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was Irish but not potato-famine Irish, and his ancestors included the John Barry known as the Father of the American Navy. His grandfather, a railroad man, an associate of the financier and robber baron Jay Cooke, had made his fortune floating bonds, then lost it when Cooke closed his bank. His father had been a partner in Diversified Securities, a three-term Washington State legislator, part-owner of the United Exchange Building, a founder of First Seattle Dexter Horton National Bank, and a majority shareholder in the United Pacific Casualty Insurance Company, which underwrote automobile insurance. In other words, the Barrys can be found, consistently, in the lore of our city. The same is true on John William’s mother’s side, which goes back to the Denny Party—the twenty-two Midwesterners who went ashore in 1851 at Alki Point to start Seattle. A certain Hiram Post was a member of this Denny Party. In 1867, he married Eustacia Case Strong. One of their daughters was Lydia Strong Post—Anglo all the way, but with a Native American name. Lydia Strong Post married H. C. Best—founder of Seattle’s Best Trust and Savings Bank, and later of the United Bond & Share Corporation—and their daughter, Dorothy Post Best, married Cyrus Worthington. Moving one more branch down the family tree, we come to Ginnie Barry, née Virginia Best Worthington—in other words, John William’s mother. In sum, my friend came from westering pioneers on both sides, and from people with pressing material ambitions who made sure he had every advantage.
    They sent him to Lakeside, for example. (His contemporaries there included Bill Gates, who is sometimes depicted in a ’72 photo seated in front of an archaic computer, Lakeside’s DEC PDP-10.) In the annual—the Numidian —for ’74, John William’s portrait doesn’t appear, and though he’s listed with three other seniors as “Not Shown,” he’s nevertheless visible in a scene on the frontispiece, a figure striding away in the deep background on a path in front of the science-and-math building, his face turned left as if looking at something outside the photo’s panoramic frame—a snapshot in search of the idyll of Lakeside’s grounds, which does not quite come off because of lowering skies and the not-too-distant hint of a freeway on the modest residential horizon.
    Despite the middling nature of its North Seattle precinct, Lakeside itself remains impressive. A year ago, at the beginning of summer, I attended a conference held there for English teachers. Maintenance vans were parked on the circular drive in front of Bliss Hall, most of them with sliding doors open; a small squadron of Seattle firefighters tested the hydrants; contractors in coveralls and earmuffs pressure-washed the brick-lined entry plaza; a landscape team mowed Parsons Field and the Quadrangle and weeded the beds in front of Moore Hall and the Refectory; and the school’s clock tower, with its sun-swathed cupola and modest spire, suggested small towns in New England.
    So this was John William’s alma mater. He had a gifted teacher there named Althea Mastroianni, who’s now retired but is known to me—I would go so far as to call her a friend, because we were both active, over the years, in writing curriculum for school districts, and we also once served, simultaneously, consecutive terms on the Washington State Council of Teachers of English. Among the names on Lakeside’s faculty list in the seventies, Mastroianni’s was the longest and the only one Latin, and among the faculty portraits in the ’74 Numidian, Mastroianni’s is notably subdued. She regards the aperture with no special interest. She’s perhaps forty but retains the aura of a lit. doctoral candidate—a lot of listless, frizzy hair tied back and, dominating the picture, outlandishly oversized glasses. This is somebody who looks to know much about something esoteric (as it turns out, her special province was the semiotician Yuri Lotman),