James Barringer

1952 - 2016

James A. Barringer

James Barringer, a longtime San Francisco attorney, died in his home in Lafayette on June 16., after a valiant 19-month battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jim was born on June 12, 1952, in Cincinnatti, the son of Thomas and Mary Barringer. The family moved to Los Angeles when Jim was four years old. He never forgot the five-day train ride west with his mother.

Always a lover of the outdoors, and of adventure, and friends, he joined the Boy Scouts and rose to the level of Eagle Scout, an accomplishment that defined many aspects of the man he would be all his life.

In high school, he won many awards for running, setting a school record for the mile at 4:36. He went on to UCLA and graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1974, where he studied political science, philosophy, art history, literature, music, and competed in debate—as he continued to do, unofficially, but with passionate intensity, all his life.

Jim went on to receive a law degree at U.C. Hastings, where he was an editor of the Law Review. Classmates remember him as brilliant, tenacious, and above all, wonderfully funny.

For much of his career, Jim practiced estate and trust litigation—in the firm of Lagarias, Barringer and Foley, and with his longtime partner Noël Margaret Lawrence in the firm of Barringer and Lawrence, and later at Evans, Latham and Campisi. In his last years, he was a sole practioner, in part to have greater freedom to pursue other aspects of life outside the law office and the courthouse.

Although he loved and deeply believed in the law—and revered the names of Benjamin Cardozo, William O. Douglas, Learned Hand, among others—Jim pursued many passions. Since childhood, he was a serious student of photography. In adult life he could seldom be found without a camera around his neck, when out exploring the world. And he explored the world with limitless curiosity.

He was an athlete: a black diamond skier who continued to hit the slopes after his first ACL blew out (but had to bow out when he blew out the second one), a lifelong runner and cyclist and hiker whose last big climb, to the top of a 12,00-foot peak in the Andes, was conducted soon after completing five rounds of chemotherapy.

Having started out life in a Christian Fundamentalist church background, Jim maintained a complicated but rich relationship with Christianity, but he found his home as an Episcopalian. He never held the view that only one path led to God. And Jim loved and believed in science. He never lost wonder or hunger to learn about quantum physics, the natural world, the universe.

He loved San Francisco. In the last month, he went to a Giants game, a Warriors game, and visited the newly reopened SF MOMA three times. But he was always ready to venture into the wilderness too—most particularly to his beloved Owens Valley, which he made a point to visit—hard as this was for him-- in the final weeks of his life.

Jim was a passionate lover of music—jazz, classical, blues, though his deepest love was rock and roll. An accomplished bass player, he was never one to take center stage, but, as was true of him in so many parts of his life, the notes he laid down held everything together.

In his younger years, Jim was an active member of the Guardsmen, where he put in many long hours on the Christmas Tree Lot in an elf suit and wrote skits that are still remembered as some of the best ever, and above all, made friendships that endured for the rest of his life. Later, he joined The Family, where he celebrated many happy weekends in the woods of Woodside, talking politics and playing music and smoking cigars.

He was handsome and debonair, quiet, and loyal to the ends of the earth. An unwavering and patriotic liberal, he was saddened and enraged by the direction of Republican politics over the last year, and proud to walk into a polling place and cast his ballot in the California primary just nine days before his death. The prospect of a Trump presidency appalled him.

Jim's first marriage of 17 years to Marilyn Spence ended in divorce, but produced three deeply-loved children of whom he was enormously proud: Matthew Barringer, of Nuremberg Germany, Philip Barringer of Oakland, and Laura Barringer of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Four and half years ago, on a Match.com date, Jim met Joyce Maynard, who like him had been divorced for almost 25 years. In their too-brief time together, they travelled to France, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Hungary. They rode Jim's motorcycle through New England and hiked the Presidential Range of New Hampshire, and so much more, though they were never happier than home together, walking down a dirt road or sharing dinner. Married in the summer of 2013, they considered themselves the luckiest people they knew, to have found each other.

In addition to his wife and children, Jim leaves one cousin, Helen Hurley of Cincinnatti, and three stepchildren who adored him, not only for how happy he made their mother, but also, simply, for the man he was, and the man he was to them.

Good-hearted but incorrigibly competitive, Jim took on cancer as tenaciously as he had taken on pedaling to the top of Mt. Diablo, or any challenge of his career. Despite the grim prognosis, from the start, he remained optimistic, and ceaseless in his efforts to live, almost to the end, when he accepted the certainty of death with equal gallantry.

There will be no funeral service, but a memorial celebration of Jim's life will be held at Joyce and Jim's home in Lafayette on September 17. Donations may be made in his name to the American Civil Liberties Union.