Making History

Resting on laurels was never in him. “Just as competitive as ever,” he wrote, “I wanted to do better every year.” And so once INTRAV had no real rival in its markets, Barney stopped competing with other companies and started competing with the limits of the industry itself.

First by Air and Sea

His first record was a hybrid nobody had tried. He chartered the Cunard liner Carmania for two-week Mediterranean cruises — 550 passengers, which took two DC-8s and a 707 to deliver. Looking over at Air France, which had a single 707 on the route, Barney couldn't resist the math: “We're three times bigger than the national carrier.” Those, he wrote, “were the first air/sea tours ever done” — and they were the seed of the cruise lines that would come later.

Then he did what almost no one in civilian aviation was doing: around-the-world charter flights — Honolulu, Sydney, Hong Kong, New Delhi, the Serengeti, all on one plane, one leader, one ticket. “In fact,” he wrote, “we were the first to do six around-the-world charters.” The economics were the entire game: hold the price down by spreading the fixed cost across as many travelers as possible — which meant finding ever more people who trusted INTRAV with the one big trip they'd take all year. In most markets there was no one else to trust. “I was a millionaire many times over before I was thirty-five.”

The Theater With No Theater

Not long after Barney and Martine's daughter Christiane was born, on November 22, 1969, INTRAV outgrew its offices and moved into the high-rise Missouri Theater Building at 634 North Grand. The name was a small St. Louis joke: the theater itself had been torn down in 1957 to build a parking lot for the very office tower that kept its name. Barney rather liked that — a grand marquee for something that no longer existed — and made it INTRAV's home for the long middle stretch of the company's life.

Around the World by Private Concorde

Barney had been in love with the Concorde since its 1976 debut — 1,330 miles an hour, twice the speed of sound, New York to London in a little over three hours. “It's like a magic carpet ride,” he thought, and in 1987 he built a program around it: “Around the World by Private Concorde,” chartering the Air France and British Airways supersonic fleets. The statistic is almost unbelievable, and it's his proudest in the whole travel career:

The one that got away belonged to William F. Buckley Jr., and it produced Barney's favorite piece of Concorde lore. Buckley's charter reached Sydney missing a piece of its tail — it had broken off on descent — and reporters afterward couldn't find a single passenger who had noticed anything wrong. “That night on The Tonight Show,” Barney wrote, “Johnny Carson said, ‘That's because Buckley was lecturing to them and they were all asleep.’”

There was a private grace note, too. On the very first around-the-world Concorde flight, Barney noticed that the head stewardess was named Martine and her assistant was named Christiane — the names of his first wife and his daughter, thirty thousand feet up and faster than sound. And on another departure, leaving San Francisco with a first fuel stop in Honolulu, he telephoned his best friend Sam Cooke in Hawaii to say he had two surprises. Cooke guessed the first — that Barney was at the airport. The second he couldn't: “I was in San Francisco two hours ago!” A new speed record for a phone-call reunion that, Barney claimed, “still stands.”

He summed up the whole barnstorming era with a shrug that only a man who'd survived it could manage: