THE SOUL OF A TRAVELER

(A tribute to Barbara, given by her Daddy at the services in the Cathedral of the Foothills, Upland, Tuesday, January 21, 1941.)

Barbara has the soul of a traveler, an her spirit lives today in the lives of hundreds of boys and girls and men and women whom she met in all parts of the world.

Barbara would hate a funeral service as much as do her mother and I. This is not a funeral in any sense of the word,but a happy “bon voyage” for a beautiful little traveler who has lived eight eplendid years of adventure and joy and friendship.

We are profoundly thankful for those eight years.  To bring a little girl up to her eighth birthday, to lead her into new paths of life, to see the development of her love for music and poetry and beauty – all of these represent the greatest privileges of living.

Barbara loved Beauty.    The principal profession of our whole family in
recent years has been the making of travel motion pictures. Wherever we went we have been in search of fine scenes for filming. As we journeyed by auto along the highway of America, or traveled by train through the fields of foreign scenes, Barbara’s eyes were alert every second to the beauty which was unfolding. Each few moments she would cry excitedly: ” There’s a picture, Daddy: ” Her judgment of beauty was good, and when she exclaimed over the
charm of a landscape or the vividness of a  rural scene, we usually stopped to
take it. Some of the finest shots in our pictures have been of Barbara’s choosing. Much of her life has been spent in shearching out beauty and in exclaiming: “There’s a picture, Daddy.”

Barbara loved people. When she was two, and again when she was four, she journeyed with us to eastern America. One summer was spent in Boston. Barbara entered eagerly into the life about her.    She became the inseparable pal of two little Boston boys who lived next door to our apartment.  So eagerly and earnestly did she enter into their lives that for months after returning home she clung to a quaint Boston accent.

During that summer in New England we took her out to Walden Pond to visit the-quiet woodland spot where Thoreau lived so closely in touch with nature. the “Orchards tfarmhomeh nature.  She went to the Old Manse – where Emerson lived near the rude bridge in Concord; she became acquainted with the “Orchards” farnhome of Louise Alcott’s ” Little Women.”  She saw Great Stone Face,and the Maine Coast, and the Old Oaken Bucket. And she loved them all.

While Europe was yet peaceful before machines of war began to smirch the sky- Barbara traveled with us across the Atlantic. The tulip fields in Holland were like glorious carpets of life; Kew Gardens in London was filling the world with sunshine.