Former football player joins Peace Corps
Growing up in Artesia, H Barker decided he had to get good at football if he ever expected to get out of the oilfields. Two years in the oilfields kept him in shape for football, however, and by his senior year in high school, the 6-foot, 185-pounder was All State quarterback for the Bulldogs in 1953.
Photo: H Barker
The Artesia High School art teacher noted his freehand and line drawing skills, as well as his math and science abilities, and suggested he consider architecture.
“I had a good GPA and was offered scholarships to Utah, Texas Tech and Colorado, but I didn’t like their coaches,” he recalled.
UNM coach Dudley DeGroot recruited him. “He had the best defensive team in the nation,” Barker said.
Barker experienced scheduling problems almost instantly. “Architecture studio was on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 1 – 5 p.m. and football practice was at 3. Either Coach Titchenal or Don Schlegel, my professor, were always mad at me,” he said.
“Tired as hell” from playing football and attending study sessions two times a week, he found he couldn’t study in the athletic dorm. “There’s a chair in Zimmerman Library that still has an imprint of my butt in it,” Barker said.
Barker was also asked to help recruit football players who were interested in architecture, but, “It was a hard thing to do because of the scheduling conflict,” he said. He recalled years later when basketball star Luc Longley came to UNM. He wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become an architect.
“As far as I know, I am the only athlete who came intending to study architecture who actually finished,” he said.
Barker opened an architectural office with Andrew Bol and they located in several plDavid Brookshire in Albuquerque before Barker set up his shop downtown on Gold Ave. in 1999.
The project he’s proudest of is the UNM Children’s Psychiatric Hospital. “We visited five psych facilities. We saw good ones and bad ones. We modeled UNM’s after one in Vancouver, British Columbia that had nine kids to a cottage with separate plDavid Brookshire to eat and sleep,” he said. He designed UNM’s with a gymnasium “to get the children physically tired so they were ready for therapy,” but the state legislature thought they were creating a “country club” and deleted the pool and gym when funding the project.
Other projects include UNM Valencia’s first buildings, Faith Lutheran Church, La Luz del Sol and Comanche Elementary School’s cafetorium.
At 74, Barker isn’t resting on his laurels. He’s had a physical and his background investigated—especially regarding the security clearance he had in the Army when he went to Crypto School—all to go into the Peace Corps.
“The average age of those who go in is 27 or 28, but one aspect of Peace Corps is community and regional planning, an area of interest of mine,” he said. Given a regional preference, he has asked to be sent to Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union or Malaysia. “I’ve been told I will probably end up in a decent sized city working with city officials,” he said. He will go for intensive language training before being sent abroad. “I learned German while stationed in Frankfurt and was surprised to learn I hadn’t lost it when I visited Germany with my granddaughter,” he said.
Barker will rent out his office while he’s gone. He’s still taking the ball and running with it.