On October 15, 2004, Paul F. Barrett died following a lengthy battle
with metastasized prostate cancer. Paul leaves behind his wife, Annette
Love Barrett and a step-son, Johnathan Powell. He was 60 years of age.
Paul was a long-time member and former chair of the Department of
Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago.

Paul was educated in Chicago, completing elementary and high school in
Chicago's Catholic system. He earned the B.A. (1966) and M.A. degrees
in history at Loyola University and the Ph.D. at the University of
Illinois-Chicago (1976). Paul was the eleventh person to complete a
history dissertation at the new UIC. Paul was a member of an especially
productive and distinguished group to finish their studies at UIC
during that period, including Roger Biles, Hasia Diner, Blanche
Glassman Hersh, Arnold Hirsch, Dominic Pacyga, Leslie Tischauser, and
Deborah White. Faculty who most influenced Barrett, reports classmate
Pacyga, were Perry Duis, Melvin Holli, Richard Jensen, Peter d'A Jones,
and Glen Holt, then at Washington University and the Chicago Historical
Society. During their time together in graduate school, remembers
Hirsch, Paul was exceedingly and unfailingly generous with his time,
research, or anything else. Hirsch added that Paul was also the gold
standard when it came to common sense.

Paul focused his dissertation and first book on the politics of street
construction, public transit, and automobile popularization in Chicago
between the 1890s and 1930. Originally titled _Straphanger's Dream_ and
retitled _The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public
Policy in Chicago_ (1983), the editor at Temple University Press
insisted (perhaps accurately) that younger readers  would not recognize
the term "straphanger." Two questions dominate that book. Why, Paul
asked, had Chicago s politicians lavished so much money on streets and
traffic control? And why, he also asked, had those same politicians
held transit officials to a 5 cent fare and forced them to provide
money-losing service to the city's periphery? Considerably simplified,
Paul's answer was that Chicago's politicians perceived the automobile
as private, and democratic. By contrast, trolley operators suffered
from a decades-long reputation for poor service and public corruption.
Space limitations forced Paul to excise portions of an especially
moving chapter that opened with a young girl falling to her death from
a moving trolley and closed with the girl's father and priest
collapsing over her casket at the funeral parlor. Often, Paul wrote in
simple, moving passages that conveyed the grief, anger, and passions of
the city's ordinary residents as well as its leading business and
political figures.

Paul was highly principled in matters that historians care about
deeply, especially the fullest description of events, thorough
documentation, and control of manuscript content throughout the
editorial process. In retrospect, stories of Paul's commitment to those
principles seem amusing. In the early 1980s, Paul was negotiating the
final details of his _Automobile and Public Transit_ with editors at
Temple University Press. In particular, the senior editor asked Paul to
reduce the length of text and footnotes. Paul regularly produced
chapters some 80-100 pages, double-spaced in length and another 40-50
pages of single-spaced footnotes. (Paul wrote each of those drafts on
an Underwood manual typewriter). At one point, Paul threatened to
withdraw the manuscript from the press rather than accept another round
of footnote reductions. Not even an impending denial of tenure at IIT
altered Paul's view of the matter. Eventually, the editor suggested a
compromise. The press would place a note at the top of his
still-copious footnotes to the effect that Paul maintained a typescript
version of those notes and would make them available upon request. One
of the book's reviewers, Gail Farr Casterline, noted the splendid range
of sources used... and complimented Paul's grasp of public
transportation as a phenomenon whose impact on the city, its people,
and the public psyche extended far beyond its function of giving rides.
No one who knew Paul would have asked him to write a thesis-driven
manuscript.

A decade later, Paul still held-high the ideas of a complete narrative
and thorough documentation. In articles for the _Journal of Urban
History_ published in 1987 and 1999, Paul prepared lengthy drafts and
equally lengthy footnotes. Once again, editor and co-author asked Paul
to give way on matters of length, especially the footnotes. (By 1999,
Paul was greatly accomplished in word processing albeit on an
early-model computer to which he clung until it no longer worked).

Nearing the end of his career, Paul remained committed to the scholarly
habits of his youth. Between the late 1990s and 2003, Paul prepared
drafts of chapters on airline regulation during the period of the late
1930s to the early 1970s. Paul produced more than twenty drafts of one
of those chapters and once again, each of those drafts was lengthy, and
each rested on Paul s thorough documentation. On reading a draft,
editors at the Ohio State University Press sought a diminution of text
and still-abundant footnotes. In reply, Paul told them that he might as
well substitute a cartoon for the chapter. In the end, Paul succumbed
to the entreaties of editors, co-authors, and his own growing
conviction that university presses were emulating the behavior of their
commercial counterparts.

Amazingly, Paul never complained of fatigue during those many rewrites.
He granted that editors were doing their job. In a period, moreover,
during which social and cultural history were in the ascendance, Paul
remained focused on development of a narrative and analysis that
fore-grounded ideas, interests, local residents, and diverse political
actors.

As a faculty member and department chair at IIT, Paul emphasized the
virtues of the humanities. Anyone who has taught at an engineering
university recognizes the efforts of senior administrators to capture
the ever-changing directions of industry for their students. Since the
1940s, the goal of engineering educators has been to produce
outstanding technologists who are comfortable with the language and
methods of science and equally comfortable in the proverbial corridors
of power. Paul never denied those goals. He insisted, however, that
engineering preparation include a solid grounding in the humanities.
Paul believed that studying humanities, an IIT colleague reported to
the _Chicago Tribune_, makes [... students] think about the fact that
when they go to work... there are lives that are affected by what they
do. In the scramble for credit hour production that characterizes all
or most contemporary universities, Paul, as chair of the humanities
department, argued for literature, philosophy, and history. As part of
that commitment, Paul postponed his own research on cities and airports
to conduct a study of humanities education in the nation's engineering
colleges. Putting in long days at IIT, Paul was and remained a
dedicated and stimulating instructor. Students, reports colleague Tom
Misa, loved his history of Chicago class. Prior to the most recent
period of residential change in Chicago, adds Misa, Paul could hear
someone talking and immediately tell them the name of their home
Catholic parish.

Paul was also willing to put in lengthy and uncomfortable days to
preserve the manuscript underpinnings of historical scholarship. In the
early 1990s, reports Dominic Pacyga, the brother of an office worker at
IIT discovered employment records (1880s-1940s) of Libby, McNeil and
Libby, a major pork packer in the Chicago stock yards. In all
likelihood, the records had been abandoned in those ruins since the
early 1960s, and dust and dirt had enveloped the building and the
records. Paul telephoned graduate-school friend Pacyga and one of his
former professors, Mel Holli, to help find a home for the records. The
three of them spent what Pacyga characterizes as one of the hottest
days of the summer filling more than 100 boxes. In turn, they carried
the boxes to a chute leading to a truck that delivered the materials to
UIC s special collections department.

After learning that his cancer would not respond to treatment,  Paul
turned increasingly to his religious faith. In addition to regular
prayer, Paul took an active role at St. Fidelis Church in his home
neighborhood on Chicago s near northwest side. On grounds that
retirement parties were for persons who were retiring, not dying, Paul
did not want money spent on him. He asked colleagues and friends to
send a donation to St. Fidelis, 1406 N. Washtenaw Ave., Chicago, IL 60622.

Whatever Paul's views of editors and presses and whatever the editorial
battles fought and lost, _The Automobile and Urban Transit_ remains one
of the standard books in the field; and his chapter on airline
regulation and deregulation challenges the conventional interpretation
both of the origins of mass airline travel and the origins of airline
deregulation. Despite a personal style that was usually diffident and
mostly playful (editors excepted), Paul was an original thinker, a
committed scholar, and a delightful force for what he characterized as
old-fashioned scholarship. He had hoped to live long enough to vote for
John Kerry and John Edwards. His quick wit and intellectual power will
be missed by students and colleagues at IIT; and I will miss Paul s
warmth, intelligence, and our many collaborations.

Mark H. Rose
Department of History
Florida Atlantic University

{Ed: H-Urban appreciates Mark's preparation of this obituary as a way
to honor Paul Barrett's contributions to the field.  H-Urban hopes to
have a forum on _The Automobile and Urban Transit_ and recent
transportation history, and welcomes offers to participate. ]

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