Sherry Kafka came from a small town in the Arkan sas Ozarks. Her little community in the backwoods of that largely 
rural state had none of the artistic trappings that would later define 
her life and make her one of the most celebrated designers and plan ners in the country. In fact, she later reported, her town didn’t even 
have a movie theater. Once a week, “a gentleman” would come to 
town with a tent, set it up in the square, and show a movie “if he 
didn’t get drunk that week.”
Her family didn’t have much money, and they moved around a 
lot trying to make ends meet. She went to sixteen schools in twelve 
years, and midway through her senior year she transferred from a 
fairly large school in Hot Springs to a tiny hamlet that had only six 
graduating students. “I think only five of us actually made it,” she 
later reported. “I even went to schools that don’t exist anymore be cause they were so small and could barely scrape together enough 
teachers.” Yet all that moving didn’t daunt her. “It made me forge 
my own methods of using what the schools offered me,” she con cluded. “I figured out very early that all schools are cultures, and 
my job was to go into that school and understand how that culture 
works.”
No one in her family had ever gone to college right out of high 
school, although her father did attend a Baptist seminary later on.