$12,000 a Year

In 1946, when Barney was twelve, he had two uncles he admired for a very specific reason: each earned $12,000 a year. Uncle Cliff sold advertising; Uncle Ed was general manager of the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. Each owned his own house and car. To a child whose father Alec made about five thousand dollars a year in clerical work and had, Barney believed, never had more than a hundred dollars in the bank, twelve thousand was the number that meant you had arrived.

Uncle Cliff landed the Lee Jeans account in Kansas City. Walking into the Ebsworth flat one day, he posed a problem to twelve-year-old Barney. They make great blue jeans, but they don't sell. Levi is the hottest thing going. How come? Barney, who read newspapers and watched his classmates carefully, answered without hesitation. Kids love the little copper rivets. They love the red Levi tag and the leather patch on the back of the waistband. Put those on Lee's. You need a logo and rivets. Uncle Cliff did what his nephew told him. Lee has been making money with those same jeans for more than 60 years, Barney writes, claim unstated: At 12 years old, I made that company with that advice.

The Youngest Eagle Scout in St. Louis

Barney made Eagle Scout at fourteen — as quickly as a boy can do it — alongside his father Alec, who was the assistant scoutmaster and who, as noted in Chapter One, thereby became the only person known to have achieved both King's Scout in England and Eagle Scout in the United States. Barney's father wasn't thrilled about his son's speed through the ranks.

Alec turned out to be about right. Barney's first date was at fifteen, with a girl named Barbara from Sunday school whose family owned a bakery in town. Alec drove them.

Barney's real obsession, though, was track. Cross-country in the fall (which he hated every step of) and track in the spring (which suited him perfectly). He moved up to varsity in his sophomore year of high school, and by senior year he was the St. Louis city sprint champion in the 100, the 220, and the 440. He gave himself a nine o'clock bedtime. The reasoning was austere: if eight hours of sleep were good, ten hours would give him an edge.

Four Scholarships to Mizzou

The University of Missouri offered him a track scholarship. Over his college years, Barney would collect every single one of the four kinds of scholarships the university offered — freshman, academic, athletic, and need-based. It still wasn't a full ride. He worked constantly.

One summer he worked three jobs simultaneously. Fridays: the ammunition factory from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., then the Kroger bakery from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. loading trucks, then clothing sales at a department store Saturday 9 to 5. He made straight A's. I almost made myself daft in the process, he writes.

Pikes Peak, the Outhouse, and the White Bucks

In his sophomore year he convinced two friends to follow Richard Halliburton's example from The Royal Road to Romance and climb Pikes Peak at night to watch the sunrise from the top. They wore shorts and short-sleeved shirts in the Colorado foothills. Three hours in, they were hopelessly lost between the trail and the dry creek beds. At 2 a.m. they stumbled onto the cog-railway tracks. A sign read: Keep off the tracks. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

Here is the difference between Barney and his friends, in his own words. His friend Larry, the future doctor, said they couldn't go up the tracks: It wouldn't be sporting. His other friend, who would spend his career at Social Security, said they couldn't go up the tracks because they'd be arrested. Barney, the entrepreneur, said: I don't know about you, but I'm going up those railroad tracks. They go to the top.

At the summit, the temperature had dropped below freezing and forty-mile-per-hour winds ripped at their faces. Nobody answered their knocks at the workers' hut. Then Barney spotted the outhouse. It had a heater. They spent the night there. Barney slept against the dirt-floor wall. He was climbing in, of all things, white bucks. They watched the sunrise. It was not as glorious as in Halliburton's book. I suppose that's because he hadn't just spent a night in an outhouse, Barney writes.

9.6 Seconds in the NCAA Finals

Barney's college track ambitions were firmly Olympic — and then, just as firmly, realistic. At the NCAA finals in the 100-yard dash, he ran 9.6 seconds. The world record at the time was 9.3. He finished eighth. Last.

Burned out by the pressure of his track scholarship, Barney transferred after two years to Washington University in St. Louis on an academic scholarship, moved back in with his parents, and regained his status as a track star in a lower division. Senior year, because of his grades, he was admitted to a combined program that would roll undergrad business into the start of law school. He had already qualified to graduate at the end of his sophomore year; he needed only about nine more credit hours to finish. He was treasurer of the business school and captain of the track team. IBM recruited people like him. The sensible path was to march straight into corporate life.

Barney walked into the dean's office and told him he was dropping out to enlist. The dean, presuming he had come by to thank him for a congratulatory letter about his number-one class rank, blinked. That's not why I'm here, Barney said. I just wanted to let you know I'm going to take a break from school and go into the army.

Two Years, Not One Day More

At the enlistment office, the sergeant tried to upsell him: three years and you can go into the Finance Corps at Ft. Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. Barney said no, sir: I'm in for two years because I have to do it. Not one day more than that.

The one thing the Army could give Barney was the one thing twelve-year-old Barney had been fantasizing about, lying in bed reading The Royal Road to Romance: the chance to see the world.