There’s a handwritten sign on the door of the Gallery of Arts and Culture across H Street from the Post Office. Though the message it conveys is simple — a straight-forward designation of a future event’s time and place — if you peer through the glass, as I did, at the Gallery’s blank walls and empty shelves, the wastes of open cardboard boxes and bare track lighting, then the piece of yellow lined paper taped to the inside of the door tells an entire story. The note informs any interested passerby that the family of Barbara Burke will be holding an estate sale this weekend. 

Barbara passed away this past spring after a brief illness. “A brief illness” is obituary-speak for that final series of events that brings a person’s time on Earth to a close, and, as phrases go, it’s about as loaded as they come. For Barbara, it meant a growing sense of confusion, followed by a car accident serious enough to require hospitalization and rehab. While in the hospital, doctors found a pancreatic mass, which she decided — at age 84 — not to treat.

The last time I saw Barbara, she was sitting in a chair in the hallway outside her room in the assisted nursing facility. I’d been visiting someone else, and was in no way prepared to see Barbara’s swoop of preternaturally jet black hair in the institutionally gray hall. I stopped, wide-eyed. “Barbara?” At the sound of her name, Barbara looked up at me, and my heart broke a little.  

Barbara Burke had a way about her, a style, an approach to the world, that was all her own. There was a power to her, despite her small stature, a firmness — of conviction, of purpose — that you could see in her eyes. And she brought you along for the ride with a smile, a conspiratorial smirk, a wry eye-roll. She made you feel special, part of her in-crowd. She called you “darling.” Said she loved you. I worked for Barbara several times, taking pictures and shooting video in her Gallery of Arts and Culture. I’ve seen her work a room, solve problems, gossip in a corner with grace and aplomb; and no matter what she was doing, or what trivial interruption I was bringing her, when she looked up at me, I always got the feeling I’d already been on her mind. 

None of that was present in the hallway. She looked up, confused or surprised, and seemed to struggle with speaking. I knelt on the floor before her chair and said some things, non-committal things, small talk, statements that didn’t require answers and masked my own shock. After a minute or so, I patted her arm, as she would have done mine, and said I’d see her again. I never did. Not two weeks later, I heard the United Methodist Church, where Barbara worshipped, was holding a celebration of life for her.

You can watch Barbara’s celebration on the church’s Facebook page and hear her niece Kelli recount the remarkable life her aunt led: After graduating high school in Tracy, California, in the mid-1950s, Barbara, the daughter of an Air Force training pilot who’d died in an exercise, began her professional life as a jet-setting flight attendant for the Flying Tiger Line, an airline founded after the Second World War by former pilots from the famed American Volunteer Group — the Flying Tigers in China. The airline contracted with the Defense Department and became the main conveyance for service personnel headed to the Far East, which, in the 1960s, was saying something. Barbara traveled the world. 

“She’d bring us children gifts,” her niece, Kelli, tells me over the phone. “I have a Japanese doll, made from traditional kimono fabric I still treasure.” 

Kelli lives in Sutter Creek where she runs a high-end apparel boutique. She’s organizing the estate sale, making sure all the artists get their works back from the now-closed gallery on H Street, wrapping up her aunt’s life. No small task. “She wasn’t one to sleep the day away,” she says of Barbara. 

Indeed. After the Flying Tigers, Barbara went back to school, getting a Master’s degree in business, as well as an arts degree. In the ‘70s, she settled in the Bay Area and established a business-consulting firm aptly called Barbara Burke Consulting Services. She negotiated contracts, restructured corporations. She worked with Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters; helped restructure United Parcel Service. “She consulted many, many businesses, big and small for twenty years,” Kelli explains. 

As a successful, independent business woman in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Barbara was a source of inspiration to her niece. “She was a mentor in a huge way, really always encouraged me to do what I really wanted to do — find my passion in life.” 

And Barbara led by example, even after her retirement. She purchased a Mendocino County retreat, Sky Canyon Ranch, that allowed patrons to commune with Nature. “That brought her from San Francisco up to that area,” Kelli says. “Then she just kept working, moving north.” 

Barbara worked with non-profits, Tribes, — any place, it seemed, that she could help. 

“She was very well-rounded, but always serving,” Kelli says.

Kelli says her aunt’s sense of service came from her spiritual side. Barbara was very devout, even becoming a certified lay-pastor while she lived in the Bay Area. 

“Her faith came first in her life, always,” Kelli says. “She was very dedicated to her faith and always led in faith.”  

It was this sense of service, of being needed just over the horizon, that drew Barbara further north. 

“It was always about what she could do to serve a community, help a business get started, help a tribe,” her niece says.

In 2006, Barbara settled in Crescent City and began working with the Small Business Development Corporation, using her sense of service along with her business acumen and experience to help small businesses expand and grow. After that, she became a small businessperson herself in 2009 with her Gallery of Arts and Culture, marrying several different passions — service, business, and art. 

“She never really retired,” Kelli laughs. 

I ask her what having an aunt like Barbara meant to her growing up. “Of course, I wanted to be a flight attendant! That seemed really cool! I idolized her. She was so loving. Always called me ‘darling’ and said ‘I love you.’ She didn’t just say that for me, she said it to a lot of people.”

I can still hear Barbara saying that, calling me “darling” and smiling, saying she loved me. It wasn’t an affectation. You got the sense that you were genuinely darling to her. Despite this warm privilege bestowed by her smile, the embrace of her familiar words, her Darling Club was by no means exclusive. If you moved in Barbara’s circle, if you ever needed her for anything, you were darling to her.   

This weekend, the family of Barbara Burke will be selling some of her things in an estate sale at her Gallery of Arts and Culture. I plan on stopping by, but I don’t know if I’ll purchase anything. To me, I think, it’ll be one last meeting of all the people whose lives were touched by Barbara, the people who were each, in their own way, darling to her. You are invited.