moved to the Marana cotton camps.
There, school was a one-room affair taught by Morgan Maxwell's wife, Kathryn. "She was just like Morgan Maxwell, her zeal and desire to be sure we got the best education possible," says Sprinkles.
Once the cotton picking was done, the family returned to Tucson, with Sprinkles finishing up second grade at Dunbar, home to all of Tucson's black children, grades 1-9.
Segregation was also rife in the town's movie theaters, lunch counters and swimming pools. Even so, says Sprinkles, "We really had a lot of fun. We didn't realize there was a stigma, of not having a choice."
Choice came hurtling into view in the fall of 1951, when Tucson's schools were integrated three years before the national mandate.
Even so, de facto segregation saw many of Dunbar's neighborhood students continuing at the school, renamed John Spring Junior High.
Not so for Sprinkles, who lived in the Mansfeld Junior High area. "I cried and cried. It was very hard for me to leave my friends and the teachers who loved and inspired me."
That fall she entered the eighth grade at Mansfeld, a school with only one other black student.
She needn't have worried. "The kids were very friendly. They went out of their way to make me feel welcome."
She also gives credit to Mansfeld for raising the bar academically. "We'd talk about things at a different level. The students there had been exposed to things. I was in an expanding world of knowledge."
After the ninth grade, she attended Tucson High, then a three-year school, but left before her senior year when her mother moved to California.
There, Sprinkles would work her way through UCLA pursuing a degree in education. In 1960 she was assigned to Bellagio on a probationary basis, the school's first black teacher.
In the spring of '61, a child in her fourth-grade class brought in a paper filled with stories about the civil-rights movement in the South and pictures of protesters attacked by whites.
The children were blasΓ© until they realized it could have been their teacher in those photos. Suddenly, the entire classroom erupted with emotion.
"This was personal," says Sprinkles, who used the incident to teach her students the word "prejudice" and to challenge them to bring in names of historic black Americans.
Learning of this, some parents β members of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society β called a meeting.
Into the fray stepped Norma Lancaster, who wound up spearheading a program that bused black pupils to Bellagio. "She decided these kids needed more than a black teacher. They needed peers."
A newlywed, Sprinkles left at the end of the school year for the East Coast. Other careers in other parts of the country would follow, from motherhood to politics and then back to education.
But never has she forgotten her links to Tucson β and the people who helped her along the way. As she writes in her book:
"I was hoisted onto the shoulders of many people so I could see where I might go."
if you go
Shirley Robinson Sprinkles will sign copies of "From Dunbar to Destiny" (Wheatmark Book Publishing, $20) from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday at the Dunbar Cultural Center, 325 W. Second St. To order books, call 798-0888, Ext. 100.
