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By Root 584 0

met my father. Byron Barker was a rugged outdoor kind of guy, an adventurous man who had grown up on a ranch in South Dakota with cattle and horses. He was working in the electrical industry when he met my mother. Electricity was in its infancy then. It was quite a pioneering and exciting time for the field. He and my mother married in 1920, and Mom accompanied him on various jobs. After a year and a half or so, my father became foreman on the high line through the state of Washington. They were living in a tent city near a little town called Darrington when I arrived. The tent city was created because this was still the Wild West. There simply were no towns near the rugged area where the electric lines were being installed. I was born on December 12, 1923. They went to a doctor’s house in Darrington where my mother gave birth, and a few days later they returned with me to the tent city. Mom said, “It was a perfect place for an Indian father and his papoose.”

One early evening while my father was working on the high line in Washington, a problem developed high on a tower. All of my father’s men had left for the day, so he decided to handle the problem himself. Unfortunately, his “hooks”—which are spiked climbing irons used by linemen to provide footholds—were not at the tower, but several pairs belonging to the men who worked for my father were located. Although they didn’t fit him perfectly, my father selected a pair and climbed the tower. But the hooks slipped. My father came crashing down and sustained an injury to his hip joint that affected his spine in a manner that proved fatal six years later.

In spite of his tragic accident, my father and mother were smitten with the state of Washington—so much so that when my father’s responsibilities on the high line were completed, he signed on for another job in Seattle. My mother said, “The tent city was a lot of fun, but I was ready for an apartment in Seattle.”

• • •

About this time, in 1924, my mother’s father, my grandfather Robert E. Tarleton, the minister, died back in South Dakota. My mother had younger sisters and a brother, so there were still two daughters and a young son at home with my grandmother, but she was now a widow, living in South Dakota. She decided she was going to southwest Missouri. It had actually been a dream of my grandparents to retire on a farm in Missouri, and now my grandmother was determined to do as she and my grandfather had planned. She bought a farm in Houston, Missouri. She was a strong-willed independent woman, just like my mother.

The idea of her mother alone with her younger sisters and a brother on a farm in Missouri did not sit well with my mother. She and my father were both concerned about this arrangement. After a short while, my mother and father moved from Washington and went down to Missouri to help my grandmother and try to make this farm work. After a while, they convinced her that she was not cut out for farming, and my grandmother traded the farm for a house in Springfield, Missouri. My grandmother, ever enterprising, opened a grocery store down the street from her house. My mother and father stayed there with her for a short time, but my father was still working electrical jobs near Springfield and then in Texas and in Mexico.

• • •

Soon we moved to Pampa, Texas, and then to Brownsville, Texas, right on the border. My father would go across the border every day, where he was foreman on a job installing lines in Mexico. It was just across the Rio Grande in a town called Matamoros. I was still just a small child then, around four or five years old. I guess you could say I absorbed a certain amount of traveling in my blood because of my parents and their willingness to follow electrical jobs wherever they led. There definitely was a pioneering spirit in those days. People did what they had to do for work and for family.

As a side note, I have a vivid memory from that Texas period of when there was a visit by Charles Lindbergh to the airport in Brownsville. He made his historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927,