A person’s legacy can be measured in a number of ways. By any measure, that of Clayton R. Barrow, Jr., who died in April of this year, is rich and varied.
My first encounter with him came in the spring of 1974, when he hired me for the staff of the Naval Institute’s monthly magazine, Proceedings. At the time, just past his 50th birthday, he said, “I never thought I’d live to see 50.” He carried with him the mental baggage of having been the son of a steam locomotive engineer who died shortly after being put out to pasture upon reaching retirement age. Perhaps as a result, Clay decided to extract all he could from life.
When I first saw Clay, he had the physique of Santa Claus and the cheerful countenance to match. His wavy hair was parted in the middle and combed back on the sides, and gradually the gray crept in. His smile lit up his entire face. A river of loyalty and pride ran through his veins, no doubt the result of his Marine Corps service. It was a knee-jerk loyalty—not necessarily in this order—to country, family, Marine Corps, Naval Institute, friends, and those who worked for him. And those who were privileged to work for him were fiercely loyal.
In World War II he was a member of the First Marine Division. To this day division members wear on their shoulders diamond-shaped patches featuring the stars of the Southern Cross and the letters of “Guadalcanal” spelled vertically downward. It was a bitter word in Clay’s memory. In the summer of 1942, when he was only 18, he had deployed with the division to New Zealand for training and a presumptive part in the invasion of Guadalcanal. He was in an artillery battalion of the 11th Marines, ready to use 155-mm howitzers against the Japanese. As he wrote in a memoir years afterward, “ ... we were aching to be in the vanguard of the first offensive land action of the Pacific War.”
Instead, the battalion stayed in New Zealand for six frustrating months. By the time he got to the ’Canal, the fighting was essentially over and the job was one of mopping up. That frustration remained with him for years. He got into combat with the 1st Division during the Korean War, when he served in a reconnaissance company. As he and his cohorts went on patrol, he passed young Marines crouched in their bunkers and imagined them thinking, “God, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.” In fact, though, Clay wouldn’t have traded places with anyone.
In World War II, he twice contracted malaria. He came home from Korea with damaged hearing, the result of a hand grenade going off nearby. Little wonder that he didn’t expect a long life.
Yet he had exorcised the demons from World War II that had made him—if only in his own perception—somewhat less than a full combat Marine.
Along the way, Clay married a fellow Marine, a staff sergeant named Martha Libby, and they had three sons. He also got into the journalistic end of the Corps as a talented cartoonist and writer. He worked in several public affairs operations, and was on the staff of Leatherneck magazine. Subsequently he retired as a master sergeant and joined the staff of the Naval Institute. In 1973 he became editor-in-chief of Proceedings. It was a position he reached strictly on merit, because the august Naval Institute had never before had a Marine as the editor of its flagship magazine—and an enlisted Marine at that.
During the years I worked with him, I came to admire his many talents and the attributes of his personality. He was a patient teacher. In my case, he turned a former journalism school student into a legitimate editor. It’s one thing to work on canned problems in class. It’s quite another to take a real article, make it better, and then convince the author that the revised words are indeed better than the author himself wrote. Clay once told me of receiving feedback from an author whose work he had edited. The writer said that Clay’s editing had enhanced the piece, similar to putting a nice frame around an oil painting.
Clay Barrow fought for the open forum. He knew that the people at the top of the hierarchy would have opportunities to express their ideas. The challenge was to give that same opportunity to those lower in the chain. Thousands of readers today turn to “Nobody Asked Me, But . . .” when they pick up each new issue of Proceedings. Clay conceived that feature, invented the title, and made it work. In the more than 20 years since then, NAMB has been a relief valve for some and a thought-provoking stimulus for many others. The sea services have doubtless been improved by the publication of those ideas and the actions that resulted from them.
When the Naval Institute’s publishers or board members were inclined to squelch something controversial, Clay argued on behalf of the authors. Time and again, he made the point that he wasn’t seeking to publish controversy for the sake of controversy. But neither did he believe that controversy should necessarily be stifled. He had faith that the forum would provide the needed balance on any given issue.
In the nearly quarter of a century that was allotted to him after he reached that age-50 milestone, Clay Barrow did much to enhance the legacy he had already built through his Marine service. Libraries throughout the world house volumes of Proceedings that were better because of his efforts. He trained people whose work perpetuates his ideas and approach to problems. He nourished the open forum that remains a bedrock principle of the Naval Institute. His children and grandchildren are productive citizens in the country he loved.
Many people speak the words of the Marine Corps motto, “Semper Fidelis.” Clay Barrow lived them.