Retirement

In 1989, at fifty-five, Barney began a ten-year plan to sell everything he owned before his sixty-fifth birthday on July 14, 1999. He didn't want to be responsible for so many employees past that date, and he knew he was not going to spend retirement in a deck chair. The art world already had most of his remaining attention.

He was glad he had named the company INTRAV rather than Ebsworth Travel. INTRAV was a name that could outlive his ownership. Ebsworth Travel would have been yoked to him forever.

Build-A-Bear

In 1997 Barney read a St. Louis Business Journal article about an enterprising woman named Maxine Clark, who had been president of Payless Shoes — responsible for selling twenty percent of all shoes in America — and had burned out. She was starting something new, a company that would let kids build their own stuffed animals in front of them: Build-A-Bear Workshop. Barney invested. The investment would compound for the rest of his life and play a significant role in financing what came after the travel business.

Selling to Kuoni

In September 1999 Barney sold INTRAV to Kuoni Reisen Holding AG, the Swiss-based travel multinational. With that transaction, thirty years after buying half of International Travel Advisors on a $5,000 cosigned bank loan, Barney was officially out of the travel business.

Hunts Point

Barney and his third wife, Pam, had been building a house in Hunts Point, Washington — a small peninsula on Lake Washington, just east of Seattle. Jim, the architect, designed it specifically for the collection. Automatic blinds protected the paintings from direct sunlight. The simple architecture deliberately did not overshadow the art. Barney wanted a home that felt like a museum — direct, uncluttered, the qualities he wanted his own life to embody.

The shower in the new house was a full-wall window looking into a Japanese garden. It would feel like showering in the midst of nature, Barney writes. Jim had designed a home that was the perfect place for the art collection.

Pam did not move in. After twelve years of marriage, she told Barney she was leaving just a couple of months before the house was ready to move into, in 2003. Barney reports this without bitterness. She had been married and divorced four times before him. All three of the women he married, he notes, stayed with him twelve years. None remarried afterward. They all remained friends.