His many talents and life experiences are showcased throughout his house in the form of photographs, artwork and awards that line the walls. He even has two keys to the city of Santa Clara.

At 93, the Willow Glen resident has been a newspaper reporter, an editor, a columnist, a world traveler, a painter and a songwriter.

But his creativity didn't stop after he retired from the newspaper business, to which he devoted 49 years of his life. In 1967, 10 years before he retired, he started learning more about watercolors—an art form he admired and later developed a talent in.

Before he got into art, Barrett lived through both rough and exciting times.

He was born in the state of Washington in 1910. His father, who worked as a clerk for the national forestry service, died when he was just 14 years old. A year later his family—his mother, Catherine, and brother, Nester—took a train to Portland, Ore. and traveled by ship to San Francisco.

He attended Santa Clara High School, and his brother supported the family by working at a Christmas tree lot, a photo laboratory and a factory in Sunnyvale that made broadcast receivers.

In 1929 he was working for the San Jose News as a city reporter, making his first salary of $12.50 per week when he was temporarily fired. The managing editor let him go because of cutbacks, but once the publisher came back from vacation and found out, he rehired him, Barrett says.

"Those were tough times," Barrett says about the Depression. "In some ways I think everyone grew closer together in misery."

After being rehired, he spent nine years as the city reporter, 16 years as city editor and the last 24 years of his career as a columnist at the San Jose News, which after a merger became the San Jose Mercury News in 1942.

"I always enjoyed it and had fun doing it," Barrett says about journalism. "But I never had ambitions to change the world. I just wanted to help people sometimes."

During his career he wrote about memorable events like the construction of Moffett Field and the San Jose Civic Auditorium and the 1933 public lynching of two men who were arrested and confessed to killing Brooke Hart, the son of a well-known city merchant.

"I was an observer that night, not a participant," Barrett says in a somber voice. He recalls the event but doesn't like to speak about it.

Barrett has a flair for writing, which he started developing in grammar school and still hasn't given up.

He jokes that his father got him into writing by saying, "Richard, you have to live by your wits—you don't have a very strong back."

Even though he is legally blind in one eye, he is still working on a memoir, titled Eighty-Seven Damn Years and Counting.


A greater audience

Throughout his career, his work reached an audience well outside of the San Jose area. He wrote 127 limericks that were published in the Wall Street Journal and some that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.

But here in the Bay Area, he was known for his column, in which he did everything from relay San Jose and Willow Glen history to write poetry to campaign.

But it wasn't political candidates he was campaigning for. Once he pushed to have a "pretty woman cellist" on the Lawrence Welk show play a solo.

Barrett says Welk ignored the woman, named Charlotte—he can't recall her last name—and only featured the men in the band, so he formed an imaginary organization in his columns called "Charlotte's Every-Loving Loyal Organization" (CELLO). And his efforts paid off; Charlotte had numerous solo appearances on the show after his campaign.

After beginning his job as a columnist in 1954, he asked his editor if he could travel more. His editor said he could travel as far away as Gilroy. But Barrett got his wish when he went on several press junkets to Europe. He stayed up late writing articles about his experiences in London, Paris, Rome and numerous other countries. The trips that Barrett went on, which lasted a couple of weeks, however, took a toll on his health, and he returned home earlier than planned after working long hours and staying up late writing stories.

But the highlights included parties in Switzerland and meeting the pope and various ambassadors, he says.

The walls of his home feature photographs of these figures as well as those of famous actresses from the 1950s that he met during his career. The photos are mixed in with pictures of his two daughters.

Barrett is a doting father. He explains how Kathleen Barrett, who used to do ballet and was part of the Santa Clara University Ballet Ensemble, is now an architect in New Mexico. His other daughter, Eileen Mitchell, is an administrative dietitian in Palo Alto.

He is also a friendly person by nature, staying connected via email with the various friends he has made through his profession. Several years ago a neighbor connected him to the Internet and email, and he has been hooked ever since.

Barrett says his good neighbors are his heroes, and he has several of them that cook and help out Barrett and his wife.

One of those neighbors is Pat Pfahn, who drives the Barretts to church. She says Barrett is "very sharp and a clever writer."

A local poet also told Barrett that his writing was so clever he was "writing poetry without even knowing it." So Barrett entered some local poetry competitions and wrote sonnets. One called, "Vortices," won several prizes and one of his favorites was called "First Snow."

And although he enjoyed his career, Barrett says it was easy to retire because he had so many other things going on in his life.

"I was tired out because I was 67 years old, two years past retirement age," he says. "I never missed the job at the time I quit because I was on the Bicentennial Commission— a local chapter that was founded to help stage the celebration of America's 200th year of independence—and working hard on lots of projects on my own. My editor joked that if I stayed one more year he would throw me the biggest party in San Jose."

But Barrett didn't stay to celebrate 50 years in the business. Instead he devoted time to watercolor painting and going on several cruises with his wife.


An artist's creativity

Barrett is a member of the Santa Clara Valley Watercolor Society and helped start the Triton Museum of Art Watercolor Biennial Competition, which he donates prize money to.

He received a purple ribbon in a recent Triton Museum competition for an abstract painting titled Trail Head. He proudly shows the work of art and describes how he soaked the rag paper in various colors without any subject matter in mind. But once he saw the final result he decided to put people in like they were standing at the bottom of a trailhead, he says.

He says he got into watercolor because he saw retirement coming.

"Painting is fun and interesting because it involves solving design problems," he says. "And when you get the right answer it is a good feeling."

A Willow Glen resident since 1950, Barrett has gotten many things right in his lifetime. Not only has he won awards in watercolor competitions, he has also won prizes for writing song lyrics and limericks.

In 1956 he won a limerick contest, and the prize was a 30-day trip to Europe for two.

That trip was in-between the two years he traveled across the world for press junkets.

Once he retired, Barrett attended various watercolor workshops around the world, learning skills from professional artists. Among the countries he visited were Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Jamaica, Tahiti and New Zealand.

Barrett's goal is to have work that is good enough to enter in shows, but he doesn't have any interest in selling. He says he doesn't paint very often anymore.

"When I was starting out, Eric Oback, who was on the art faculty at San José State, gave me an individual lesson to get my feet on the path," Barrett says. "He said that probably after a thousand paintings I should be doing good work. I don't think I am anywhere near that number."

Hanging in his house alongside his own artwork are paintings by other artists who have inspired him and offered advice.

Some of the paintings are scenes of local cities like Alviso, Montebello and Santa Cruz and are by Robert E. Wood, Morris Shubin and Don Phillips. Others are of Mexico by Rex Brandt.

Millard Sheets, who created various mosaic pieces found on banks throughout California, also painted coconut plantations in Moorea, near Tahiti, which Barrett has hanging in his living room.

But he wasn't only getting help from famous artists; he was also offering them assistance. Before he retired he was able to get an artist friend hired for work. He suggested Sheets work on the mural at the San Jose International Airport, which he was contracted to do.

Barrett says inspiration for his art is "watching what happens on the paper when water and different hues mix."

But watercolor isn't the only way Barrett has expressed his creative side. He has also written song lyrics.

It all began in 1976, when Barrett wrote a script for the Bicentennial Commission show that featured a multimedia presentation. A musician named Leonard Auletti—a retired San Francisco bandleader—attended and asked Barrett to write a song on "the spirit of '76." Auletti set it to music.

"I already knew something about how pop songs of the day were structured, and he told me that strong words fall on strong beats," Barrett says. "I guess I got to thinking about it during the night, even to how it might sound, and I quickly wrote a lyric and Leonard said that when he sat down to write the music everything fell into place perfectly."

The song was sung with the band from the Metropolitan Adult Education Program at the Montgomery Theater on the opening day of the Fourth of July celebration in 1976.

It was also sung by several classes throughout the country and performed by a Japanese banjo band. He also wrote a country song called "Chickens in the Graveyard," which ran in his column, was performed in Campbell and had a lyric, "Oh, there are chickens in the graveyard where my Dolly lies tonight ... ."

He also wrote lyrics based on actual incidences in his life. "Queen of the Launderette" is about a woman he knew who struck up an acquaintance with a man while doing her laundry. It was published in the Wall Street Journal and then a 14-year-old girl from New York set the lyrics to music and performed it in a show.

When he became a more seasoned lyric writer, he competed in the 1979 American Song Festival, where he made the semifinals with an easy-listening song called "Always Is a Long, Long Time."

Through the experience of writing lyrics, he says, he learned that it is difficult for a person to sell a song unless they perform it themselves.

"I would say I have accomplished everything in my life I wanted to except I would've liked to have been a musician," he says. "I just had no talent or gift for it, but I love music. Musicians and neighbors are my heroes."