Saratoga News

The question, sadly, will never be asked

By Carl Heintze

I note with sadness the passing of Col. Terrill Barco of Saratoga. Col. Barco (I never thought of him as anything less than a colonel) was a remarkable kind of guy. Bluff, hearty and friendly, he always seemed to me to have a bearing born of long military service, and indeed, he had spent much of his life in the Army. Somehow he always seemed to be in uniform, even if I never saw him in one.

He started his military career before World War II, and after it was over he served in a variety of capacities in the Cold War that followed.

But I don't remember Col. Barco for any of that. I never knew him as a serviceman. Terrill and I and a lot of other people got acquainted in a writing class hosted by the late Sherman Grant courtesy of West Valley College.

We were a mixed bunch. Besides Terrill, there were the widow of the "Cheery Farmer," once the theme mascot for the county fair; a Lockheed engineer who wrote ghost stories and had managed an enormous novel on a KGB operative; a Jewish grandmother who was writing of her husband's miraculous escape from Poland as a boy; a former Midwestern farm girl; several old newspaper types like me; and Sherman Grant himself, who once wrote scripts for the now-forgotten radio show Duffy's Tavern.

Sherman's real name was neither Sherman nor Grant, but no matter. He was an incisive critic and a great motivator. Sherman's way of teaching writing was to have us read what we'd written, after which the writer was subjected to criticism (positive only) and finally a word or two from Sherm himself, usually enthusiastic.

To this assemblage Terrill brought not what you'd expect--memories of his military past--but two distinctive characters.

One was, I presumed, himself as a boy growing up in the South. The other was a seamstress who turned out to be an amateur detective. She regularly outsmarted the police. The stories in Boy, Terrill's memoir, were delightful and as unlike the bluff colonel seemed to be as night and day. But they rang true, and we enjoyed listening to them.

The seamstress detective, whose name I have, alas, forgotten, was equally charming. She used a lot of her sewing skills to help solve crimes. I never learned where Terrill picked up his knowledge of sewing, but perhaps it was from his wife. Or he could, for all I know, have been a secret needle-and-thread man himself. Somehow I doubt that, though. Suffice it to say he managed to make both his detective and the mystery something worth reading.

About the rest of the colonel's life I can tell you very little, but I gather he was a great cook and a real estate developer, and that he dabbled in Saratoga politics. I always thought of him as a writer, however, something of which I think he was very proud.

Hardly any of us in the writing group ever got published; as far as I know, Terrill didn't either, and that's a shame, because Boy especially deserved to see wider circulation than it received in our little gathering. I often wondered whether he ever wrote any more detective stories based on the seamstress detective. Probably, like most of the rest of us, he tucked the manuscripts away and got them out now and then to read to himself. For the group, alas, finally broke up and drifted apart.

Grant got sick and then died, which removed the motivating spirit from our assemblage. We tried under another leader, but it was never quite the same. In the end, we all went our separate ways.

I saw Terrill several times after that, but briefly. He always seemed the same cheerful colonel, and he always inquired after the rest of the group. On a couple occasions, he rounded up the remnants of the group at his house for a party. When I went to these gatherings, I always meant to ask him how he learned all that information about sewing, but I never did.

Now I'll never have the chance.

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