The following is the eulogy delivered at the memorial service for my father, Glenn Barrett, on October 20, 2014.
In 1994, Dad found himself at a yarn show in Birmingham, England, talking to little British ladies about the various qualities of different types of yarn, and making change in pound sterling. Earlier that week, he had seen a new brand of yarn on display in the window of a yarn shop in Bath, the yarn proudly bearing the name of his hometown in Colorado: Aurora.
He paused for a minute during that bustling yarn show, and thought to himself, “How did I get here?” What twists and turns in his life had led him to this surreal juncture?
Perhaps the simplest answer to that question began with Dad's desire to give my mother a thoughtful and unique Christmas present in 1980. Ten years earlier, he had seen knitting machines in Argentina. The machine consisted of a bed of needles, across which the knitter would drag a carriage back and forth. Yarn would feed into the carriage, and a punch-card would dictate the design, guiding the yarn onto some needles and not others with each pass of the carriage.
Dad looked all over southern Michigan for a knitting machine dealer, and bought Mom one such machine made by Toyota. Very quickly, she was mastering the new device, creating Christmas stockings and knitting hats for dad's coworkers.
The hobby slowly grew in scope. Within a few years, mom and dad were not only selling knitted goods at craft shows, but they were selling yarn and knitting machines out of our home. Growing up, there was always a room or two in our house filled with inventory.
In 1988, Mom and Dad took a big step and opened a store not far from our home. A small office was converted into a playroom for my youngest brother, and it became known as “Evan's office.”
They started as dealers for Toyota knitting machines, but also branched out to other brands like Brother and Knitking. In 1989, Mom and Dad were the top Brother machine dealer in the U.S., and they were rewarded with a Caribbean cruise.
As their business expanded, they began subscribing to British knitting magazines, where they often read about an English yarn called “Yeoman” that was unavailable in the states.
In 1991, they traveled to England to meet with the owner of Yeoman Yarns and to work out a business deal. Their trip coincided with my oldest brother's basic training for the Army Reserve, but the rest of us kids stayed with various relatives in Michigan. They came home from that trip as the sole importer and distributor of Yeoman yarns in the United States. Their excitement must have worn off on me because I recall talking “Yeoman Yarns this” and “Yeoman Yarns that” at school, until my friends had to politely (or not quite so) ask me to change the subject.
In an effort to jump-start their new import business, Mom and Dad prepared for a large yarn show in Reno, Nevada. They asked for, and received, an advance of inventory from Yeoman Yarns, with the plan to pay it off over the next year. Their entire inventory was loaded onto a small U-Haul trailer.
They pulled into the yarn show and parked next to the ginormous trailer that had been brought to the show by Bramwell Yarns. Needless, to say, they felt a bit intimidated. But Dad was a canny businessman. He had rented out several spaces on the yarn show floor and displayed his inventory on custom-built wooden shelves. Bramwell only had a pair of booths and displayed their wares on cheap plastic shelves. The yarn show proved to be a huge success. They were able to pay off the inventory advance not in a year, as they had planned, but within the week.
Over the next few years, they traveled to yarn shows in Chicago, Nashville, Seattle, San Francisco, Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, and Grand Rapids. During these shows, they began to see a need for a new dress yarn, a wool/rayon blend. They worked with the owner of Yeoman Yarns to develop a new offering, and in 1994, the new “Aurora” line was premiered by Yeoman Yarns.
So it was that Dad found himself in Birmingham, England, making change in pound sterling and musing about the choices in life that brought him here. But perhaps his question wasn't so much, “How did I get
here?” but rather “How did
I get here?”
The first fifteen years of his life were not aiming him at Birmingham, England. My family is fortunate to have a written record of my dad's life, and I'd like to read some excerpts about his childhood.
“I knew our family was different. We didn’t live in a residential neighborhood with a manicured lawn. We lived on a street lined by factories in an area of town the kids called 'Smoky Hollow.' Kids at school knew our parents were drunks, and reminded us they were better. The whippings were more frequent than we deserved. I dreaded the 4:15 whistle at Standard Oil when my dad came home each day.
“Our home was in disrepair. Dennis and I slept in sleeping bags on cots in the garage. We didn’t have clean sheets. The house had two partial bathrooms. One had a toilet and a sink. The other had a bathtub/shower and a sewer pipe surrounded by a mound of dirt. The bathroom stunk because of the open sewer pipe and we always peed on the mound of dirt. The tiles were falling off the wall in the bathtub.
“We didn’t have much supervision and we could go anywhere we wanted as long as we were home when the streetlights turned on. We had to take care of ourselves. Often, I would put together some kind of ad-lib meal of fried bologna or worse for Hank and me. They didn’t have microwaves and frozen burritos in the late 1950’s.
“My biggest embarrassment came when I was in second grade, when Mrs. Hoffman sent me to the nurse’s office for having dirty ears. Of course, they hauled Dennis into the nurse’s office as well. We were sent home from school so we could take a bath. That same day, Greg Butler was sick and he was driven home at the same time. The next day, Greg Butler let everybody know that the Barrett brothers had been sent home for being dirty. It was hard for us to live that down.
“Our parents didn’t spend much money on school clothes. So we were teased for wearing the same clothes every day. When I was in junior high school and high school, Dennis and I would go to the laundromat almost every night to wash the one pair of pants and couple of shirts we owned.
“Drinking created a lot of problems. Vacations were ruined because my parents would get drunk. Once, we were in Colorado on vacation and my parents started arguing. They were both drunk. My mother got so drunk that she got out of the car, took a taxi to the train station, and almost bought a ticket home, but we got there in time to stop her.
“There were lots of times when she would open the car door and threaten to jump out. Once, my father got so drunk while we were on a trip to the mountains my mother left him sleeping on a picnic table and we drove home without him.
“Once, my dad threw my mom down on a pipe and cracked her head. Several other times, she would get thrown down the steps or just pushed over some furniture, causing her to break a leg or an arm. There were times when she would have more than one broken bone. She spent a lot of time in wheelchairs and on crutches.
“Because of these huge fights, the police came to our house many times. A few times they would take my dad to the station to sleep it off. We knew each of the local police officers and they knew us by name.
“One night, my mother was drunk, as usual, and I was a bit antagonistic about her condition, so we had another argument. I told her about my discussion with the bishop [about moving me to a foster home]. At that time, I was sleeping on a cot in the living room. She jumped on the cot and started swinging at me. In front of our house, there was a factory and the workers were on a coffee break. When my mother started swinging at me, they just stood there and stared in the window.”
Dad related to us a story of running away from home when he was 15 years old. He hitchhiked from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, sleeping on the side of the highways some nights, and dodging the police who would send him home. He eventually made his way up to Sparks, Nevada, before deciding to return home. He was gone a week and his parents never even noticed that he had left.
About that same time, life started turning around for Dad. He joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and found some positive role models. His parents divorced, and neither seemed capable or willing to take care of the children. His dad even went so far as to put a lock on the kitchen cabinets to keep dad and his brothers from eating between mealtimes.
Eventually, his Mormon bishop pulled him aside and asked him how he felt about living with a foster family. Without hesitation, Dad responded that it would be for the best. Within a few weeks, he was living with foster parents Gerry and Gordon Stephens, who he would stay in touch with throughout his life.
He started working hard in school, excelling in classes that he had previously been flunking. He enjoyed the new-found success, being named a top student in his class at a school where not so long ago, his peers thought he was dumb.
Even though he pulled his high school grades out of their death spiral, it may have been too little, too late. Dad graduated from high school, but his overall GPA was only 2.5. Fortunately, his principal had taken a personal interest in him, and not only cheered him on, but had written a glowing letter of recommendation to Brigham Young University. In 1968, he was accepted to BYU.
The following year, he was called to serve as a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Argentina North Mission. They say you can take the man out of L.A., but you can't take the L.A. out of the man. From my dad's life story:
“One Monday, we bought some firecrackers and lit them off in the countryside. When we went to work that evening, we still had a couple tiny harmless firecrackers left. Riding down the street late that evening, a group of Argentines yelled anti-American sentiments at us. We circled around the block and bought a grapefruit ... I put one of the small firecrackers in the end of the grapefruit and hurled it towards the Argentines. In the dark sky, you could only see the lit fuse revolving around the spinning dark object. This was a very scary sight. The Argentines yelled 'Bomba!' and scattered in every direction. The grapefruit landed near some of them, and the tiny firecracker harmlessly popped. I hope they had a good sense of humor.”
His time in Argentina were also a spiritual time from him. Again, from his life story:
“While in Jujuy, I met a member girl that was slowly going blind. At that time, it was her goal to read the Book of Mormon before she lost her sight. That was the one thing she wanted to accomplish. When I left, she didn’t even recognize me unless I spoke, but she did finish reading the Book of Mormon. I understand that after I left, her sight returned to her gradually.”
As a missionary, he enjoyed the energetic hymns of his faith. He especially liked a hymn called “El Alba Ya Rompe,” or in English, “The Day Dawn is Breaking.” Even later in life he would often sing the song in Spanish, at the top of his lungs, as he puttered around the house.
The experiences of his youth, as struggling youth in El Segundo, as a young man striving for something more, and as a missionary helping others to achieve great things in their own lives, helped pave the road that eventually lead him to Birmingham, England in 1994.
And that road did not end in England. There were still many twists and turns ahead of him.
In 1995, Dad became interested in a process called sand-blasting. The process involved taping a pattern onto a piece of glass, the pattern being cut in such a way that it shielded some portions of the glass and exposed others. The glass-work would then be placed in a protective cabinet, and sand would be blasted at it. Because some portions of the glass was exposed, it would get finely chipped, and when the pattern was peeled away, a lovely piece of etched glass was revealed.
Dad bought a sand-blasting machine and placed it in a back corner of the yarn shop. In the evening and on weekends, he would play with his new toy, making gifts for coworkers and teachers at his children's schools. As happened with the yarn shop, one thing lead to another until dad was operating a full-blown business, that included trophies, plaques, advertising specialties, embroidery, and more.
During this time, he was still working a regular job with the Department of Defense, and mom was running the day-to-day operations of the yarn store. With the birth and growth of dad's trophy business, she began doing double-duty and running both businesses. Eventually, dad would hire my brother and I to work for him full time, with my brother eventually buying the business and building his own full-time career.
In teaching himself the business of trophies and plaques, dad would create samples for display. He made himself a “Department of Defense Employee of the Century” plaque that he proudly displayed in the entryway of the trophy store. He also found unusual but practical uses for his new business. In his bedroom, he had a trophy with a plaque bearing the inscription: PTHS Award. PTHS stood for “Place to Hide Stuff” and he hid important documents and credit cards in the trophy's column, knowing that a burglar in search of loot was unlikely to grab the cheap looking trophy.
In retrospect, my dad said the following about these two businesses: “The work I did in my career was important, but running these two businesses was much more rewarding. Here, I wasn’t pigeon-holed into specialized systems. I was responsible for every aspect of running the business. I was in charge of accounting, tax compliance, building maintenance, marketing and sales, product development, process improvement, purchasing, computer systems, web design, internet sales, and showroom design. My career gave us security, but these two businesses gave me an exciting challenge for 25 years.”
The road he followed after Birmingham, England led my dad all over the globe. His trips to England for business only whetted his appetite for more adventures around the world.
In 1998, Dad returned to Argentina, excited to show Mom the places that she'd only heard about in his stories. He learned early on to be a cautious traveler: “On Sunday morning, we went to church with my old mission companion, Elder Senrra. On our way to church, we stopped at the ATM. As we walked away from the ATM, some nice people pointed out that the “aves” (birds) had pooped upon our clothes. They helped wipe us down. I learned the next day as I checked out of the hotel, they had ignored the $300 cash in my wallet and took only one credit card hoping I wouldn’t miss it too soon. The bird poop was just mustard they had squirted onto our clothes. We reported the theft to the credit card company and the $3,000 in charges were never billed to us.”
Other adventures in South America included two trips to Peru. On one of those trips, he worked with a yarn manufacturer to create his own brand of yarn, a soft wool made from the coats of baby alpacas. Dad imported this yarn, called it “Yarns by Aurora” and wrapped it in a label that he had designed himself.
His second adventure in Peru he was able to share with his youngest children. They traveled to the Amazon, spent the night on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca, and hiked the mountains above Machu Picchu.
In 2001, he traveled to Spain and Morocco, another adventure he shared with his two youngest children. Lessons learned in Argentina came in handy: “In Madrid, two expert pickpockets targeted me. With impeccable timing, a man in front of me dropped an armload of papers, causing me to stop. Simultaneously, a man behind me was reaching for my wallet. None of this escaped Sandy’s attention. Her hand reached my wallet first and their plan was thwarted.”
My dad loved to keep Mom on her toes, and in 2004, he planned a surprise trip for the two of them. Mom knew they were going somewhere, but Dad kept the destination a secret. He had planned an elaborate “Amazing Race”-like game, with a series of clues that Mom would follow to their final destination. Unfortunately, while eating breakfast at IHOP a month before the big trip, Dad idly said to Mom, “When we get back from Thailand next month...” and the cat was out of the bag.
They had a great time, riding elephants and lying on the beach. Less than a year later, that beach would be devastated by a tsunami on Christmas Day.
Without a doubt, Mom and Dad's favorite destination, the island paradise that they returned to again and again, was the island of Naxos in Greece. Dad describes this paradise in his life history: “On Naxos Island, on Plaka Beach, we found our beach paradise. Plaka Beach and Agia Ana Beach offer miles of beautiful white sand beaches and unspoiled scenery. There were a few vacation apartments along the beach and a sufficient number of tavernas where we could eat inexpensive family-cooked meals at night. A dirt road ran along the beach. We rented a simple second-story studio apartment right on the beach for $20/day.”
Along the road, both to and from Birmingham, Dad has been many things. Determined. Energetic. Resourceful. Entrepreneur. World Traveler. But without a doubt, the words that he valued most were husband and father.
He saw my mom for the first time, he says, from literally across the room. At the time, she was dating a friend of my dad's, a young man who had also served a mission in South America. This young man taught mom a Spanish phrase and told her to say it to dad. “Che, vos sos loco,” which translates to “Dude, you're crazy,” and in later years, it became something of a in-joke for the two of them, and sometimes used as code for “I love you.”
At first, Dad limited his flirting with Mom, out of respect for his friend, but once the two broke up, he saw his opportunity. Their first date was on March 31, 1972.
Less than a month later, the two of them were sitting on the stairs outside the de Jong Concert Hall on BYU's campus. Dad, sheepishly and shyly said to Mom, “You'd kill me if you knew what I was thinking.” Naturally, Mom pressed him to reveal his thoughts. “You would make a good little wife,” he told her.
At the time, when a girl got engaged at BYU, she would announce it to her friends at a candle passing. The girls in the dorm would gather in a circle, and a lit candle with the engagement ring attached would be passed around the circle. After going around the circle once, the candle would be passed a second time, and when it got to the girl who was to announce her engagement, she would blow out the candle.
Mom planned her candle passing for May 8. Unbeknownst to her, Dad pushed it up to the week before. When mom gathered with her friends on May 1, she had no idea that it was to be her own candle-passing. It was during the second pass of the candle, as my mom was admiring the candle and ring, that Dad, who was standing behind her, leaned forward and blew out the candle. She was shocked by his brazenness, and her surprise led many of their friends to believe that this was Dad's proposal to her.
At the end of the semester, the two parted, he to return to California to work and save money, and she to her family in Michigan to plan for a December wedding. While in California, Dad spent some time with a former church leader. Dad's experience with life had not really prepared him to understand how families function, and it was this church leader that helped him understand that it would be a good idea to fly out to Michigan and meet his fiancee's family.
In July, he flew east to meet with his future in-laws. They had never met him before, and he had been dating their daughter for less than four months. Some members of Mom's family were opposed to the union from the beginning. But it was during the weekend visit that Mom's mom told the young couple that it would make more sense to get married in August rather than December. Dad had somehow won them over.
And so the two lovebirds scrambled to plan their wedding for the following month. And on August 15, 1972, Glenn and Sandra Barrett were married for time and for all eternity in the Idaho Falls Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
They have been best friends ever since, doing everything together, and always finding time for each other. Growing up, my brothers and I knew that on Friday nights we would be left to cook dinner for ourselves (usually mac and cheese or something similar) because Mom and Dad would be on their weekly date. My brothers and I got into some trouble on those Friday nights; we made some pretty awful messes that never quite got cleaned up on time, but we were the stronger for knowing and understanding the depths of devotion our parents had for each other.
Mom and Dad did everything together, sometimes even ordering the same meals at a restaurant. When Dad took up golf in the mid 1990s, though, no one in our family expected Mom to join him. Mom had been a constant cheerleader in all of her family's sports endeavors, but had never been a participant herself. So you can imagine our surprise when a few years later she joined dad on the green. What's more, she became a seriously good golfer.
Mom was Dad's favorite golf companion. He would grumble when Mom beat him, but there was always love and respect there. You knew that he was just so darn proud of Mom's golf game, as he was so proud of all of her successes.
But before he was a golfer, Dad was a skier and a baseball coach. It is in these roles that I find my most vivid memories of Dad.
When I was in fifth grade, a local ski resort offered free lessons for first-time skiers. Dad took the kids, thinking it would be a great one-time activity. We loved it; he wasn't very impressed. He decided to go one more time, and call it done. And then he just couldn't stop going.
Besides the weekend ski trips with all of us kids, Dad would often take one-on-one trips with a chosen child in the middle of the week. These were coveted trips, because not only did we get to skip school, but we got to spend quality time alone with Dad.
Dad was a natural athlete, and he excelled at other sports besides skiing and golf. He worked hard to help each of his kids develop, if not talent, then at least aptitude for baseball, basketball, and football. In our house, “soccer” was a dirty word. In fact, after a disappointing basketball performance, he made me cry by threatening to sign me up for soccer.
Dad took time to have family baseball practices. After work, he'd gather a bag of baseball equipment, and a bucket of balls, and we'd go off in search of an empty ball field. It was usually the three oldest brothers, so Dad would pitch, and one of us would bat, one would catch, and one would shag balls.
He also coached our baseball teams, and he was a phenomenal coach. He coached for a number of years in a competitive league, one that had the kids try out and then the coaches participated in a draft. Dad had a good eye for talent, for not being blinded by flash, and he always drafted a consistently good team. In such a league, you'd expect teams to be evenly matched, but he usually only lost one or two games (out of 20 or more) each season.
The politics of little league often denied Dad a much-deserved coaching position on the all-star team, and often the kids on his teams would be similarly denied. One year, though, Dad organized his own all-star team, secured a sponsor, and took his hand-picked team of unaffiliated players to a tournament in Commerce City. We beat most of the all-star teams from established little leagues, including the one that had snubbed Dad. We took home second place and a gigantic trophy that had a prominent spot in our living room for years afterwards.
One of Dad's signatures as a baseball coach was his end-of-season candy bar awards. He would commemorate an amazing play or a memorable event by giving each kid on the team a candy bar or snack food whose name was reminiscent of the event. One Saturday, our team showed up to play the Reds, but the opposing team was short one man. We lent them one of our players and proceeded with the game. At the end of the year, the kid who played one game for the Reds received a large bag of Big Red chewing gum. My sister, while playing catcher one year, caught a fly ball that practically fell in her glove. She simply looked up, stuck out her glove, and the play made itself. She received a box of Pop Tarts. One final example: during a game, one of our players broke his finger. At the end of the year banquet, Dad called the kid to his side and presented him with a king-sized Butterfinger. Before handing it to the kid, he took the candy bar and broke it in half.
One of my earliest memories of Dad is of the two of us, walking along side a lake in Michigan. I looked up at the sky and asked Dad, “Why is the sky up there, and not somewhere else?” Dad took a second to reply, and then told me, “I suppose that when God was done creating everything else, that was the last place left, so he put the sky there.”
The memory is so vivid because it represents so much about my dad that I admire and love and respect. He often took time to spend one-on-one time with his kids. He listened to us and took our concerns seriously. He approached life with a practicality and level-headedness that I still haven't mastered but I continue to aspire to. And perhaps, too, there is in that exchange Dad's sly sense of humor that has become a hallmark of the stories that have been told about him these last few days.
When I was an LDS missionary in Mexico, I received frequent letters from my dad. I still have those letters, and I know that in the days and years to come, when I need to feel him close to me, when I need to hear his wit and wisdom, it will be these letters that I return to again and again. So, I'd like to close with a couple quotes from those precious letters.
“I will continue to remind you to not criticize the local customs. Accept them. Countries have weird personalities just like your missionaries have diversities. It's very difficult to be positive all the time, but you are a very positive guy. Sometimes I look at Barrett personalities of my father, Aunt Mary Ellen, and even myself, and I see a propensity toward negativity. I catch myself sometimes and have to tell myself to not focus on people's faults or unpleasantness. I don't know if you have noticed this in people, but negative people are not fun to be around. They're all a bunch of jerks. I hate 'em. Whoops there I go again.”
And in response to a question I asked him about the choices that led me to Mexico, he replied:
“In life, you choose roads, and unless you run out of gas or you feel you are not traveling in the right direction, you stay on the highway. The road you have chosen is a good one, and we are proud of you for being attracted to that lifestyle. Along the road, you have opportunities for side trips, some good, some bad. Some will lead you away from your chosen course. Others will make your trip more exciting and interesting. And on each side trip, you will have opportunities to make decisions, but you always need to get back on course and never lose your bearings.”
The road that led my dad to Birmingham was filled with joys and sorrows. Dad savored the joys and learned from the sorrows, and even after that pivotal yarn show, his road continued to provide him with love and fulfillment and happiness. He left this world with no regrets. My most heart-felt prayer is that when I come to the end of my road, I can look back on it with the same satisfaction and happiness that Dad did.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
