Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM

“So, what have you been doing today, Mom?” asked my son, Dustin, when he called the other night.
“Not much,” I answered. “Just the same old, everyday stuff.”
“Stuff? What stuff?”
“Well if you must know I’ve done a bit of housework, dishes, laundry, cleaned the horse pens, watered the horses and the yard, watched some TV, and checked my email. Anything else you want to know? Like maybe my life history.”
“Nah. Not tonight. It would take to long. You need to write it down.”


Ok, so that is what I am doing. Writing down my life history. Not that anyone would really be interested in it. Including my son. But here goes anyway. To start with my name is Barbara Jean (Barnett) Borror. I have never done anything extremely important to the world, haven’t saved anyone’s life, haven’t done anything that made headlines nor do I expect to before I die, but I would like to my story down for posterity or for any very bored person that might decide to read this. I guess I am just one of those very unimportant people that the world is mostly made up of. Maybe that is the way you are, too. We are but would the world have been any worse off if we had never been born? If I can entertain just one person for a few minutes this might be worth it.

Albuquerque, New Mexico: the First Time
On August 3, 1951 a Thursday, if I am correct, I was born to Catherine (Green) Barnett and Robert Leroy Barnett in a hospital on Sandia Army Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico. At that time my dad was in the Air Force, stationed on Kirkland Air Force Base which was next to Sandia Army Base. But Kirkland didn’t have a hospital that had a maternity ward and Sandia did so I was born on an Army Base.
My parents lived in a small apartment in what is known as the North Valley of the Albuquerque, NM area, and in the South Valley. I have an address on an old postcard the Daddy sent to Mother postmarked Mar 26, 1954 from Joplin, MO. He must have been there on some sort of training. It was sent to 3303 Express (I am not sure of the spelling of the street name) Dr. SW, Albuquerque, NM. I believe but I am not sure that for a while we lived in my grandmother’s home on Don Louis Rd NW in the same area when she decided to move to Amarillo, Texas. My granddad, Andy Boyd Green, my mom’s dad had died when Mother was just a few months pregent with me. I guess, from what I remember Mother saying Gram, as I called my grandmother, Alma Beatrice (Coe) Green wasn’t too happy in Albuquerque and moved to Amarillo where she had found a job.
My next couple of years where spent there. I don’t remember much about it. I do know that it must have been a fairly happy time for my family. What I think I remember has been encouraged by the photos that my parents had and the stories they told me about those times. They took quite a few photos of me, each other, family and friends and the house we lived in. And on trips they took. They continued to do this all their lives. I know it was mostly Mother’s idea. Daddy liked pictures but not the way Mother did.
Mother came from a family of picture takers. From all the photos that she had of her parents and some of her grandparents it seems to me that as soon as the very first cameras became available to the general public the Greens and the Coes must have invested in them. I have always felt that my mom’s family wanted to preserve their family life as much as possible and their best ways of doing it was with family stories and photography. It seems to be born and bred into their families and was passed down to my mom and her sisters and then on to me and my sisters. The Coes and the Greens didn’t write down their family histories as much as we would have liked but the urge to do so has come down to me and my sister, Jan and hopefully to my niece, Cyndi.
That is one of the reasons I have decided to write my life history. It may not be the most important part of world history that there is but I would like to know that it is written down.
Story telling and photography weren’t the only things that were important to me and my family. Not even the most important part of our lives. For me and my family our children always came first, followed by our pets. I think that a love of all things living was, also, bred into us. Especially a love of cats, dogs, and horses. This was followed by a love of flowers, plants and the whole outdoors. Many of those old photos are filled with animals, and flowers as well as the people who raised them.

In those first photos of me there was frequently a collie dog named Sport. Sport had belonged to Gram and Granddad Green, who had always had a way with training dogs, as well as his horses and mules. When Gram moved to Texas she left Sport with us. Mother would tell me of how she wouldn’t have been afraid to leave me in the front yard unattended as long as Sport was with me. Not to say she ever did it, she just knew Sport would have taken care of me if she had left me alone. She said that after I started walking many a time she watched me head for the edge of the yard and Sport would always be between me and the edge. He never allowed me to leave the yard. He would let me walk up to him, lean on him, push, and pull on him but wouldn’t let me get by him.
Sport was also a wonderful watchdog. The kind that would bark and not allow a stranger in until told it was alright, but then he would let them in and leave them alone. Until one day a workman of some kind came to the door and my mom went to let him in. But Sport refused to stop barking and stood between Mother and the door as he did when I tried to leave the yard. Mother decided to listen to her dog and didn’t let the man in. She told him he would have to come back when her husband was there. She said she didn’t know what prompted her to do that but she said she had a hunch that if Sport wouldn’t let the man in, she shouldn’t either. Who knows what might have happened if she had.
This and other stories taught me to pay attention to how my pets reacted to strangers. I still do it. If any of my dogs didn’t like someone, neither do I. I really believe that animals can ‘read’ people better than another person can. In most situations we are taught that all people are good. Watch the news on TV. Read the papers. It’s not true. And I rely on my dogs to help me figure out who to trust and who not to trust.
I don’t really remember Sport but the memories of my first dog are good ones. I have never had another Rough Coated Collie like Sport but there have been lots of other dogs as well as a large number of cats, several horses and a verity of small animals like fish, lizards, insects, and birds. These pets will fill a large part of my life history so if you don’t care for animals I suggest you don’t read this. But if you do read it maybe I can change your mind and teach you about the joys of having and loving animals.
Mother told me that my first words were the usual ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’. But she thought my third word had to have been ‘horsey’. Parades were a big deal to my parents, and since they enjoyed them they would take me to them. Mother said I would get so excited when the horses would come down the street, and quickly leaned to call out ‘horsey, horsey’. Ever since then I have associated the sound of marching band music to the sound of horse’s hooves on pavement.

Mother used to tell me how when I was about a year old she took me and a basket of wet clothes out into the yard. She set me down in the sand under the clothes line to play and started hanging the wet clothes on the clothes line. At some point she looked down to see that I was playing with something that moved. Being concerned she checked and found that apparently she had set me in a nest of just hatched baby hornytoads. She said she would have thought that at my age I would have been putting them in my mouth, but instead I was holding one very gently and watching it. She said the hornytoad was small enough to easily fit in my baby hand so she was sure they had just recently hatched. She was familiar with hornytoads and wasn’t afraid of them. Hornytoads aren’t really toads but are a spined lizard that lives in the desert. They don’t have any teeth and eat mostly ants. They can flatten their selves and play dead with the best possum or they can run like heck and hide under the least little bit of leaves or sticks as they are usually the color of the sand or dirt where they are living. I don’t know if playing with them as a baby had an influence on my liking for them but I have really liked the little lizard all my life. When I was about 40 years old there was a young Navajo Indian man working where I worked. Someone had asked him about spirit animals, and he said everyone had a spirit animal. Several of the people there asked how they could know what their spirit animal was. He told a few people what he thought their spirit animal might be. I hadn’t really joined into the conversation as I though he was just hamming it up for the ‘white women’ as he frequently did anyway. I thought he was having fun and I was enjoying watching him do it. Then he turned to me and said that my spirit animal was the hornytoad and the white bear. I laughed and said I didn’t know about the white bear but I did know about the hornytoad and told him the story of when I was a baby sitting under the clothes line. He just smiled as if he had already known. Later I was to find out he was right about the white bear, too.
The horned lizard really can shoot blood out of its eyes. I have seen it do this. Its main food is ants or similar insects. And he doesn’t have any teeth. The belly of a horny toad is probably the softest thing I have ever touched. They are getting rare and I think are almost endangered. It is such a shame as this is such a neat little creature. They do not make good pets as they are difficult to care for, most dying within a few months of capture. Also it is illegal to have them in some states.

http://www.hornedlizards.org/hornedlizards/hornedlizards_frame.html

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad.html

I guess I must have been about a year old when someone gave me a penny as people were prone to do with little kids back then so they could buy a piece of candy or gum. I didn’t know what a penny was so I put it in my mouth and swallowed it, according to Mother. She was horrified. They rushed me to the doctor, who assured them there was no problem. That the penny would work its way through me in a day or so. Mother took the trouble to check my diapers and make sure the penny did come out. The penny went into my baby book. Some years later mine and Sarah’s baby books would be lost in a move and never found.
At about this same time Mother had taken me with her on a shopping trip somewhere in Albuquerque. We were crossing a street and I was lagging behind. There was a car coming so Mother grabbed my arm and pulled me along. She didn’t realize that she had dislocated my shoulder until I started crying. She took me to the chiropractor that she and Gram went to on a regular basic and had for a number of years. He was able to put my arm back and there was never a problem with it. Mother and Gram were always warning me to never pull on a child’s arm as you could easily do damage.
When we lived in Gram’s house we had a neighbor next door that was to be sort of famous later on, although most people have never heard of him. He was an artist named Eugene Henry Bischoff. He was known for his very realist paintings of landscapes and Indians. He was born in Germany in 1880 but studied art in New York and California, and was living in New Mexico by 1937. He and his wife Kay had known my grandfather before he died. Gene did a life-size painting of Granddad doing his taxidermy work in his shop after Granddad died. There is a faint outline of my parents in the back of the painting. Gram kept the painting in her home until she died, when I got it for a while, and now one of my cousins has it. Gene did a small watercolor painting of cactus in bloom that he gave to my parents as a wedding present. I, also, have two prints of Indians about the same size, 18 by 12. I would give anything to have more of his painting but the few that are on the market are way out of my means. I don’t remember it but the Bischoff actually had a television at that time. Gene and Kay were almost like grandparents to me, and later my sisters and I called Kay Grandma Kay. They would have me over to watch TV with them from time to time and Mother said I liked the ballet but that may have been because it was something they were fond of and encouraged me to like it. We kept in touch with the Bischoffs after we left Albuquerque, but Gene died in 1954. The Bischoffs also ran a small publishing company in Albuquerque called EuKaBi Publishing ( It was a combination of their first names and last name.) There are a few published prints of Gene’s work and a series of high quality coloring books for children or adults that had black and white drawings similar to Gene’s paintings. Kay had written information about the Indian or landscape on the following page with suggestions on how to color it. You might say they were similar to the paint by number sets but for coloring but without the numbers. Somewhere I have several of the books which are now out of print. We moved back to Albuquerque when I was in high school and Grandma Kay was able to come to my graduation.