Joe L. Barnhill

Joe Barnhill, long time Boulder resident and businessman, passed away on Saturday, January 5, 2008, following a brief illness. He was 87 years old.

Joe Lee Barnhill was born at home in 1920 in rural Marthaville, Louisiana, near the historic antebellum parish of Nachitoches.

If the tiny Marthaville reminded Joe's children of the community depicted in "To Kill a Mockingbird," they fondly considered the Barnhill family as the inspiration for "The Waltons."

Robert and Minnie Barnhill both came from established local clans. Minnie Ingram married here childhood sweetheart at sixteen and settled nearby on his 40 acre homestead. Robert's great uncle William Barnhill was renowned for having buried an unknown confederate soldier who was killed by Union troops on his property in 1863. Generations of Barnhill's would tend the grave, and eventually through the leadership of Robert the site became a state landmark and tourist destination.

Robert was a towering figure in the community and a lifelong hero to his son Joe. In the depth of the depression the family lived off their land, supplemented by Robert's enthusiastic local entrepreneurship in which all family members were enlisted. He and his sons harvested and hauled logs and seasonally extracted and processed sugar cane; he drove the local school bus and delivered the community mail; and he was the song leader throughout his life at the family's Beulah Methodist Church.

Joe was fifth in the family rank of ten children evenly divided in gender -- the girls helping their mother at home, and the boys with their father in the daily business of survival. Joe was proud to graduate from Marthaville High School as the runner-up valedictorian, and the winner of the American Legion Award.

With his older brother Glen and his cousin Aubry, Joe left Marthaville to find work in the big city of Shreveport. He worked happily in a local drug store where he was a highly sociable soda jerk before he and Glen enlisted together in the Navy in 1943 following Pearl Harbor -- thus becoming the first Barnhill's of their generation to ever leave Louisiana.

Joe's war years began in Norfolk, Virginia where he was trained as a dive bomber gunner preparing for the Pacific Theater. Stationed on the storied air craft carrier the USS Bunker Hill, Joe and his pilot survived nine months of intensive combat as his fleet island-hopped through a series of monumental engagements -- flying countless missions seeking and attaching Japanese targets, twice surviving being downed in the Pacific, once following the battle that severely damaged the Bunker Hill.

Newly discharged in 1945, Joe returned to Boulder where he had received his radio signal training, and where he had met his future wife. At the University of Colorado on the GI Bill, Joe studied chemistry with the plans of becoming a pharmacist. With a family on the way, Joe went to work at Blackmar's Furniture, located on Pearl Street for 40 years, where he was top salesman and a favorite of his customers and colleagues for his great service and even greater storytelling.

Widowed with two young children, in 1956 Joe married Betty Farrens, a school teacher from Fort Collins-- bringing together four young children, Joe's son and daughter and Betty's two daughters.

In 1970 Joe and Betty opened Barnhill Interiors in a small downtown storefront. Over the decades Barnhill Interiors evolved from a fledgling startup to a Boulder business mainstay -- located eventually on Folsom Street, and in business for 25 years until their retirement, existing continuously today as Bartlett Interiors.

Joe was a member of Boulder's first Presbyterian Church for 50 years, where he and Betty were active in adult and youth outreach, bible studies and prayer groups. Through his business he participated in the Boulder Newcomers Club, served as president of the Casey Junior High PTA, and was president for a term of the Boulder Lyons Club. Joe and Betty moved to the University Hill area shortly before their retirement in the early 1980's where both were to spend the rest of their lives as good neighbors and great friends.

Joe's beloved wife Betty preceded him in death in 20001. He is survived by their children Janis Aldridge Sower of Nantucket; Diana Aldridge of Washington D.C.; and Marcia Barnhill Slaughter and Joe Lee Barnhill Jr. of Denver; and their grandchildren Aldridge and Cleaver Sower, Holly, Damon and Jennifer Barnhill, and Jessica and Derick Slaughter. He is also survived by his brother Glenn Barnhill, and his sisters Edlyn Shirley, Delourse Veillon, and Fay Parks, all of Marthaville.

A memorial service will be held in the Chapel of First Presbyterian Church of Boulder at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 12, 2008.