A Man Known by His Books, George Barbarow
by Bryce Martin

George Barbarow had rows and rows of stacks of literary magazines in his house in East Bakersfield. The house behind him he owned as well as this one. The one behind him fronted the street, was much larger and he used it for rental income. He said he never made much money during his working years. He was retired, and in his latter years had worked with the state on road and highway projects.
Many of his cache of magazines dealt with the arts and were published in New York. For one, I don’t recall its name, he contributed regular movie reviews. He also wrote reviews on books and plays, and was considered an authority on renowned novelist James Agee, according to Barbarow and backed up by his numerous contributions on his favored subject in the major periodicals he held as witness.
It was a mini-library. I didn't think of him as being eccentric -- he was hoarding books, not cats -- since I knew many of the books bore a direct relation to him. I was careful, though, not to disturb the crawly things. The small house in the springtime was a haven for black widow spiders.
Most of his literary and film criticism and essays were published in the late 1940s and early 1950s and covered Hamlet to Hitchcock. He was one of the first regular contributors to Hudson Review (New York).
His family emigrated here from England and settled in the Brooklyn region of Greater New York. Born in 1915, he was nearing 66 years of age.
He had just recently taken to collecting ephemera. Little stacks of advertising for a Pepsi promotion that fit over the necks of the bottles, for example, rested on a corner table. He had begun to collect old cars. Not classic models, just old, big cars, the V-8s. They didn’t cost much and he felt they would appreciate in value fairly quickly. He had three in his backyard, and not much room for any more. He had baseball cards, rather recent ones 15 to 20 years old, such as Sandy Koufax, and some worth a little money. He didn’t know their value. I did and filled him in. That’s how I met him. He had run a newspaper ad offering his baseball cards for sale. He had several cards from the Wings Cigarette airplane set, trading cards from the 1940s I had seen a few of when I was a kid in the ‘50s and the memory of which brought on pleasant pangs of nostalgia. He had the first issue of Sports Illustrated.
With the old cars and the ephemera, he either expected to live a long time and cash in on his smartly amassed collection, or he anticipated his humble bounty to soar in value in short time. I didn’t buy any of the cards, just wrote down the dollar amounts for him on each one on a sheet of paper he could use as a guide, since he had received some calls and had set some appointments to show them.
I enjoyed visiting with him occasionally and a few times we’d go to the nearby Tam O’Shanter on Alta Vista Drive and down some suds. Having an interest in all facets of movie making myself, as well as of having a knowledgeable overview of its development over the years, I experienced a rush of emotions as I realized I had an expert in front of me who could tell me what he thought were the best movies ever made. He said he hadn’t been to a movie in years, and didn’t feel like he’d missed anything. “The last good movie was Intolerance,” he said. I knew of the film he referred to, though I had to look up the year it came out. I knew it was a silent film. It was from 1916 I discovered. It was his way of joking, I’m sure.
A few months later, he told me he had cable television installed and had watched a slough of movies. One he made a point of heaping praise on was Tilt. That kind of shocked me coming from him. I had seen it and remembered Brooke Shields and Charles Durning in it, but recalled nothing much about it memorable.
He had enjoyed studying economics over the years and prized a favored observation from economist Milton Friedman: “If you want to keep blacks down, raise the minimum wage.” It was Friedman's keen insight Barbarow found brilliant. Friedman was not advocating the oppression of blacks, stressing instead that minimum wage laws were anti-black.

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