Barney had a special lounging spot in my library, where he could look into my tree filled back yard and also view me in the kitchen.   His hair oil left a smudge on the mahogany paneling…..forever a remembrance of his connection and presence

Barney and I were love-partners for about 8 years, when he shared my Seattle(Montlake) house.   He spent much time singing and sight reading at my piano.   I bought him a book of opera scores, so he could accompany himself.   I loved hearing him so enjoy playing and singing.

He feared he wouldn’t get tenure so hustled up a teaching position in Chicago.  It turned out he DID get tenure at the Univ. of Washington, after all!   He was settled in Chicago by the time I found out.

I have old slides of Barney in my camera that I need to develop.   Most of them were taken in the many Islands visited by ferry,where he loved to go on the weekends.

       
So if he had a three o-clock class, he would always be late by 25-30 minutes, and by our second course with him, we were all tuned to his time. 

How is your health, after caring for Barney?
I so hope you are well!!!
From the former mate of dear Barney, in Seattle

All of us will forever miss our brilliant love-friend, who was so kind towards strangers on the street…..literally.
Barney and I used to walk on the streets of Seattle, in the OLD safe days, and I shall never forget his compassion towards the helpless people with no hope, and offering them some dignity and kindness

While Barney and I were loves-mates, and sharing my house, along with being a mathematician, I was a professional ballet dancer.    I went to Europe to audition for spontaneous dance company positions, which usually became available when a dancer was injured, not uncommon.   Barney tagged along with me (what an expansion to his repertory!), to many European cities.   It was sweet when, after an audition (usually just taking company class), he would try to negotiate with a dance company director for a company position for me.   That’s just not how it works in Europe.   But the attempt was so sweet.
I’m so glad he got to see some of the world (European, at least)) on accompanying me on my world tours!   Every new country we entered, initiated his immediate attempt to learn the language!!!   But, of course

I have a book of opera scores for piano, and Barney loved sight-reading that while singing along.   Too bad it was before these days of recording events

Barney and I met in 1965 when we both had instructorships in mathematics departments—Barney’s at Harvard and mine at MIT. Each department impressed on each of us that those appointments were very temporary. We also shared a good friend and an interest in mathematics. Even though we never lived in the same state after we left Massachusetts in 1967, our friendship continued—through many phone calls and occasional visits for another 54 years. Barney saw us in San Diego, which he loved for its climate and casual lifestyle. After he moved to Chicago, Mary and I saw him whenever we returned to that city of our childhood.

As everyone who knew him knows, Barney’s intellectual interests were broad and deep. His ability to recall details and perspectives from many areas and any time astonished me. So often any conversation was filled with stimulating ideas and questions about whatever was on his mind.

Barney cared about his students, wanting them to learn and progress but never be discouraged. This commitment was one strand throughout our many discussions about teaching and universities. He seemed unwilling (or unable) to understand why grades had to be given and he always wanted to reward effort and accomplishment but never disappoint a student by pointing out any weakness or lack of understanding. This fit into a larger pattern of favoring apparent (and, in his case and mind, real) kindness on a personal level in place of institutional treatments of people.

Barney’s deep laugh and great sense of humor were also almost always an essential part of any visit.

I remember well his descriptions of his many walks along the Lakefront from downtown to Evanston. While I was sad that he could never do anything like that after his stroke, he never mentioned that or complained about it to me.

Barney had and enjoyed a broad range of friends. I met almost none of them but felt as though I knew some through our conversations.

Fortunately, we did come to know Natasha. She and Barney had a remarkable, deep, and long relationship. I could see she was a great gift to him, and I have learned that he was a real partner to her in many ways. I was so happy when he told me that they formally married after having been so close for years.

Recently, Natasha told me that Barney often called me when he was seeking advice. In one sense, I was aware of this. He often called with a serious question that he was trying to resolve. He found making important decisions—should I buy my apartment? when should I retire? —very hard. We would talk through them many times. It seems ironic that he so often sought my advice when he so seldom followed it. I hope I helped him think through some of the questions that made him anxious. Even with our often-different perspectives, we both continued to respect each other.

I feel very lucky that Barney and I met and continued our friendship for so long. I will miss him.

I first met Barney Glickfeld in about 1963, when I was a beginning graduate student in mathematics at Cornell and he was finishing up his graduate work at Columbia.  He was a brilliant mathematician and a good-hearted person, and we were close friends then and for many years afterward.

In one episode that I remember, he had charged me with being too much of an optimist and I had counter-charged him with being too much of a pessimist.  To resolve this controversy, we proposed the following bet:  We look at the lead headline in tomorrow’s Boston newspaper (he was then at Harvard) and see whether it supported optimism or pessimism.  The lead headline was something like “Corruption found in some city bureau.”  He instantly claimed that it supported his pessimism, whereas I argued that the fact that they found the corruption supported my optimism.

Despite his charm, Barney was a lost soul.  His mother had died when he was about 13 or 14, and the woman his father married did not want to be his mother and Barney felt undermined his relationship with his father.  After his father died, Barney asked me to accompany him to the ceremony of unveiling his father’s tombstone.  When the cloth was removed I said to myself, “How could she do that?”  His step-mother had erased Barney from his father’s life by omitting the phrase “loving father” from the tombstone.  As I recall, Barney was devastated.

After being divorced from his first wife, Barney asked me to be his best man at a marriage that was to take place at the home of his fiancee’s parents.  When asked to produce the marriage license, he went to his bag and pulled out … his divorce papers.  Not a good way to start a marriage.  He was not a very worldly person, and was sometimes unaware of what was going on, sort of what is called in Yiddish a luftmensch, someone who lives in the clouds.  As he was finishing his postdoc, he came to Cornell to meet with a professor who was looking to hire a collaborator.  After they met and talked mathematics, they went to dinner and then I joined them for a game of miniature golf, which we spiced up with small bets.  Barney hustled the professor and, despite my attempts to convey to him that he was misjudging the situation, Barney hustled himself out of a job offer.

Barney had a large personality, a large presence, and a large voice.  My wife Judy remembers particularly his singing Gilbert and Sullivan to her on the phone.

Barney was friendly, funny, good-natured,and often bewildered.  Unfortunately, I saw him only twice in the past 30 years, the last time during my visit to Chicago ten years ago.  Nevertheless, he was a presence in my life for many years and I will miss him.

I met Barney when I was the lead psychiatrist for Overlake Hospital’s Involuntary Treatment Unit in Bellevue, WA in 1977 or 78. Barney was a public defender. Barney’s job, from his point of view, was to defend poor people from having their autonomy and freedom taken away and be subject to powerful psychotropic medications. Barney’s job, from my point of view, was to keep people away from the help they so desperately needed.

Our friendship started with an argument that became a years-long friendship. Once feeling somewhat glum, my mood immediately transformed to laughter as Barney and Freya, gave me a banana and a shoulder and back rub. My wife Wendy describes hearing peals of laughter emanating from our house from a block away. When I saw “My Dinner with Andre,” I enjoyed it but thought, I have conversations like that all the time with Barney.

Barney was larger than life and so physically clumsy that he would describe his hands as paws. After a lifetime of therapy he learned that, “If you have to make a decision, you’ve already made a mistake.” His humor was hilarious, self-deprecating, and his dependence on women, open and unapologetic. He told me, “Always look at a woman’s plants, because when you’re with her long enough, you become one of them.” Barney needed a caretaker and the best of people cared for him. I will miss him.

Hi Natalia, This is what I saw this morning when I stepped out of the house after Barney's funeral this morning. It was so beautiful, I called Wendy out to see it, too. Looking at the radiant light, like heaven, I thought of Barney smiling down on us. Wendy had the exact same thought and we each thought we had to send you these pictures.

I was working as an analyst in medical research at the University of Washington and taking post graduate math courses, when I took Barney’s class.   I fell in love at first sight, and upon talking&walking after every class, the feeling became mutual.   After class, we walked to the law school (when he was working on that degree) and got to know each other. 

He soon moved in to my house in Montlake, just across a canal from the UW, in a serene, lovely area.   He shared my tudor house for 8 years.   He feared he wouldn’t get tenure (which turned out to be false), so hustled to get another position, anywhere - it became Chicago.

I shall treasure our intense, passionate, intellectual relationship - he was one in a million.   I still see the smudge of his hair oil on the mahogany wall of my library where he loved to lounge and read/write.

Now I must remove and develop old film in my camera, from our long-ago meanderings.   Times before cell phone pictures.

Raymond Smullyan wrote a wonderful book of puzzles that cast problems in combinatory logic as questions relating to birds. The book was "To Mock a Mockingbird", and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves puzzles. In the mid 1980s, Rusty Lusk and I wrote a theorem-proving system that was pretty good for the time. Barney and I decided to build a simple translator that cast problems posed by Sullyan as theorems in first-order logic, and then tried to prove them using the theorem prover. It worked well, and then Barney and I built a simple server at Argonne that accepted mail requests to have a problem solved. The server would try to compute an answer, and when it was successful, it would mail the result back to the person who sent the request. This was not a serious system -- we built it as a lark. However we did name the server "birdbrain@argonne. So users would send problems to bridbrain, and their responses came back via email. For 1985, we thought it was pretty cool. We did give a talk on it, and it amused the logicians we showed it to. I will remember Barney as playful, but serious -- just like the paper, which was titled "A Foray into Combinatory Logic".

I first laid eyes on Barney in 2016 when I walked into the lobby of the Transportation Building in the South Loop. I had just moved to Chicago to begin my master’s degree at the University of Chicago and signed a lease for a unit on the 2nd floor. The first thing I thought was – “who was this large man sitting on a bench talking to the door man about metaphysics, women and politics in Turkey”? It didn’t take me long to discover this was a typical conversation with Barney. He was insatiably curious about the world and his version of “small talk” were topics such as Latent Semantic Analysis, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Tax Law. He would invoke these conversations upon you without much notice.

As I settled into the Transportation Building, Chicago and my master’s program, evenings at Barney’s condominium became a regular occurrence. Multiple nights per week, I would sit in a reclining chair, coined the “Transmogrifier” by Barney because of its ability to propel the user out of the chair – a mechanism designed for those needing assistance standing up, but to Barney, it was actually designed to initiate a profound transformation of an individual – from a seated to an upright position, all controlled by the press of a couple buttons. A typical evening begun with me going downstairs to the 7/11 to get a pint of Talenti ice cream and joining Barney in his condominium where he would instruct me to find a particular book in the pile of books sprawled on the floor in front of him (referred to as “his library”) and then reading and pausing to discuss excerpts for the remainder of the evening. Some nights, Natasha would walk in and Barney would proclaim “owner, owner, finally you have come to save us from this insanity!” Barney would then plead Natasha to read her recent addition to the fictious tales of Upper Winetka and Upper Losetka (the lowly neighborhood to the south of Chicago’s affluent Winetka suburb where the citizens longed to one day make it to Winetka). Barney appreciated the humor so much he would erupt in laughter, making the whole room seem to shake.

It was during these evenings that I became aware of Barney’s utter brilliance. His ability to remember a Samuel Johnson poem he recited as a teenager or a Tom Lehr song he heard in 1959 or a Mathematical proof he learned in grad school in the early 60s, his mind demonstrated intelligence that I had never seen before. Beyond the mathematics and psychology lessons that Barney imprinted upon me, he taught me lessons he was much less aware of. He taught me the importance of cultivating friendships as a young person, finding interesting people and spending time learning from them, the value of learning throughout your life and how to take interest in people and make them feel valuable. However, the most important lesson Barney taught me was one in which he learned during a couple’s therapy session – while Barney was pleading his case to his shrink one afternoon, the shrink stopped him mid-sentence and said “shut up Barney! Many of your issues could be solved if sometimes you just shut up.”

In 2018 I left Chicago and moved to Denver, Colorado to begin a job at Oracle. A job that Barney had cajoled me not to take since “the worst job in academia is still better than the best job in the corporate world.” A remark that he substantiated by the following story – one afternoon while Barney was working at Control Data Corporation, he was working on a difficult problem and decided to go for a walk to think through a possible solution (the same strategy he once employed in NYC when he was a graduate student walking through Central Park). The decision to leave his desk was not looked favorably upon his colleagues and they reported him to his manager.

Every time Barney would call me while I lived in Colorado, he would laughingly ask how “corporato” was treating me and how much money they are doling out for me to stay there. We still talked regularly on the phone and Barney would update me on what he was reading, or he would advise me on how to date a Jewish woman.

At the beginning of 2020, Natasha texted me saying that Barney had sepsis and was in a coma. It was at this same time that my mom was dying of cancer. I thought – how can two extremely sad events be co-occurring? Both Barney and my mom were sick, yet I didn’t want to accept that there could be an end to their sickness. Miraculously, Barney recovered (perhaps due to the promise of young female caregivers at the rehabilitation center), but my mom was not as fortunate. In the last two years, I learned how to honor my mom by grieving her absence but also celebrating her amazing life. I will try to do the same with Barney. I will celebrate his laugh, his incredible stories, his entertaining voice messages and his brilliance. Most of all, I will celebrate what he did for me – a 22-year-old lost kid starting grad school in a new city – he gave me a sense of belonging and helped me find my purpose and myself.

I will miss you, Barney.

Barney would often come by when I was visiting Natasha, and pose an interesting and totally original question, and then solicit our opinions on the matter. It was flattering and a worthy challenge to be consulted by him, and always fun. His mind was so interesting that it was easy to forget his other superlatives, namely, his total devotion to Natasha, his generosity, and his interest in everyone, regardless of [perceived] stature. He was an inveterate re-shaper of language to extract every ounce of meaning and commentary. His turns of phrase were so unique that when Natasha asked me if I’d like to join them on a weekend away, I declined; my stated reason was that I’d return speaking a version of English that no one else would understand. An example - his reference to Natasha as his owner and to himself as her cat was both touching and perfectly descriptive. Knowing that he was Natasha’s rock makes him even more special. I will miss his multilayered humor, his compete lack of pretension, and his warmth.

A note from Natalia:
Lisa is our beloved caregiver -- she is like a part of our family. When Barney got COVID, Lisa said "I am not abandoning Barney, I will continue to take care of him." Two days later she also got sick with COVID, but together with John she continued to take care of Barney in spite of suffering from COVID herself. 
I am deeply grateful to Lisa and John for this highest gift of humanity. I am happy that Barney was able to experience it in the last days of his life.

Now a post from Lisa:
“Some days there won't be a song in your heart. Sing anyway.”
Emory Austin

I was blessed to have had the opportunity to provide assistance and utmost care for Barney during the past year. Barney was a brilliant man, but more importantly he was a good friend to me and many. His wit brought so many great laughs that will continue to resonate within my heart when I think of all his jokes. I will miss preparing his favorite food requests, matzoh ball soup and turkey patty. He loved listening to music and we loved to sing along together. These are some my fondest memories I have with Barney.

Rest easy Barney, you fought so well, you inspired many, loved Natalia so deeply, you loved so loudly, no one that ever knew you can ever forget you. Thank you for all the help and wisdom you have gifted me. Until we meet again.

I first met Barney by accident. Actually he was a friend of my late mother’s who was a visiting professor in the computer science department at the U of C where she also worked at the time. 

I had just returned from a fifteen year sojourn in Europe and was more or less about to endure an extended period of severe underemployment.

We met one afternoon after being introduced and he called me that evening……4 times, the last of which was three in the morning. He became increasingly unsettled and anxious, having just lost his girlfriend of some years just a few days before, whom he intended to marry.

Although I too was deeply traumatized being unemployed, after having just returned to the United States well over a decade after moving overseas, I decided to do what I could. So I let him talk and mostly just listened.

Barney, although completely consumed by grief and suffering at losing his “true love”, was terribly funny, his jokes filled with cynicism, satire, and irony. In brief, I found him to be a master of Jewish humor. He had me in stitches at three in the morning, and was so good that I not only forgot about my own suffering, but slowly responded in kind.

I thought if I cared enough to listen when others wouldn’t he might eventually be able to lick the open wound left at his recent abandonment at the altar and heal.

Little did I know that this would turn out to be a monumental endeavor lasting almost three decades.

That’s right, almost thirty years of three am calls consoling, cajoling, 10 different psychiatrists and psychologists, 100 books, and millions of jokes, up until about the last couple of years of his life.

Even though most of our relationship took place over a thin copper wire for all those years, I will always cherish the unique brand of self-effacing humor we developed and secretly shared.

In closing, the most valuable take away I got from this enormously generous, kind, warm, extremely talented, sage, and brilliant beyond compare individual was to never take myself or life so seriously that I can’t find some tiny bit of sanguinity in the insanity of the every day world.

BTW, he once told me that he had studied music for a time in his youth. He even surprised me one night by opening up with one of the most incredible contra-baritones I’d ever heard giving his own rendition of the Stone Commendatore’s aria in Mozart’s magnificent opera “Don Giovanni” note for note, a cappella, and true to the libretto!

And it goes without saying that he imagined himself as Don Giovanni, the opera’s tragic hero!

Repose en Paix éternelle mon cher ami!