Professor Barrs loved words, kerosene, perfection

James Barrs used to tell his son, Andrew, to give every endeavor his all. The longtime English professor, who died last September the day before his 101st birthday, certainly lived his own life that way.

From an early age, Barrs knew he loved words, and growing up on a small farm in Georgia didn’t prevent him from pursuing his passion. Plowing the fields behind a mule, he kept a leather-bound pocket-sized dictionary in his work clothes. When the mule turned around at the end of a row, Barrs would whip out the dictionary to look up new words.

He was crazy about exercise and always kept in shape. English professor Francis Blessington, MA’66, who took classes taught by Barrs in the 1960s and later became his colleague, says Barrs never took the elevator. He preferred to walk the four flights to and from his English department office.

Blessington remembers the time when Barrs, who was then close to seventy and retired, challenged a few English department colleagues to see who could jump the highest from a standing position. You can guess who won.

Barrs loved Cadillacs, and he loved to drive. Twice in the 1960s he drove from Boston to Alaska and back, about 10,000 miles roundtrip. Parts of the Alaska-Canada Highway were still dirt and gravel back then. Barrs bought Sears, Roebuck’s best tires for the first trip. Though they were guaranteed for three years, by the time Barrs returned to Boston the tires were worn out. Not one to take a warranty lightly, he returned them.

On his second trip, he used Michelins. They not only survived the trip but lasted for a total of 71,000 miles. For the next thirty-five years, Barrs bought only Michelins. He loved things to be perfect, explains his son.

“He had very high standards,” says Andrew. “He was criticized at Northeastern for putting up too many Fs, because you were supposed to follow a bell curve. But his feeling was you had to learn, and he was reluctant to lower the standards. He always tried to achieve perfection, no matter what he did.”

Andrew credits his father for his “lifetime of hard work, both physically and mentally, intense personal development, and a passion like none other I have ever seen for demanding the best of himself and for helping others who were willing to do the same.”

Barrs’s achievements started early. When he was twelve, one of his teachers in Georgia suggested he take the two-day teacher’s exam. He did, earning a B+.

Though he was, of course, too young to teach then, instruction was in his future. At age eighteen, he enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens with $150 from his father and $50 from a wealthy woman who’d been impressed by his high school record. Barrs pulled in a few extra dollars by reading electric meters for the local utility company in the afternoons after class. Later, he went door-to-door taking delivery orders for a large grocery store. By doubling his course load, he was able to graduate summa cum laude in three years.

He began teaching in the Georgia high schools. Then, in 1929, he headed north to Harvard University with the $1,000 he’d been able to save. That year, he met Vida Fitz Randolph, a technician at Boston City Hospital who was taking courses at Harvard Medical School. They married two years later.

After earning a master’s in Latin and Greek and a doctorate in comparative philology from Harvard, Barrs spent several years back in Georgia working as a teacher and an administrator.

Then he and Vida returned to Boston. He wound up working at the General Electric plant in Lynn, where, thanks to the technical know-how he’d learned on the farm, he helped make turbo superchargers and jet engines. He also spent a couple of years teaching English at a Maryland college.

Eventually, he spotted a notice for a vacancy at MIT’s English department. Before he interviewed for the job, he decided to stop first at Northeastern and practice his job-interview technique there.

He soon learned the MIT vacancy was only for a yearlong position. By the end of that week, though, he’d gotten another job offer—from Northeastern, where he remained for twenty-eight years. He taught Anglo-Saxon grammar and literature, the history of the English language, linguistics, and semantics before retiring in 1971.

For many years, he was a regional vice president for Phi Kappa Phi, as well as the copyeditor for its quarterly magazine. He also plied his trade on WGBH-TV and at several Boston radio stations, happily delving into word histories for viewers and listeners. Blessington says he still remembers the background Barrs could give on “goober.” Andrew says his father often answered a simple question about the meaning of a word with a lengthy explication of its origins.

But one of Andrew’s favorite stories about his father isn’t about words; it involves kerosene. Seems that, at age three, Barrs came down with the croup. Nothing calmed his cough. Finally, Barrs’s father—himself a fairly atypical sort—poured a teaspoon of kerosene down his son’s throat. “Believe it or not, he actually got better very quickly after that,” Andrew says.

Whether the dose had anything to do with Barrs’s swift recovery remains an open question. But he was left with a lasting love of kerosene.

In fact, in an essay he wrote called “Reconstructed Rebel,” Barrs lists twenty uses for kerosene, including “controlling lice on hogs when mixed with used motor oil” and “for fresh cuts in human beings.” Also—of course—for croup.

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