Barbara Breedlove Rollins didn’t change jobs, she switched careers. Determined to do nothing the ordinary way, she retired twice from her final job.

Graduating with honors from McMurry (then College) in 1969, she taught Spanish and English to seventh and eighth graders in Brownsfield, Texas, that lasting a whole school year. She intended through school to be a missionary to South America and when summer study in Spain failed to come to be, she went to Nashville, Tennessee, to get a Masters in Christian Education from Scarritt College for Christian Workers, putting that to use as Director of Christian Education at what was then Matthews Memorial United Methodist Church in Fort Worth. After two years she Mike Rollins, moving to Wichita Falls, working as a typesetter two or three months before moving to Austin. Since the plan was to move again with Mike’s job, she took employment as a Legal Secretary for Niemann and Niemann Law Firm. When they stayed in Austin longer that the initial plan, Barbara went to law school because she was bored. With a fifteen-month-old son, Barbara was amazed at graduation to realize she had honors grades. The family moved to Abilene to be closer to parents where Barbara started practicing law at Bradbury and Tippen which became Bradbury, Tippen, Rollins, Adkins and Hamilton before it fell apart and Barbara looked around for a change, which she found when elected to the brand new County Court at Lw #2 of Taylor County. The first woman Republican elected to county-wide office in Taylor County, she defeated two to win in 1988 and never again had an opponent in primary or general elections, retiring December 31, 2010. When her successor Sam Carroll passed away in August, 2016, she was appointed to complete his term, serving fourteen from September through December 2017.

In 2006 Barbara was a founding partner in Silver Boomer Books, a publishing company. She has written many whole books and even more partial ones. Five were published before Silver Boomer Books, five more since then, and others are in the making. She has authored and published a daily poetry blog since May 4, 2011.

Barbara has been a Toastmaster since December, 2005, and initializing the Abilene Speakers Bureau is a final project through which she hopes to reach the level of Distinguished Toastmaster.

With every job, every hobby, every endeavor speech topics arose. Sorted by subject she has spoken on these:

Barbara’s Speech Topics
Law / Court System
Writing
Pets
Travel
Abilene, We Have a problem (jury service numbers) How to Write so People Will Read It  Bugsy the Dog  My Experience with Roman Medicine
From Runnymede to Me Lessons Learned from The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman Caring for Pets as a Non-Pet Person Lessons Learned in Nicaragua
How you Get elected for the Clueless  On Self Publishing George the Cat English in England, Ireland and Texas
The Juvenile Justice System What a PublisherLooks for in a Manuscript
The Legal System  How to Write a Book
Juvenile Law 101 Writing a Modern Haiku
Writing a Novel
Writing a Sonnet
Texas Women’s Legal History
Personal Lessons
12-Step Recovery
Barbara’s Genealogy
Belva Lockwood’s Fifteen Important Firsts  Being the Boss When Timid 12-step Recovery  William the Conqueror aka William the Bastard
Early Women Lawyers in the US  Having a Stroke Rewrites Your Life A Book in Hand Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and England
Helen Viglini—First Woman Judge in Texas Helpful Books for Mixed up People Like Me I don’t Believe in New Years Resolutions Faith of My Mothers
 Texas Women’s Legal History before it Began Lifelong Advantages of Music Lessons The Birth of Twelve-Step Programs My Bigamist Out-of-Wedlock Ancestor
The all-woman Texas Supreme Court  Preparing for Success The Dutch in New Amsterdam
Sarah T. Hughes a Texas Judge 20 Years before Women could be Jurors Smart Phones for Old Fogies
The Bible Story in One Sitting
The History of Christendom