Large and small, some 35 years old, all gracefully twist skyward amid mosaic-like gravel paths.
"That's a mountain," he said, pointing to one tall tree in a small assembly of bonsais. "That's a waterfall. There's a lake."
 Donald Barnaby contemplates an orchid, in the bonsai garden of his Princeton home |
But now the bonsai garden is a metaphor for Barnaby's life.
"I've lived a very interesting life, walked a lot of different paths," said 90-year-old Barnaby.
It began with his birth on Feb. 2, 1917, to Clarence and Marian Barnaby, fixtures in song-and-dance vaudeville. For his first seven years, "we didn't live anywhere. We traveled all the time." Stagehands often escorted little Donald and sister Muriel onstage to join their parents for bows.
He loved music and sports as a boy. Growing up in Massachusetts after his parents' divorce, he became skilled on violin and viola and in track, basketball and baseball. But his overriding passion was electrical engineering, which he studied at MIT and worked at in Ohio, Wisconsin and California.
Joining the Navy in February 1943, he faced a crossroads.
After an abbreviated training period, he emerged a commissioned officer and entered radar - a new, sensitive area.
"We couldn't take papers out of the class area," he said. "It was a secret of the war."
In January of 1944 he was assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Franklin. Its first voyage was a shakedown cruise to Venezuela to "find out where everything was wrong with all the stuff on the ship, fix it all and then take off for the real war."
After slipping through the Panama Canal, "we headed out to the beautiful blue Pacific and spent the next two years shooting down Japanese enemy planes and ships almost all the time."
There were typhoons. Over one seven-month stretch, Barnaby set foot on land just once. As radar officer, he worked on-again, off-again, four-hour shifts and spent most of his time in combat. "You get used to getting bombed," he said, but "you don't get used to losing shipmates."
The Franklin lost 125 men to a kamikaze pilot in Leyte Gulf (the Philippines). It saw action in Okinawa. But all that paled when on March 19, 1945, a Japanese plane dropped two bombs that caused a shipboard inferno. Eight-hundred-and-thirty-two men perished.
Severely disabled, the Franklin fled for refuge and repairs at the Brooklyn, N.Y. shipyard. Another carrier followed to fend off planes still attacking, but it couldn't fend off the horrors. "We were still finding parts of bodies and throwing them overboard" for weeks, Barnaby said. "I've seen some pretty horrible things."
And then, once back through the Panama Canal, the ship faced aggressive Germans in the Atlantic.
Against his expectations, Barnaby and the Franklin reached American soil, where as "officer of the deck," he obligingly sent enlisted men - not the officers - for mental health services.
"Officers weren't supposed to have the same feelings," he said. "I still dream about it all these years later. That's why I never get a full night's sleep."
Today, Barnaby is seasoned when it comes to war. As a Navy man, he supported the United States in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq - the latter, up to a point.
"I supported World War II wholeheartedly, but recently, I've changed my opinion," he said. "The (Iraq) war hasn't gone the way it was planned and I think we should cut our losses. Even if the Iraqis end up killing each other, we don't need to be in the middle."
Despite the lack of mental health services, he "was able to overcome and live a normal life."
After staying in the reserves until 1955, he worked in radar and with an electronics company in Ohio, ran a plant in Canada and managed a plant in Wisconsin. Having loved sailing since boyhood, he enjoyed traveling the Mississippi River in his 22-foot cabin cruiser. (He shows off three yellowed sheets of paper with addresses where he's lived from 1939 to 1960.)
Tired of shoveling snow in Milwaukee, he came to California in 1960 to work for Eitel McCullogh in San Carlos, which became Varian Associates. He married his second wife, Virginia ("Ginny") in 1967, and helped raise her two children. Now they have four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Living that normal life did not allay his war-instilled hatred of all things Japanese - until he came to the Coastside in 1970 to live near the ocean and have a garden.
He visited a Japanese garden in a San Mateo public park, got interested in bonsai and studied it with the garden's curator, a Mr. Umaheiro. Suddenly, "my hatred of Japan totally disappeared."
"I just realized there's too much intolerance in the world. I hate to see all the intolerance (for) people of different colors and different religions," he said. "I think we should find a way to reduce it, but I don't have much hope for that."
Barnaby may have regained tolerance, but the war stripped him of something else. "I lost all my religion," said the once-Episcopalian. "I don't believe in a God that would permit 832 fellow shipmates to be wiped out.
"I believe in scientific evolution, (not) in this what I call nonsense of different religions. Each has its own Supreme Being and they don't all seem to get along."
He made other turnarounds too. He abruptly quit smoking and swapped a conventional Milwaukee diet for lighter fare when a doctor told him his cholesterol was dangerously high. Of his bratwurst- and steak-loving old friends, "I'm the only one still surviving."
Now his thoughts are far from war. In his study, cluttered with papers, magazines and books, "I get a little behind in my reading" of his tall stack of Forbes magazines.
And there's the garden.
"Bonsai is really a reproduction of nature," he said. "You try to imitate nature in miniature style."
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