David Victor Barth

Biographical Sketch of David Victor Barth

David Victor Barth was born at St. John's Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma at 5:30 PM, on September 23, 1942, to Vincent David Barth and Norma Bell. His mother said that at birth he had a rather pointed head.

His parents rented a house at 3125 E. Admiral Blvd. in Tulsa. Vincent was an engineer for Douglas Aircraft Company's Tulsa plant where B 24 bombers were built under contract to support the effort of WWII.

David's brother was also born in Tulsa, November 18, 1944.

There was a screened porch on the right side of the house.

One night when David was about two years old, he was invited to a birthday party for a young child who lived several blocks away. He was picked up by a policeman who was driving a motorcycle with a side box carrying a couple of other children. David was terrified of having to ride in the box with the lid closed. His fear of close quarters must have abated because, later, in the Navy, he was in submarines.

When he was three, the family moved to Detroit, Michigan. They rented a yellow frame duplex at 18658 Bradford Avenue from September 1945 until April 1946. Soot from the industry in the area blackened the snow.

His father made him a wooden boat with three inch diameter gears for wheels and a string to pull it. Low wages mandated frugality in providing toys for the children.

In 1946 the family moved again, to 445 Balsam Street, Lakewood, Colorado, where Vincent got a job with the Bureau of Reclamation. From the back yard of their home, there was a view of the Rocky Mountains. At that time, their house was on the outskirts of the Denver metropolitan area.

David's mother helped him plant and raise pansies in shallow wooden boxes.

One morning, Vincent and Norma surprised David with a new toy: a drum made from an empty coffee can with automobile inner tube rubber stretched across the open ends.

For David, it was an adventure each morning to check the mouse traps to see if any luckless mice had been caught.

David liked the feel of soft fur, and his parents gave him a swatch of fur that was like a security blanket.

He had rabbit fur slippers that wore out quickly because he wore them so much. He had to remember to detour around the heater grate in the living room floor to avoid burning his feet.

Balsam Street was a gravel road in the late 1940s, and David remembered the big yellow graders that smoothed it each Summer.

The family raised ducks in a pen in the back yard. The ducks often escaped in the early morning and awakened the family with loud quacking. Sometimes, following a quacking binge that would awaken Vincent on a Saturday morning when he was trying to get some extra sleep, a duck would discover that it had been invited to dinner.

In 1948 David contracted tonsillitis. He remembered waiting in a crib outside the operating room in the hallway of some Denver hospital, alone. His mother had stayed with him awhile, but she had the two other children to attend to, so she had to leave him. He stood up in the crib that served as his gurney, and called out to passing nurses who were too busy to stop and keep him company. Finally, he was wheeled into the operating room. He resisted breathing the gas, and once the anesthesiologist invited him to sit up and watch the snow falling outside to get him to relax.

David's sister, Naoma Elizabeth, was born September 30, 1946, during the time the family lived in Lakewood. In 1948 there was a layoff by the Bureau of Reclamation, and Vincent lost his job. The family moved to Columbus, Ohio when Vincent got a job with Battelle Memorial Institute as a metallurgical engineer.

Vincent left for Ohio several weeks before the family did, leaving Norma to sell the house and their 1935 Ford. David remembered the Ford. It was dark green with big fenders, running boards, an asphalt top, wire wheels, a horn with tabs on it, and a plunger type starter pedal on the floor.

Norma took the children by train to Columbus where Vincent met them at Union station and took them by taxi to the new two bedroom house he had purchased at 68 West Rathbone Road, Columbus, Ohio. Norma and the children had never seen it until the night they arrived.

Five year old David remembered the first night at the new house. It was one of those moments he wanted to remember. Since there was no time to shop or cook, David ate Cheerios for dinner.

Vincent walked a few blocks to the northern bus line turn around to go to work. In 1950 he purchased a used 1948 Chevrolet.

David and Duncan had bunk beds and Naoma slept in a crib in their parent's room. Within a year, with the help of Victor, Vincent's father, Vincent and Norma finished the attic, turning it into a bedroom for the boys at one end and a study for Vincent at the other.

David and Duncan were different in their approach to housekeeping. David tried to keep his side picked up while Duncan was not so neat.

David collected cap pistols, and at one time, owned more than a dozen.

Vincent made pea shooters out of stainless steel tubes and he and the children would go to the basement, turn out the lights, and sneak around pelting each other by shooting the beans from the tubes. Vincent didn't tell the kids that you shouldn't put the beans into your mouth until you are ready to fire or they would swell up and not shoot through the tube. As a result, the children had many misfires, and got pelted by Vincent's beans.

Around age six, David had nightmares for a few months. He dreamed he was being chased by a monster that he believed would maul and eat him. He became frustrated with the dreams, and decided that he would let the monster catch him because he didn't want to experience the fear anymore. After that, the monster didn't enter his dreams.

His mother told him that he could determine if he was dreaming by pinching himself. If it hurt, he was awake. However, in his dreams, when David pinched himself, it hurt, so that test wasn't very reliable.

The house on Rathbone Road had a box elder tree in the front yard. It was about 50 feet high by the early 1950's, and David became enamored with climbing it. He loved to get away from humanity on the ground by climbing to the highest branches that would support his weight. He would look out through the leaves, but in that flat part of the city, there was not much else to see besides other treetops. Still, he really enjoyed looking down on the world.

He became very good at climbing the tree, and neither his brother nor his sister ever tried to climb it, so it became his private refuge.

About age five or six, David became fascinated by airplanes. He read all he could about them in newspaper articles. He watched them fly over their home. While the other children were oblivious to aircraft, David watched them and learned to recognize Piper Cubs, Beechcraft Bonanzas, bombers, tankers, and passenger planes. He saw his first jet, an F 80, around 1950. David read books about Scott Crossfield and Chuck Yeager in the early 1950's when those test pilots were flying the early rocket powered planes in attempts to break the sound barrier.

It was about this time that David began having dreams that he could fly by flapping his arms. The setting of those dreams was usually in the front yard, and he was being chased by a vicious dog or a bully. He would wildly flap his arms and slowly rise above the surface. He was usually high enough that the bully would grab at his shoes, and David would have to kick and flap even harder to escape the jumping bully trying to pull him back to earth. After gaining twenty or so feet above the ground, he could glide, but he had to make sure he didn't lose too much altitude, lest the bully or the mad dog attempt to grab him again.

His fascination with flight probably caused these dreams which continued several times each year until he began taking flying lessons at age 31. After he began flying, those dreams ceased.

The family had several cats. Socko was the first, then came Muffin. Muffin became David's cat, kept in the basement during the day. When David came home, the cat would recognize his footsteps and meow to be let out and fed.

David remembered the few sick days that he spent on the sofa playing with modeling clay and listening to the old radio soaps like "The life and Times of Stella Dallas" and "Life Begins At Forty." Sing alongs featuring Heart of My Heart were popular.

Although David heard about television from a fellow student, Ralph Barber, in the second grade at Homedale Elementary in 1949, the family didn't purchase one until around 1953.

When David entered the second grade in 1949, Norma, who was an unemployed teacher, hired a black maid, Mary Gunn, to take care of Duncan and Naoma, and went back to teaching.

In the fourth grade, when he was 11, David got infectious mononucleosis, requiring him to stay out of school for a month. That was a setback for his academic standing.

In 1955 the family moved two miles North to 139 Westview Avenue near Homedale Elementary. David had gone to school there in grades 1 through 4, then went to Worthington Elementary for the fifth and sixth grades, then to Worthington Jr. High for the seventh and eighth grades, and finally, four years at Worthington High.

Shortly after the family moved, they bought a new 1956 Chevrolet station wagon. They received a $50 trade in for the 1948 Chevrolet.

David graduated from Worthington High in 1960 in the lower third of his class. He was interested in science, but not mathematics. He enjoyed inventing. He mixed rocket fuel from a formula provided by his father, but the fuel was so weak that David suspected that Vincent, who had earned his B.S. degree in chemistry, had given him an ineffective formula in the interest of safety.

As a result, David turned to gunpowder in a 50/50 mixture with sugar. He and a neighbor boy made straw rockets fueled with this mixture. They flew about 100 feet, and were most impressive at night. By fueling the top inch with pure gunpowder to provide sort of a warhead, the rockets would pop with a yellow flash at the end of their flight.

During his high school years, he built an electric timer to turn his radio on and off automatically.

Another invention was a retractable periscope to spy on his sister when she used the bathroom in the basement, which wasn't very often. It was operated from his basement bedroom, on the other side of a concrete block wall. He giggled so much at the first opportunity to try the device out, that Naoma overheard him and stopped using that bathroom. Their parents directed the dismantling of the optical device.

He put together a bootleg telephone and installed it in his basement bedroom, but the phone company detected it, and he had to disconnect it.

His favorite invention was a ground effect machine (GEM), or cushion of air vehicle. It was built from a hollow, multi layered cardboard disk about two feet in diameter and four inches high. It had come with a new washing machine to stabilize the agitator during shipping. David attached a high speed motor from a junk yard to the center and put a fan blade on the bottom side to blow air downward. Surprisingly, it worked. However, when David showed it off to a science teacher, he pushed the unit too hard across the floor, and when the GEM reached the end of the extension cord, the wires to the motor were pulled together and shorted. The science teacher, fearing that it would cause a fire, or at least blow the fuses, had him take it home.

In a nationwide science examination given in 1959, when he was a high school senior, David scored in the top one percent. That test consisted entirely of science questions but no math. One question that he got right, but which the other students protested was, "What is an umbilical?" David's answer was the cable that connects a rocket to the gantry. The other students chose the anatomical answer which was incorrect because that was really the "umbilical cord."

After graduation, his parents told him that if he attended college right after high school, they would foot the bill. If he didn't go directly to college, he would have to pay his own way. So, David enrolled at Ohio State University in engineering. The reason he chose engineering is that it was a prestigious occupation, America had been embarrassed by the Russian's Sputnik satellite, and he was interested in science.

Since enrollment restrictions were loosest during Summer quarters at Ohio State University, David enrolled right after graduation. In retrospect, he should have gone on the month long vacation to Colorado with his parents. They met up with the Mosers, the Jack Barths, and Victor Barth in Aspen. When the family was preparing for that trip, David surreptitious removed a bottle of 7-UP from a six-pack, carefully removed the metal cap, drank the delicious, refreshing liquid, refilled the bottle with tap water, replaced the cap, and put the bottle back into the six-pack. After the trip, Naoma said it was the last bottle, they were in the desert, throats parched, and when they opened the bottle, they knew David had pulled off the joke of the year (well, the joke of the week).

Ohio State was experiencing a flood of enrollees into engineering, and the school was using heavy duty math courses to weed out the less able. David was one of those weeded out of engineering. After the Autumn quarter, he was close to flunking out, so he decided to go into the military.

He found that the Navy had a program that would provide two years of schooling in return for six years active duty. He would spend the remaining four years on submarines.

He joined the U. S. Navy in November 1960. Boot camp was in followed by electronics technician school in Great Lakes, Illinois. Submarine school in New London, Connecticut rounded out his first year in the service. Computer school in Dam Neck, Virginia took a year, and then he was assigned to the U.S.S. Lafayette, SSB(N) 616, still in construction on the ways at the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics in Groton, Connecticut, across the river from New London.

The boat was launched in 1962, christened by Jackie Kennedy, the First Lady. David was part of the honor crew onboard the boat as it slid down the ways and never had a view of Jackie.

David spent the next few months of 1962 and 1963 learning the systems throughout the boat as the yard workers finished installing the computer systems. David was assigned to the Lafayette as a navigation center technician, responsible for the operation and maintenance of several computers.

David made seven 60 day patrols in the Mediterranean Sea as a member of the blue crew. The boat was submerged continuously during patrol, so he didn't get to see much of the world except when he took a three week whirlwind 13 country tour of Europe with a shipmate, Doug Shellenberger. They traveled by train with $100 Eurail Passes. They went as far north as Oslo, Norway and back south to Rota, Spain where they caught a hop on a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) plane back to Charleston, South Carolina.

The blue and gold crews alternated duty on board the boat. The blue crew flew from Charleston to Rota in October and April to relieve the gold crew as it returned from patrol. Upon arrival, the gold crew spent three days with the blue crew to pass on system status information. The gold crew would then fly back to the States while the blue crew spent the next month readying the sub for the next patrol.

After the month long tune up, the sub would depart Rota, sail out to the ocean accompanied by Russian trawlers, dive, and cruise through the straits of Gibraltar, surfacing only after making a 60 day underwater cruise of the Med. Because of the Russian menace (Kruschev had threatened to sink one if he detected it on patrol), the "cruises" were considered war patrols and the crews received hazardous duty pay.

The food on board the subs was excellent. Langusta and filet mignon were often served, and crew members could get ice cream, steak, or anything else they wanted, any time. It was difficult to stay slim. There was a set of weights and a stationary cycle to ride, but not many sailors made use of them. David chose to do situps, pull ups, and work with 15 pound dumbbells.

David learned programming in machine language, and wrote a program to automatically trigger the computer to print out a navigational fix every 15 minutes. This enabled the computer operator to do other things without having to try to be precise about being at the computer console when time to get a fix rolled around. His program was adopted by many submarines in the fleet.

After arriving in Charleston, the crew had a month off. In towns with a naval base, such as Charleston, not many girls were interested in dating enlisted men. Unfortunately, a few enlisted men made fools of themselves in bars, reflecting on the reputation of all sailors. Also, being gone six months of the year made it difficult to achieve ongoing relationships, so David didn't date while he was in the Navy.

He took trips with Doug and other shipmates to such places as Matamuskeet Wildlife Refuge where they stayed in the large lodge and took many pictures of birds. In retrospect, it wasn�t very exciting.

They discovered a small resort on Edisto Island and spent many days working and enjoying seashore life with the Hutsons who owned the large house called Hutson's Landing.

At Hutson's they met the Bell family, Weldon, his wife, Ola, their two daughters Shirley and Peggy, and their two sons, Jimmy and Robert. The Bells were dairy farmers. David and Doug enjoyed working on the farm as much as the times at Hutson's.

One time Weldon and his two brothers who co owned the farm, set up a pair of hay baling units, each consisting of a tractor pulling a baler, and a wagon attached to that. Doug and David donned gloves and rode on the wagons, lifting and stacking bales as they came off the baler, racing to see who could take the lead. It was hard work, but it was fun. In the end, neither Doug's unit nor Dave's won because the balers kept breaking down. But they put up a lot of hay that day and had a lot of fun.

The daughters, Peggy and Shirley, were very attractive, especially Shirley, the 16 year old. Had Shirley been a few years older, David would have tried to date her, but he surely would have had a lot of competition.

In 1965 David took $4,200 of his savings and purchased a new Corvette for cash. It was his dream car: ermine white with a red interior and black convertible top. He sold it in 1968 for $2,600 to buy a house. It had 30,000 miles and was in mint condition.

David was honorably discharged in 1966. He went back to live at his parent's home in Columbus, enrolling in the Winter quarter at Ohio State in September of 1966. His work that quarter earned him a "B" average. Although he wanted to get a degree someday, David wanted to get out into the real world and work as a computer programmer, so he quit school.

Not wanting to settle in Columbus because of the dreary winter weather, he checked the Rand McNally road atlas, and chose Denver as his next home.

In March of 1967, he packed up his 1965 Corvette and headed to Denver, Colorado. He got a room at the YMCA downtown and began job hunting. Within a week he had a job as a programmer trainee for the American National Bank of Denver, where he worked for five years, moving up to programming manager. During these years he programmed in Burroughs Assembler.

Shortly after getting the job at American National Bank, David rented an apartment within walking distance of the bank. A few blocks away from his apartment was an outdoor ice skating rink in Zechindorf Plaza. He purchased ice skates in 1967 and began many years of ice skating.

He and a co-worker at the bank, Al Schmidt, began climbing Colorado mountains over 14,000 feet in elevation. Of the 52 fourteeners, David climbed 26 of them between 1968 and 1971. He climbed some of them with Al, then others with a girlfriend, Carolyn.

In the Spring of 1971, David noticed a long haired female programmer in the accounting department of the bank. She kept to that area, so he didn't see her again until the accounting programming department was merged with the group David was in, sometime in June 1971.

The girl was Carol Mikesh, and David was smitten by her personality and beauty. Carol and David became good friends, and David moved in with her in 1972. Carol, having gone through a divorce, did not want to remarry right away, so the couple lived together. In later years, they decided not to marry to keep each of their asset pools (even though not large) independent. This approach worked well because it eliminated money arguments. Carol could go out and buy a suit and David could go rent an airplane without affecting each other's bank account.

In 1972, he joined Mid Continent Computer Services, programming in Cobol. In 1973 through 1975 he worked at Bayly Corporation, a private label maker of jeans for J. C. Pennys and other retailers, again programming in Cobol for a Burroughs B3500.

Shortly after starting at Mid Continent, David met Gary George. Gary was a fellow programmer who had an engineering degree, and had worked on the F 111 project for General Dynamics, and owned a Cessna 172. Gary threw a party for his fellow employees in the party suite of his apartment building. Before the party, Carol was excited to meet Gary because he owned an airplane, and she had fond memories of flying a small plane over the Georgia coast.

David was less enthusiastic about small planes. His concept of flight was piloting military fighters, which he knew was out of his reach. At the party, Carol asked Gary about his plane. Gary suggested that he might take David and Carol on a flight someday.

A few months later, on a cool October evening, David and Carol met Gary and his girlfriend at the airport for a flight in Gary's Cessna. The air was smooth and the moon was full. The city lights looked like diamonds on black velvet. The moon shone on the lakes, making them appear to be pools of molten silver.

After the takeoff, David's first question to Gary was what frequency should he use if Gary should become incapacitated. Gary patiently answered, realizing that David was experiencing a little tension. But David was hooked on flying. Gary let him use the plane for $5.00 an hour plus fuel. David paid $6.00 an hour to an instructor and got his pilot's license in 1974.

In 1975 and 1976 he went to work for Cobe Laboratories writing an Order Entry system on a Datapoint Computer in an assembler language indigenous to that equipment.

By 1977, David had become a flight instructor, and he quit his job with Cobe Laboratories to finish his undergraduate degree at Metropolitan State College, instructing flying students between classes. After graduation, David returned to full time employment. He continued to teach flying part time.

David's other employers included Mile High Savings (which subsequently became Silverado Savings, of S&L bailout fame), Cobe Laboratories for the second time, Van Schaack Real Estate, Affiliated Banks Service Co., Aviation Information Services, Inc., and Computer Data Systems, Inc.

In 1982, David earned a master of science degree in business administration. He then took a part time job teaching evening courses at Metropolitan State College in 1982 and 1983.

Along the way, David earned a glider pilot's license, a real estate broker license, and an amateur radio operator license (technician). He was listed in "Who's Who in the West" in 1987.

Carol and David began to take three to six day vacations in the late 1970s, flying on commercial airlines. By 1990, they had visited New Zealand; Sydney, Australia; Hong Kong (several times); and Switzerland; as well as many domestic destinations.

Their lives are different from most couples because they have chosen not to have children. But they made the best of the situation, enjoying life.

In 1995 David earned a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from Kennedy-Western University. It took him three years to complete the course work and the dissertation, but it was well worth the effort. He was then listed in �Who�s Who in America.�

The programming language that David had used since 1970, Cobol, was obsolete by 2000, and jobs working with it were almost non-existent. He chose to become a technical writer and business analyst, working on short-term contracts.

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