Clayton W. Barker taught high school biology in Wheaton for more than 30 years and for many of those years co-owned a campground in North Carolina with a teaching colleague.
“Clayton was the perfect gentleman,” said longtime friend and retired Wheaton Central High School Spanish teacher Alfred Samper. “He was so generous and was always willing to give of his time.”
Barker, 91, died of complications of lymphoma Feb. 10 at Windsor Park Manor retirement community in Carol Stream, said his wife of 67 years, Esther.
Born in New Goshen, Ind., Barker moved as a child to a tiny Downstate community, Cissna Park, where he grew up. After high school, he served in the Army Air Forces and as a weatherman in the Pacific theater during World War II, according to his family.
After the war, Barker earned a bachelor’s degree in education in 1948 from Huntington College in Indiana. In 1949, he earned a master’s degree in biology from the University of Michigan, and he earned a master’s degree in botany from the University of Colorado in 1961.
Barker began teaching biology at what was then Wheaton Community High School in Wheaton in 1949, beginning a 33-year career at that school. Carol Wenninger took biology from Barker during his first year of teaching and remembered him as being “able to make dissecting a frog interesting.”
“He was a very wonderful teacher in that he was kind and gentle but he also was stern. He expected you to do your work,” said Wenninger, who with her husband eventually became friends with Barker. “The pressure he put on you didn’t make you squirm, but it made you want to work. He motivated you to learn.”
“He enjoyed the interaction with the students,” his wife said. “He loved the classroom.”
Barker became friends with the school district’s business manager, Robert Day, who later taught business at the Wheaton high school. In 1963, Barker and Day, with their families, bought a campground in the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina that they ran during the summers for two decades.
During Barker’s time as a teacher at the school, which was renamed Wheaton Central High School in 1964, he developed a reputation for planning and emceeing at parties for retiring teachers. Retired Wheaton Central social studies teacher Roland Sawyer recalled Barker’s “tremendous sense of humor” and noted Barker’s willingness to serve as the master of ceremonies at his own retirement party.
“I can’t think of a nicer person I have ever met in my life. I never heard him say one negative thing about anybody,” Sawyer said.
After retiring from Wheaton Central in 1982, Barker and his wife moved to Taiwan, where he taught biology to missionaries’ children for seven years and also served on a team of church planters.
The couple moved back to Wheaton and also lived for more than two decades in Cullowhee, N.C., before moving in 2013 to a Carol Stream retirement community, where Barker enjoyed teaching fellow residents how to make hand-turned native wood bowls — a skill he learned while living in North Carolina.
Barker also is survived by two sons, Garry and Gregg; a daughter, Gayle Woody; nine grandchildren; and 17 great-grandchildren.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
