William "Bill" Barncord's Obituary
William “Bill” Wesley Barncord, age 80, of Richardson, Texas, passed from this world on the morning of November 14th, 2021, after a long struggle with his health.
Bill was born April 3rd, 1941 in White Oak, Pennsylvania to John Wesley Barncord Jr. and Helen Marie Barncord, née Hoffman. The eldest of three brothers, he spent his formative years living on the family farm in Elizabeth, PA., where he learned the value of hard work, how to operate large machinery, and how to protect their livestock from confused trespassers during deer hunting season. One year, someone trampled their corn and killed the family’s milk cow. This led him to take up bow hunting as a teen, because bow hunting season was before rifle hunting season, and those hunters were more careful. When he wasn’t doing chores, he spent time reading and visiting with his maternal grandfather Arthur Hoffman, the local pharmacist who served the community and inspired Bill’s love of chemistry and science in general. Six hundred yards from his grandfather’s drug store was a four classroom school. Each room had two grades taught by one teacher. The same four women taught the eight years Bill attended. They had a ball field behind the building for recess and the twin outside outhouses for bathrooms, with no heat and no running water.
As a high school student, Bill excelled in math and sciences. A foreshadowing of his future job, Bill made rocket fuel for a demonstration for his physics class, with materials he got with Grandpa Hoffman’s help. His experiment shot out six foot flames and nearly gave his physics teacher a heart attack.
It was no surprise that the US Air Force placed him in the missile development program in the 1960s. During his time in the service, he learned photography and computing. After his initial training in making rocket and jet fuel in Chicago, he was stationed at Edwards AFB, Patrick AFB, and Vandenberg AFB.
While stationed at Edwards AFB, Bill was known for broadcasting Elvis Presley songs through the electrical wiring in his barracks for his buddies. He also caused mild concern among nearby ranches, when he ”disposed“ of a pound of impure sodium in a huge hole filled of water at a construction site on base, after following a commander’s orders quite literally. The base received calls from five miles away and Bill’s superior officer was reprimanded for not following procedures.
Bill met his future wife, Margaret Claire Sjolund, at a church dance. Family lore has it that Bill wore out three pairs of military boots walking from his barracks to the Sjolund ranch. So frequent of a visitor was he, that Margaret’s father, Clarence Sjolund, told her that she needed to marry him or get rid of him because he was eating them out of house and home. A week later, when Bill asked Clarence for his daughter’s hand in marriage, the answer was, “Well, it’s about time!” Bill and Margaret were married March 2nd, 1963, at the Latter-Day Saint Temple in Los Angeles. The couple’s song was “The Twelfth of Never” by Johnny Mathis. Their first two daughters Amanda and Serena were born at Edwards and Vandenberg, respectively.
After leaving the Air Force, Bill moved his then small family to western Pennsylvania, where he worked in a steel mill for two months before getting a job in the computer industry. His only son Samuel was born close to Bill’s own birth place, just two weeks after the first Moon landing by the Apollo 11 mission. The Burroughs Corporation hired Bill as a hardware tech at first, moving the family to the suburbs of Detroit, where his third daughter Geneva was born.
But it wasn’t long until Bill was promoted to a software tech, and was transferred to the Denver area, where his youngest daughter Lydia was born. To help with the frequent changing of schools, he would send with his children printouts of ASCII images of Peanut characters, mazes, and find-a-word puzzles as a gift to their classes, based on their grade levels. Being that it was during the 1970s, it was the first time that many of their classmates and some of the teachers had personally held actual printer paper. At home, 6 foot mazes from the same program would be taped together on a wall and the family would solve them together. When Bill had to work late, Margaret would fix a picnic dinner and bring the kids to eat with him. While Bill worked, the family entertained themselves with art activities using used punchcards and flowchart templates. Sometimes Bill would set up terminals with the original Colossal Cave text adventure for his wife and older children to play.
During this time Bill provided for his growing family with a large backyard garden and hunting an elk every winter. Bill was a responsible hunter. Instead of going for trophy worthy prey for bragging rights, he always asked the game warden which population needed thinning for the health of the herd and would hunt that. He was once forced to shoot a bear. While Bill was tracking an elk cow, another hunter shot at a mama bear and missed. Mama Bear didn’t see the hunter who fired on her, but she saw Bill and charged. He first tried to run away, but stumbled and fell. Bill said that his first thought was “I don’t have a license to shoot a bear!” But then he remembered that one of his buddies did have one, so he killed the bear with one shot, and then told the park rangers that his buddy shot it, letting his buddy take it home. Bill experienced other close calls while hunting, most of them caused by other hunters. After a few years, he began to avoid camping with people who drank lots of beer, and then went to wearing as much bright orange as he could. Whenever anyone gave him grief about it, he would state these immortal words: “Deer are color blind.” During this time, Bill was making his own ammo and invested in a high quality hunting bow and arrows.
Bill eventually became head software tech for the mountain states, before eventually becoming Head Instructor of Customer Education. He taught COBOL to business men. He quickly realized that his students didn’t understand programming basics, so he found a magazine tutorial called “How to learn BASIC in 8 lessons or one long night”. To test it out, he set up the computer he made from scratch, and told his daughter Mandy to do the tutorial, adding, “If you have questions, I will be upstairs watching Star Trek.” He figured that if a 12 year old girl could understand it, so could a 36 year old businessman. In the end, he found out that not only could a 12yo and a 10yo girl understand BASIC easier than an adult, so could an 8yo boy. So in 1977, Bill Barncord became one of the first people in the 20th century to discover that children understand new technology quicker than their elders.
Bill was later transferred to Dallas to head the customer education department there. While in Dallas, Bill took a job with a local firm, Hinton Mortgage, where he was their data processing manager and a junior vice-president. The company grew and when it came time to split off the savings and loan business unit, Bill decided that he would rather be a contract systems analyst, then continue with the executive route. He had to leave off his manager and executive experience on his resume to make him more employable to the agencies. He eventually worked long term through FIS and retired at the age of 74.
As a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when he was 20, Bill appreciated his church family and enjoyed the opportunities for service it provided him. Of all the church callings he had, he treasured and enjoyed the role of Home Teacher the most, because it allowed him to be part of many wonderful people’s lives and developed many deep bonds.
Bill and his wife Margaret loved handiwork. They taught their children candle making, leatherwork, sewing, ceramics, and other crafts. Bill loved fishing too. He would sometimes take his children camping with him, as he did fly fishing in the South Platte River in the Rocky Mountains. He also would take the family to Lake Dillon for normal fishing. One trip, Bill was enjoying fishing so much that when he noticed that the front of his legs were getting pink, instead of going back to the VW van to get sunscreen (or asking one of his children to), he had the brilliant idea of turning around and fishing backwards, resulting in a worse sunburn on the back of his legs. Luckily, his wife was able to drive the family home and his children helped with the ice packs.
In addition to shared activities with his family, Bill had a variety of hobbies he specifically enjoyed. He was particularly fond of model trains and made sure his children played with them when they were young. Photography was a passion of his, and he occasionally did wedding shoots to supplement the household income in his 20s. He also loved electronics. His penchant for getting the little electric lab kits from Radio Shack was such that his wife Margaret attempted to reign it in. Not too successfully though. His daughter Amanda became the unexpectant recipient of a crystal radio at age 5, because Bill told Margaret he got it for their eldest. In reality, the best reception in the house was the window next to Mandy’s bed, and she knew better than to tell her mom that Dad had literally checked every other room in the house first. In his later years, he combined his love of crafts and electronics by getting into machine embroidery and 3D printing. While Bill didn’t play an instrument, nor was inclined to sing, he had a rich appreciation of music, which ranged from the folk music artists of his youth to many of the popular artists from the 1950s to the 1980s to classical music. He once corrected his eldest abruptly when she identified an instrumental piece as the theme music of 2001: A Space Odessa, by saying “It’s Strauss!” He told the same child years later that for all his idiosyncrasies, Boy George could really sing. Though Bill’s choices in music were varied, his favorite color by far was red, which complimented Margaret’s favorite color of green. He loved the color so much that he named one of his favorite cats “Red Rider”, even though the Javanese cat was a seal point with blue eyes. Cats were another passion of Bill’s, one that he shared with his late wife and passed down to his children.
Bill is survived by his five children: Amanda Barncord of Oklahoma City, OK; Serena and her husband Wayne Greene of Houston, TX; Samuel and his wife Rebecca Barncord of Richardson, Tx; Geneva Newton and her husband Jeremy Wilmot of Plano, TX; and Lydia and her husband Djuro Novakovic of Houston, TX. His nine grandchildren: Aaron Gilbert, Ethan Gilbert, Raymond Gilbert, Jacob Doerr, Catherine Doerr, Adelaide Newton, Hope Newton, Rachel Newton, Isabella Mucciacciaro, and Ellen Novakovic. And his two great grandchildren: Athena Hill and Artemis Hill. He is also survived by his brothers Richard Barncord, and Charles Barncord.
He was predeceased by his wife, Margaret Claire Barncord, who died February 26, 2013. Per his wishes he will be cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Colorado mountains near her ashes. A virtual memorial will be held on December 12th, 2021 at 6pm US Central time. Please send your request to s u n g u i d e @ g m a i l . c o m for an invitation to the service.
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