Zack Barnett

My grandpa Barney could tell a story about shooting a deer or ditching his Navy plane over the Pacific. He played football in a leather helmet and later wore a leather pilot’s cap in the war. His face looked like a wrinkled old book, which fit perfectly because Barney told gripping stories about both his own life and the lives of his family members. The last hanging in New Mexico? The day his one-armed father shut his lone hand in a car door? The nights he and a buddy guarded the Portales water tower after Pearl Harbor? Now Barney’s kids tell stories just like their dad. Conflict. Tension. Humor. Timing. Barney’d be real proud of the way his daughter, my aunt Mona Robinson, recounts a family legend about Barney himself in this video that my wife, Jamie, took with a point and shoot camera at a family reunion.