Raised by a World War II veteran and married to an Army veteran, Barbara Crettol built one of Kern County’s most enduring dance legacies.
By Kathleen Hokit, Published on July 4, 2026.
The aroma of a freshly baked apple pie greeted us before the conversation even began.
Inside Barbara Crettol’s Shafter home, cats sprawled comfortably outside, dogs roamed happily from room to room, each one receiving the same gentle affection that generations of young dancers once knew so well.
Every corner of the home was filled with memories and a sense of love. Family photographs, beautiful decor. It didn’t take long to realize that nurturing—whether children, animals or the people she loves—has always been at the heart of who Barbara is.
Across the room, her husband, Jim, smiled as the conversation turned to the pie on the plates in front of us.
“She’s a really good pie maker,” he says proudly.
That quiet moment said as much about Barbara Crettol as the the time together during the interview itself could.
For more than 25 years, Crettol poured that same care into Northwest Ballet, the dance school she founded in Wasco, California that became a second home for generations of children across Wasco, Shafter, and surrounding communities. But long before she became a beloved ballet teacher, she was the daughter of a World War II Army Air Forces captain, the wife of an Army veteran, and a young woman whose own teacher forever changed the course of her life.
Barbara Crettol and Her Legacy
The ballet studio Barbara Crettol built in Wasco closed its doors more than two decades ago. The music stopped. The costumes were packed away. The rehearsals came to an end.
Yet in many ways, the studio still exists.
It lives in the memories of former students who can still recall choreography decades later. It lives in friendships that began at the ballet barre and endured into adulthood. It lives in the confidence countless young girls and boys carried with them long after their final curtain call.
And it still lives in Barbara’s dreams.
“I still dream it,” she says. “I don’t dream of me dancing. I dream of me teaching.”
The studio appears again and again. The dancers are there. The lessons are underway. Even the familiar partition from that beloved Wasco studio returns, standing guard between the dancers and the street, just as it always did.
“It’s always in my dance dreams,” she says with a smile.
For anyone who ever stepped through those doors, that may not come as a surprise.
Because for Barbara Crettol, ballet was never simply about dance.
A Taft Girl, a Landman’s Daughter
To understand how a young woman from a small Central Valley farm and oil community became the heartbeat of a regional dance world, it helps to start where Barbara’s story begins: in the oil fields of Kern County.
She was born in Taft in September of 1952, the third child and only daughter in a family shaped by wartime, hard work, and deep roots in the land. Her father, Oscar Linscott, was a Taft native born in 1917 who had grown up on Signal Hill after losing his own father to an oil field accident at just seven years old.
It was a loss that altered the course of his childhood and, quietly, his ambitions. He decided early that oil field labor wasn’t the life he wanted. He became the first in his family to attend college, enrolling at Fresno State with plans to become an engineer.
In 1941, just before the United States entered World War II, Oscar met Catherine Rowan or as many called her “Katy,” a Denver-born, fiercely Irish Catholic woman born in 1920 with a full college scholarship she’d been forbidden by her own father to use.
They knew each other six weeks before they married.
“It was wartime,” Crettol explains. “He was going to be sent to India for two years.”
Oscar was a captain in what was then the U.S. Army Air Forces, working on the Norton Bombsight—a precision mechanical instrument used by bombardiers to calculate the exact moment to release bombs with pinpoint accuracy. He spent two years in India while Catherine waited at home. For nearly all of that time, she heard nothing.
“She finally got a postcard,” Crettol says. “And it said: Greetings from the Middle East. – Oscar. That was it.”
No love you. No I miss you. Just a name and a postmark.
They were married 68 years.
Oscar eventually became a landman—a leaser, in the language of the oil industry, the man who knocks on farmers’ and ranchers’ doors, negotiates mineral rights, and arranges the contracts between property owners and the drilling companies. Fans of the Taylor Sheridan series Landman will recognize the role immediately.
“That was my dad,” Crettol says. “That was Oscar.”
The work brought the family to Bakersfield when Crettol was three years old, to the house she would live in until the day she married.
Oscar’s profession took him across Kern County, building relationships with landowners, geologists, and oilmen—and, as it happened, with some well-connected figures in Los Angeles.
One of his clients was a cousin of the legendary Hollywood filmmaker and actor Cecil B. DeMille. It was through that connection that a young Barbara Crettol was invited to one of the most glamorous evenings of her childhood: the opening gala of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1964.
“My dad said, I don’t think we’re going to go to the gala because of the affordability issue,” she recalls. “But I promise, within the next ballet company coming, I will take you to see the performance.”
He kept his word. On an evening when the audience dressed to the nines and the ballet didn’t begin until eight o’clock, Oscar and Catherine took their young daughter to see Swan Lake performed by the New York City Ballet.
“My mom had a hat,” Crettol says. “She was just gorgeous.”
The drive home was through the night, Barbara in the backseat, the dark valley rolling past the windows. But something had taken root.
The Ultimatum
Barbara was nine years old when her mother heard about a local instructor, a woman named Martha Knight who ran a ballet school in Bakersfield. Catherine went to watch a class. She liked what she saw. She suggested her daughter try it.
Around the same time, Barbara had developed a strong interest in the violin.
Her mother sat her down and gave her a choice.
“My mom gave me the ultimatum,” Crettol says. “Make a choice. You can’t have both.”
At the time, it seemed unfair. The musicality of the violin felt like it would complement dance, not compete with it. But Barbara trusted her mother.
“She was absolutely right,” she says now. “You can’t really have a true passion for two things. One will take dominance over the other.”
She took her first ballet class at nine years old, wearing tennis shoes and shorts—not tights, not a leotard, not ballet flats. Just a girl and a wooden floor and a teacher who was about to change everything.
“Once I took my first class, that was it,” she says. “I never spoke about the violin again.”
The affinity never entirely disappeared, however.
She still loves the violin, still finds herself moved by the cello, still hears what she might have been in those long, lyrical strings. But she made her choice. And she never looked back.
The Teacher Who Made Everything Possible
Martha was more than a ballet instructor. She was, by any measure, the foundation on which Barbara Crettol built her entire life in dance.
Barbara Crettol with her ballet teacher Martha Knight
Every summer, Martha organized small groups of her most dedicated students—usually five at a time—and took them to San Francisco and Los Angeles to study with accomplished professional instructors. She always took class alongside her students, which Barbara found enormously reassuring.
“When Martha was with you, you knew you were cared for,” she says. “It was like a mother hen and all her little chicks.”
Martha Knight (left) and Barbara Crettol.
In San Francisco, they stayed with Martha’s family in Lafayette and took the bus into the city, rotating through different studios. In Los Angeles, Martha introduced her students to acclaimed teachers from the professional ballet world. One of the most memorable was Irina Kosmovska, a Russian ballet instructor in Beverly Hills.
“Even a child knows when you have something special. You don’t know exactly the depth of that specialty, but you do realize it’s unique.”
The experience opened her eyes to a new style of teaching and exposed her to the rich traditions of classical ballet beyond Kern County.
“I didn’t know any of that at the time,” Crettol says. “I think I would have been very intimidated. But I thought the accent was just fabulous.”
There were corrections delivered in French, which Martha quietly interpreted. There was rosin on the floor—that particular dry, powdery scent that Barbara still associates with walking into a real ballet studio.
There was a staircase leading up to second-floor studios, and the smell of an art form practiced seriously.
Those summers expanded what Barbara understood to be possible, not just for herself, but for what a teacher could give a student.
In Hollywood, she studied with Gene Marinaccio, a teacher who began every class with forty minutes of floor stretches that looked closer to gymnastics than ballet. In Beverly Hills, she encountered New York City Ballet company dancers taking warmup classes alongside her, going through grand pliés without so much as glancing in her direction.
She once found herself two spots away from Mikhail Baryshnikov—his China-blue eyes impossible to miss—as he moved through a routine before a performance that evening.
“He was very gracious to the teacher,” she says. “He would bow. The men always bowed, the girls always curtsied. It was wonderful.”
The whole experience was quietly revelatory: that dance was a living tradition, handed down through rooms exactly like these, by teachers exactly like Martha. That what happened in a small Bakersfield studio could connect a girl directly to some of the most profound artistic lineages in the world.
Decades later, Barbara still credits her teacher for everything.
“If it hadn’t been for her,” she says, “there would be no me.”
The Farmer and the Ballerina
By the time Barbara met Jim Crettol, she was seventeen years old and dance had become the defining axis of her life.
Jim was 21 and freshly returned from military service in Korea. He had been drafted into the Army, trained as a helicopter mechanic and door gunner, and fully expected to be sent to Vietnam at the height of the war.
All three Crettols. At the top, Victor Crettol (Jim’s grandfather) Army First Cavalry Division in WWl 1917-1919. In the middle, Barbara Crettol’s father-in-law Arthur Crettol as Staff Sergeant Army Air Corps Arthur Crettol in WWll with the 38th Fighter Squad Division 1941-1946. At the bottom, Barbara’s husband Jim Crettol as Staff Sergeant 7th Medical Battalion stationed in Korea 1968-1969.
Instead, through what he still considers a providential clerical error, his entire battalion was dispatched to Korea.
“The receiving officer said something to the effect that the Army, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to send you to Korea, where we really don’t need your expertise,” Crettol says. “Anyone who wants to go back tomorrow, you’re going to end up in Vietnam for sure.”
Jim was the first to raise his hand and volunteer to stay.
He came home a staff sergeant, full of the quiet, unshakeable confidence that Barbara noticed immediately when they met at an engagement party in Wasco.
Her brother was marrying Jim’s sister. The families were being introduced.
“He just walks into a room and he knows everyone,” she says. “That confidence was very intriguing.”
They married when Barbara was nineteen. She and Jim moved to a farm between Shafter and Wasco.
The long drives back to Bakersfield for ballet classes became impossible. Dance, in its previous form, was over.
Or so she thought.
“I just found a new love,” she says. “My husband. And my children.”
One Hundred Dollars a Month
Crettol was a young mother with a baby at home when the thought simply appeared one day: “I think I’m going to teach.”
No building. No students. No money. Just that single idea.
She began searching for a space in 1974, looking back and forth between Wasco and Shafter, two small farming communities six miles apart, each with its own character.
The Wasco Woman’s Club opened its doors, offering Crettol the use of its clubhouse on 7th Street, complete with the beautiful wooden floors every ballet teacher hopes to find.
One hundred dollars a month.
“At the time,” she says, “I hadn’t come up with that.”
And she had no students. Not yet.
She moved forward anyway, insisting from the beginning that classes would meet twice a week, because once a week was simply not enough for any meaningful progress in ballet. The school grew slowly, then steadily. After a year, she moved to a new space in Wasco, next to a jewelry store on 7th Street.
Barbara Crettol second to the right with her students
By 1986, she relocated to the corner building that would become the studio most of her students remember: the large studio space that had previously housed Johnson’s Department Store, with that partition, still in her dreams, that stood between the dancers and the windows overlooking 7th Street.
It took seven years to turn a profit.
“My first profit was my seventh year,” she says. “All the others were losing years.”
But the school was small enough to weather those early years. After their children went to bed, Barbara and Jim transformed their living space into a production studio, recording, and editing music on reel-to-reel tape.
Jim carefully spliced together compositions from different composers, using white Scotch leader tape to mark transitions between scenes, just as Martha had taught Barbara years before.
Northwest Ballet’s Community Spirit
A Wasco High School English teacher with a quiet gift for visual design, built the studio’s sets, including an ethereal mountain silhouette fashioned from light metal conduit that could be flown from the rigging overhead, catching stage light in ways that gave depth to the simplest backdrop.
While Barbara imagined the productions, her husband, Jim, figured out how to bring many of those ideas to life. On performance nights, he tackled technical challenges behind the scenes, from wiring illuminated stage pieces to finding practical solutions for Barbara’s increasingly ambitious productions. As Barbara dreamed up each ballet, Jim became the steady engineer who helped transform those dreams into reality.
Recalling Victorian Afternoon, one of three original ballets presented during Northwest Ballet’s 20th Anniversary Gala, Crettol laughs about one unexpected challenge:
“Jim had to find out how he could light that chandelier. And he had to find electricity to light that.”
Husband Jim Crettol and Barbara.
Mothers sewed costumes from kits Barbara put together herself: material, patterns, thread, notions, everything boxed up and sent home with the women who showed up year after year because they believed in what was being built.
Kern Magazine spoke with Sandy Tiner, one of the mother’s that did just that.
“That was such a special time for me watching my little girl do something she loved,” Tiner says. “Being able to help by sewing for the production was very rewarding for me.”
Crettol gave the contributors free tickets and listed their names in the program. The programs were all thoughtfully written and compiled by Crettol herself.
“I always insisted it had to be my verbiage,” she says of the programs. “My punctuation. Everything I wrote. I did all that writing myself.”
Each productions grew more ambitious. Pioneer Celebration in 1981 drew on Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid, complete with a live fiddle player, a California State champion, she describes as a shy man who was anything but once he put bow to string.
Barbara Crettol pictured on the left
Authenticity became one of Crettol’s artistic signatures. When Highland Magic took the stage, audiences heard live bagpipes. Rather than relying solely on recorded accompaniment, Crettol sought out musicians who could transport audiences into each production’s world.
“I liked authenticity.” she says. “I carry that through.”
Sitar Concerto brought the textures of East Indian classical music to the stage, an homage, in its way, to her father’s stories of the poverty and beauty he witnessed in India during the war.
And always: the children at the center of it.
“I wanted them to enjoy me as much as I wanted to enjoy them,” she says. “Music was my catalyst. That was my opportunity to tie us together.”
Beyond the Studio Walls
Crettol never wanted her dancers to believe Northwest Ballet was the only place they could learn. Just as her own teacher, Martha, had expanded her world by taking small groups of students to study with accomplished instructors in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Crettol carried that tradition forward with her own dancers.
During the summer, Crettol organized trips to workshops, including programs at Civic Dance Center in Bakersfield, where students encountered new instructors, different teaching styles, and dancers from studios throughout the region.
For many, it was their first glimpse into a much larger dance community.
“I always liked that summer thing,” Crettol says. “It did get to a point where it was best that I didn’t take a class with my students, but I was there.”
Crettol wanted her students to experience unfamiliar studios, learn from other teachers, and discover that ballet was a lifelong tradition passed from one generation to the next.
Students also eagerly anticipated Northwest Ballet’s summer programs. Designed by Crettol, the sessions went far beyond traditional ballet classes, introducing dancers to character dance, jazz, and other disciplines while offering an early glimpse into choreography that might later find its way into the studio’s next original production.
More Than a Dance Studio
That sense of home was no accident.
Back in Wasco, Northwest Ballet became much more than a place to learn pliés and pirouettes. It became a gathering place where children grew up together, parents became volunteers, and lifelong friendships formed between rehearsals.
Advanced dancers spent countless hours at the studio preparing for productions, often learning choreography out of sequence while helping younger students stay focused until it was their turn.
“So you poor advanced students, you were there a lot,” Crettol says.
Those long rehearsals became traditions in themselves. Super Bowl Sunday meant a television rolled into the studio, tables filled with snacks, and the dance family gathering together between scenes to cheer on the game before returning to the dance floor.
“It was a lovely family kind of atmosphere,” Crettol says.
Students also took their talents beyond Northwest Ballet’s original productions, performing in local art festivals, community showcases, and talent shows that gave them opportunities to grow as performers and represent their studio with pride.
That was always Crettol’s greatest lesson. Ballet taught discipline, artistry, and technique, but the friendships, confidence, teamwork, and sense of belonging her students carried into adulthood were every bit as meaningful as the performances themselves.
The Hardest Goodbye
The studio closed in 1999. Crettol made the decision herself, on her own terms, with no debts.
“When I closed the door, everything was paid for,” she says. “I didn’t owe the bank anything. I didn’t owe Jim anything.”
That was important to her. She had made herself a promise years earlier: if dance ever became something she couldn’t afford to sustain, she would close before the loss became something else.
What she hadn’t accounted for was the grief.
“It was just like all of the rugs were pulled out from underneath me,” she says. “Even though I did the pulling of the rugs.”
For a year, she was, by her own account, terribly depressed.
By then, the Crettol’s children, Brian and Suzanne, were grown. Brian was away at Cal Poly, while Suzanne had made a home in San Diego.
The house between Shafter and Wasco, which for 25 years had been filled with choreography, music, and the bustle of preparing for productions, had grown remarkably quiet.
She worked through it. Slowly, the way grief requires.
“You have to cry,” she says. “You have to lose. You have to forgive, but never forget.”
In time, a different kind of understanding emerged. The studio had been hers, but the gift had always been given in two directions.
“I became a better person because of being a teacher rather than the dancer,” she says. “I learned so much from the girls about myself, about the world, about what a gift it is to work with children.”
Former students still dream about Northwest Ballet. They remember it not simply as a dance studio, but as a place where confidence took root, friendships flourished, and childhood unfolded under the guidance of a teacher who believed in them before they fully believed in themselves.
According to one past student, Northwest Ballet played a role in how she approaches her career in music, currently serving as Stockdale High School Director of Instrumental Music and board member of Kern County Music Educators Association and the Bakersfield Youth Symphony Orchestra:
“Northwest Ballet was a welcoming and creative space where dancers of all ages could learn and grow. Mrs Crettol’s classes taught me the value of artistry, expression, and confidence, which has enriched the way I teach and connect to my students as a music educator,” Amanda Sproul says. “It has been especially wonderful watching my daughter discover the same joy in dance that I found at her age.”
Amanda Sproul pictured on the right at Northwest Ballet
In Barbara Crettol’s dreams, the studio is always a little bigger than it was. Always lit like sunset. The partition is always there. The music is playing.
And in many ways, Northwest Ballet never really closed. It lives on in the hearts of the generations Barbara Crettol taught, each carrying forward a small piece of the girl who, in the 1960s, rode home through the dark San Joaquin Valley after witnessing a live ballet production at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and dared to imagine a life in dance.
That girl could never have imagined that she would spend 25 years awakening that same sense of wonder in generations of children. Some found it at the barre. Others found it from the audience, where her original productions sparked imaginations that spilled onto paper in the form of heartfelt drawings, handwritten notes, and treasured keepsakes—many of which Barbara still carefully preserves today.
Preserving a Lifetime of Memories
Long after Northwest Ballet’s final curtain call, Barbara Crettol quietly became the keeper of its history.
Tucked neatly into binders are decades of photographs, recital programs, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, greeting cards, drawings, and letters from former students and families.
Some of the albums have become treasured keepsakes that she has occasionally shared with former dancers searching for childhood photographs of themselves.
One wall of the family garage has become a quiet tribute to Northwest Ballet. There, a carefully arranged gallery celebrates the school Crettol devoted more than 25 years to building, featuring the hand-painted sign two students created for the studio door alongside the teaching barre where generations of dancers learned their first pliés.
It isn’t there as a monument to the past, but as a conversation with the future.
Barbara Crettol’s gallery wall of Northwest Ballet memories
“My purpose in putting up the gallery in the first place was to show the grandsons that I had an opportunity to share my love and art of ballet for many years in my community,” Crettol says. “As well as the pleasure of being their grandmother forever.”
That simple reflection says everything about the woman who devoted her life to teaching.
Barbara Crettol with her parents and husband
Her accomplishments matter. The awards, newspaper clippings, and photographs tell the story of a remarkable career.
But to Crettol, they exist alongside something even more important, the family she treasures today and the generations of students who still carry a piece of Northwest Ballet wherever life has taken them.
Barbara Crettol with her daughter Suzanne
Somewhere, in a house between Shafter and Wasco, Barbara Crettol still dreams about Northwest Ballet.
Rehearsals and recitals. Costumes stitched by loving hands. Children discovering confidence one plié at a time. Letters, drawings, newspaper clippings, and treasured keepsakes—each one a reminder that Northwest Ballet wasn’t simply part of Barbara Crettol’s story. It became part of the story of everyone whose life it touched.
“It was the most fulfilling gift I’ve ever been given.”
Kern Magazine Signature Questions
What do you love about your community?
“I love the pace. I love the openness of the community. By and large, I’ve always been treated with extreme kindness and appreciation and interest—whether it was ballet or personal. I found that Shafter in particular is very receptive, very progressive in their thinking. I was very lucky that I had the best of both worlds, both Shafter and Wasco. But more than anything, the people themselves have been most helpful, encouraging, and kind. It always strikes me with great humility that all these parents allowed me to be part of their daughters’ lives. That’s a big thing for parents to do, to trust me with their little one. That is a very big deal.”
When you want to eat local, where do you go?
“Luigi’s, of course—and I know that’s Bakersfield, but you know. Locally, we have a wonderful Mexican restaurant in Shafter, right across from where Spencer’s used to be. The staff are delightful, the owner is very nice. It’s generally lunch—Jim and I are homebodies in the evening. But my real memory of eating local goes back to Hoyett’s Sandwich Shop in Wasco.
When you want to get out of town, where do you go?
“Lately it’s been Morro Bay. We have a house there, which makes it very inviting. But traveling has always been an education for me. Going to Europe, to Switzerland, to San Francisco—it makes me appreciate being American and having the freedoms that we have. I love finding a theater or a museum wherever I go. And San Francisco has a special place. One year Jim surprised us with box seats at the War Memorial Opera House for the San Francisco Ballet. We were right over the stage. Romeo and Juliet. By the time I came out, I was just totally crying. Jim said, ‘How was the ballet?’ And I couldn’t tell him. It was the most exquisite thing I’ve ever seen.”
