Biographical Sketch of Duncan Norman Barth

Written in March 1990 by David Victor Barth

Duncan was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on November 18, 1944 to Vincent David Barth and Norma Bell. Being the middle child, he did not get to do all of the things that his older brother, David, did, and neither he nor his brother were doted upon as was their younger sister who was very close to their mother, Norma. Norma had always wanted a daughter, and after the second son, Duncan Norman, was born, she is supposed to have said to Vincent, "Another damn boy!"

Vincent chose Duncan Norman's name from the Tulsa telephone directory.

When the family lived in Lakewood, Colorado at 445 Balsam Street in 1948, the house was heated through a grate in the living room floor. The grate got pretty hot, and one day Duncan fell on the grate, getting a cross hatched burn on his leg.

From early on, Duncan took less interest in how neat his surroundings were than in the workings of the mechanical devices he loved to collect. Since the boys shared a room, split down the middle, David's half always looked neat compared to Duncan's which was messy with pieces of machinery, assembled and disassembled, lying about.

Duncan's interest was drawn to anything in the house that was mechanical. He always wanted to find out how things worked. When he was a toddler, he found that the toilet tank had "machinery" in it.

One of his earliest inventions was the "Foot Operated Toilet Flusher." This mechanism, designed and built by Duncan when he was around 5 years old, consisted of a rope connecting a foot long board on the floor to the flushing handle of the toilet. He would instruct every family member going into the bathroom to flush the toilet using the foot pedal by pushing it down with their foot instead of pulling the handle in the conventional way.

Years later, Duncan received awards from his employer for inventions to improve equipment.

When the family lived in Lakewood, Colorado, in 1947-1948, Duncan was sitting in the backyard. The neighbor's white cat walked by and got his tail pulled by three year old Duncan. It crept up on him from behind and scratched his back, leaving bloody claw marks. David, two years older, watched in horror as Duncan screamed, blood flowing down his back.

When the family lived in Columbus, Ohio, around 1952, David received a new bicycle from his parents. Duncan felt badly that he, too, had not gotten a bike. He had to be satisfied riding an old, hand-me-down, balloon tire, coaster brake bike until his sixteenth birthday. He got the bike in lieu of being allowed to get a driver's license because his parents felt he wasn't responsible enough to drive.

Duncan used to envy people who got to go to the hospital because they got to lie around all day in bed, watch television, eat food that was served to them, and be waited on by nurses.

About 1955, Duncan had to go to the hospital for a hernia operation. He decided that being there wasn't as big a deal as he had originally thought.

Duncan's academic record was pitiful. Few courses interested him with the exception of shop. He was always good at working with his hands and making things. However, he was brilliant with mechanical, and, later, electrical devices.

Around 1952 the boys were given an old Lionel electric train of 1927 vintage by some friends of the family whose children had outgrown it. Since the boys already had a recent Lionel train, Duncan got the old one and David took possession of the new one on mutual agreement.

David soon realized the value of the older train, so he dickered with Duncan to trade for the old, metal train.

One day when Duncan was occupied outside, David, who enjoyed modeling in clay, fabricated a dozen little clay men and placed them on Duncan's train. There was an engineer in the cab, several men on the caboose, tramps riding in boxcars, and even a damsel tied to the tracks.

When Duncan returned and saw the clay people, he wasn't amused, especially because the damsel gummed up the wheels when the engine ran over her.

Being older, David often took advantage of Duncan by trading him cheap trinkets for nicer stuff. For example, he might trade Duncan a dozen trinkets collected from gum ball machines for a nice cap gun. During the deal, he would capture Duncan's interest in the trinkets by describing how interesting and useful they were. Duncan usually made the trade.

The brick house they lived in from 1948 to 1955, at 48 W. Rathbone Road in Columbus, had only two bedrooms and an unfinished attic. With the able assistance of his father, Victor, Vincent finished the attic, making it into a large room the boys could share and a smaller room that Vincent could use as a study. At this time Vincent was taking courses at Ohio State University, and a study area was a welcome addition to the house.

In the boy's rooms, the peaked ceiling came down to about three feet from the floor to meet the vertical wall. Since there was a void behind the vertical side wall, storage shelves were built in to a section on each side of the boy's room. The shelves had doors on them and could be padlocked. David and Duncan had their own combination lock.

One day Duncan crawled into his shelf and asked David to close the doors so he could see what it was like to be inside his closet, in the dark. Then he asked David to put on the padlock so he could imagine himself a prisoner. After David had locked him in, Duncan decided he wanted to get out. It was then he realized he would have to give David his secret combination to get out. He thought about it for twenty minutes while David was convulsed with laughter, finally giving David his combination.

Duncan collected more than a hundred small airplane engines, but he never successfully flew a model plane. His interest was running the engines on the bench, disassembling them, putting them back together, tuning them up, and running them again. He would spend many hours during the summer playing with engines out in the garage or tool shed in Columbus.

The lawn mower was a favorite toy, too. Since he often had it apart, he was assigned the job of mowing the lawn. He didn't enjoy mowing, but at least he was able to get the mower together when the approximate time to mow rolled around.

About 1957, Duncan and the neighbor boy across the street, Larry Beers, formed a partnership to fix lawn mowers. The boys changed spark plugs, tightened loose bolts, tuned them up, and made them work. One day they were working on a neighbor's mower, and somehow, they ignited the fuel in the opened gas tank. There was a "whoosh" as a flame shot upward from the open tank, burning the leaves off a tree in the back yard. The boys sheepishly returned the mower to the neighbor who had to buy a new gas tank.

Although he didn't like classroom work, Duncan cherished his high school job as flag raiser. Each school morning he promptly raised the flag, and then lowered it each afternoon. In four years of high school, Duncan never missed a day of school, nor a day of attending to the flag ceremony.

During his teens, Duncan used to ride his bicycle more than 20 miles to Don Scott Airfield near Worthington, Ohio to watch the airplanes. He never desired to fly airplanes, he just wanted to study their mechanical design.

Around this time he met a man who also had an interest in machinery, particularly in model airplane engines. He and Duncan would visit for hours working on engines and various other types of machinery.

Duncan and his sister, Naoma, were not "goody two shoes" like their older brother, David. They had no qualms about locating the Christmas presents hidden in closets or other places by their parents, opening them to see what they were going to receive, then carefully wrapping them back up.

David was shocked in later years when he learned they had done this. Naoma and Duncan told him that the most difficult part of knowing what they were getting was faking surprise when they opened the presents.

After graduating from high school in 1964, Duncan wasn't certain what he wanted to do. Since David had joined the U. S. Navy in 1960, their mother, Norma, suspected that Duncan would benefit from an enlistment in the military, too. She knew that the draft board was looking for boys to join the Army to go to the war in Vietnam, so she decided to take Duncan to the Air Force recruiter. Duncan really didn't feel that he had much say in this decision, and, perhaps accurately, felt that his parents were flushing him from the nest.

In the recruiter's office, the Air Force sergeant told Duncan that his chosen area of interest in mechanics was filled up, but that there might be an opening in the near future.

Norma and Duncan left the office, but before they had gotten a mile away, Norma turned the car around and took Duncan back, telling him that he should take whatever occupation was available. Duncan was shocked. However, he did get lucky, and after boot camp in Texas, was assigned to a display and model building section at Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, only 50 miles from home. David always suspected that when the Air Force recruiter saw them return, he felt sorry for Duncan and made some clerical adjustments so that Duncan could get into a mechanical-related occupation.

While stationed at Wright Patterson in Dayton, Duncan purchased a Vespa scooter that he drove home on occasion, although it was a rather slow and a difficult trip in bad weather. Later, he bought a Honda 205, which made the trip much faster. Any machinery that Duncan worked on always ran beautifully because he learned the fine points of the way it worked and then took excellent care of it.

While still in the Air Force at Dayton, Duncan purchased a 1937 John Deer single cylinder tractor which he laboriously drove back to Columbus to put into storage. He soon found that because it didn't have a modern hydraulic lift or coupling at the rear, it was not as useful as newer models, but it fit in with his intense interest in old machines.

When Duncan got out of the Air Force in 1970, he applied to work at Ohio Bell, the place he had always wanted to work. To him, the telephone company seemed to have enough mechanical and electrical devices to keep him interested.

Applicants had to take a test that lasted several hours. Duncan failed. He was crushed. He inquired whether he could test again and was told that he had one more chance to pass the test. He studied math and other books for weeks, trying to learn enough so that he could get the job.

For the first time in his life, he was studying hard. He wanted this job badly. It was the only job he had considered. Finally, the second and final chance to pass the test came around. Duncan sweated through the test, hoping that he had passed. He waited while the tests were scored. Finally, he was told that he had passed. It was a tremendous relief for Duncan. That became his life work. After he was told he had passed the test, he left the building, ducked into an alley, and cried with relief of getting the job.

Duncan's first assignment was working with a crew wiring poles. Often, Duncan would call home from a pole, tapping into a phone line, and dialing home with his handset. Mother was often surprised that he was on a telephone pole when he called and admonished him to be careful.

Once he was established in his new job, Duncan purchased a home in Westerville, Ohio, at 6714 Old 3 C Highway. That house was perfect for him because it was in the country where no one cared if he ran tractors or played with other machinery. It had a very large garage that could have held more than 4 or 5 cars. That garage became the storage location for much of Duncan's mechanical collection.

Duncan was always an insatiable collector of mechanical devices. His parents referred to it as "junk," but to Duncan, it was neat stuff. In a way, this "junk" was Duncan's toys. Before he moved away from his parent's home, there was friction between him and his mother and father about all the "junk" that was stored in their garage, tool shed, basement, etc. Getting the "junk" out of their house became one of his parent's priorities.

During a visit to Duncan's home in the mid eighties, his older brother, David, noted that his four car garage contained three outboard motors from the 1920s, a large coke bottle dispensing machine, a refrigerator dating from the 1930s, three Vespa scooters, a two Harley motorcycles, a large five cylinder engine that had rotating cylinders, a motor generator set consisting of a four cylinder engine and a 10 kilowatt generator, a red devil heater, an early model "Pong" video arcade game, the 1937 John Deer tractor, a commercial size ice maker, and other machines in various states of repair.

Duncan had studied each one of these devices and could describe, in detail, exactly how they worked.

That Duncan worked in Columbus was beneficial to both him and his parents. He could go home to visit whenever he wished, and he could help his parents with big jobs. One of those jobs was cutting down several large trees in the backyard of the half acre lot the family home stood on at 139 Westivew Avenue.

Duncan came properly equipped with protective eye wear, gloves, and a chain saw. He even brought telephone pole climbing gear borrowed from his work.

It was sometime in the early 1970s that someone in Duncan's crew decided that his nickname up to then, "Dunk," should be changed to a name with less negative connotation. His new nickname was "Deke," and he approved of it wholeheartedly. He hated “Dunk” because it made him think of being dunked under water.

Duncan married Marilyn Jo Matthews on February 26, 1972. They had a daughter, Jodi Rene, and a son, Scott Matthew. Their marriage was not a strong one from the beginning, and each tended to pursue their own interests.

Duncan liked to get up early in the morning and go to bed early. Marilyn was the opposite, often staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning. When no children had come along after a few years, they considered adopting. Shortly after that, they had a daughter, Jodi Rene, and later, a son, Scott Matthew.

Marilyn rarely cooked for Duncan, and she never cleaned house. Duncan had to cook his own food or eat out. Once when he returned from work in the evening, he saw that Marilyn was cooking. He excitedly showed interest that she was cooking dinner for the family. She told Duncan that she was cooking lunch, she was making only enough for herself and the children, and he would have to fend for himself.

When members of Duncan's family would come to visit, Marilyn would hide in a bedroom, pouting, because she was ashamed of the messy house. However, she would never clean it up. Duncan tried to keep it picked up as well as he could.

Marilyn quit work when they were married, but under pressure from her family, she began to insist that Duncan give her all of his pay from which she would dole out an allowance to him. Since Duncan already gave her most of his paycheck, and there was never anything to show for it, he was reluctant to give her all of it.

Marilyn retaliated by moving out of the house, thinking that her departure with the children would change his mind. Although Duncan loved the kids, he was fed up with Marilyn. They were divorced in 1983. After their divorce, Marilyn tried desperately to reconcile to no avail.

In the early 1970s, Duncan joined the Air Force Reserve. He did this because it meant that for working one extra weekend a month he would be paid, and, if he were to stay with the reserves for 20 years, he would receive a pension.

He became a cargo master, in charge of loading and deploying cargo on C123s at Rickenbacker Air Force Base near Columbus. That plane was originally designed to be a glider in WWII. Two piston engines were added after the war, and later, two small jet engines were added, outboard, for takeoff.

When the C123s were replaced by C130s in the early 1980s, Duncan elected to join the palletizing crew. In 1989, he joined the parachute rigging crew.

The two week Summer camps sometimes resulted in Duncan going to foreign venues such as England, Spain, Germany, and the Azores.

In the late 1970s, the phone company needed someone to maintain the air drying units that piped dry air into the telephone cable tubes. These dryers were necessary because moisture in the tubes would cause short circuits.

When a person to maintain the dryer units was to be selected, a manager, Tom Woods, who had lived near the Barth family in the late 1940s and early 1050s, said that since Duncan had enjoyed playing with toilets during his childhood, fixing dryers would be right up his alley.

Duncan was selected for the job, and by 2006, he was still maintaining air dryer units in Columbus.

While assigned to maintain the dryer units, Duncan found that the weak part of the system was the air filter for air going into the compressor. In dusty conditions, some dust could get into the compressor, ruining it.

Duncan designed a more efficient filter that could be manufactured more cheaply while lasting longer. He was presented with an award from Ameritech (previously, Ohio Bell, which subsequently became SBS) for his invention.

In 2004, at age 60, Duncan retired from the Air Force Reserves after 36 years of service at the grade of E6. As of 2007, he continues working for the phone company saying that he would be bored if he didn't have a job.

Of the three children that Vincent and Norma Barth raised, Duncan, the middle child, was the most concerned for financial security. He made a long-term commitment to his phone company job, joined the Air Force Reserves for the added income and retirement benefit, saved his money, contributed to his 401K, maintained 2 rental houses, and became the wealthiest of the three siblings.

Because he was fond of machinery, he became interested in motorcycles, and by 2007 owned 4 Harley Davidson models. For many years he and his girl friend, Carol Lee, have visited the motorcycle event in Sturgis, South Dakota.

Around 2001 Duncan and Carol Lee moved onto a 5 acre farm near Centerburg, the geographic center of Ohio. It is a perfect location for Duncan to collect and play with machinery.