Peter Duncan Barber

Peter Duncan Barber, force of nature, died December 22, 2022 at the age of 78. In his honor, we will laugh, play cribbage and ping pong, play Beethoven loudly, sing along with Neil Diamond and Motown hits, plant bulbs, think laterally, try to grow dahlias as beautiful as his, and commune with cows (“Hello Cows, Hello Pete”).

Pete was born in Niagara Falls, NY, in 1944 to Margaret and Neil Barber, and grew up in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1966. A Phi Delt fraternity brother and All-Ivy athlete as a soccer fullback and baseball pitcher, he was known for his irreverence, and by his moniker, “Hot Dog.” He was the recipient of the Alfred H. Watson Trophy in 1966, as Dartmouth’s outstanding athlete of the year. In 2009, he was inducted into Dartmouth’s athletic hall of fame, the “Wearers of the Green.”

He received his masters from the University of Pennsylvania, and then in 1967, for complicated reasons, he enlisted in the military and was deployed to Vietnam in 1968. In 1969, at age 24, a mortar explosion left him paralyzed. He spent the next 53 years in a wheelchair. He was a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and spoke calmly and unreservedly about his experiences. Few were better at understanding death and loss. Beethoven’s 9th is good for grief, he would tell us.

Pete grew prize-winning dahlias, coached his childrens’ soccer teams for years in Kenwood and Santa Rosa, CA, and worked for the Social Security Administration in Palo Alto and Santa Rosa. He nurtured relationships all over the country with friends from childhood, Dartmouth, work, and the Army. He loved Maui, Palm Springs, Yosemite, Austria, and Cape Cod, finding beauty in trees and music, whales and wildcats. He loved road trips, rolling down the middle of the street or around the track for a mile before work in the morning, and calling to check on his many friends.

He would answer children’s questions about the wheelchair with candor and kindness and surprised all by lacking discernible regret or bitterness. He became a surrogate father for friends and stepchildren. In public he would continue as ever to be the joker, the Hot Dog, and would push it too far sometimes, but in private he was the one with whom to speak when a loved one died or you were considering a big decision.

“Bumpa” dedicated huge amounts of himself to spending time with his grandchildren, including rides on his lap, stories, countless baseball games, ice cream on Cape Cod, and pancakes in Hawaii, while playing cards at every stop on the road. He wrote about these adventures in essays he shared with his family called “Bumpa’s Lap.”

Toward the end of his life he spent many months in the Veterans Hospitals in both California and Massachusetts, where he was visited and entertained by friends and family from across the country.

He lived until he died, passing calmly, after a week of pneumonia, surrounded by his family.

His life is celebrated by his wife Mary, his german shepherd Heidi, children Christopher Barber (Laura Diffenderfer), Heather Barber (Justin Sweder), stepchildren Tobin Spohr (Rena Spohr) and Aaron Spohr (Jane Spohr), foster daughter Brenda Chatter Thompson (Mike Thompson); first wife Kim Barber; beloved grandchildren Noah and Zoë Sweder, Bryston Spohr, and Grainger and Tia del Rio; sisters Susan Barber (Joe Lee), Judy Wilson (David Wilson), and Patricia Milliman; nieces and nephews Nicole Wilson, Trevor Wilson, Amanda Milliman, and Pete Milliman; and his many friends.

He chose to be buried in the Massachusetts National Cemetery on Cape Cod, in order that he may be counted as one of the incalculable, yet personal, costs of war.

You may honor him by standing up to injustice and hatred, joking around with a side of snark, and by loving expansively.

Thank you Dad, Pops, Bumpa, Pete, our lives are immeasurably better for having known and loved you.

In lieu of flowers donations may be made in his name to Paralyzed Veterans of America (https://pva.org/), or German Shepherd Rescue of Northern California (https://www.gsrnc.org/).

You may email the family at CelebratePeterBarber@gmail.com.