Ron Barker’s photos bring home the bacon
Above Photo: I’ve had two photo teachers, one is Jim Cammack, a gypsy photojournalist. The other is Ron Barker, a guy genuinely blessed with a creative brain. Mr. Cammack’s sorta like a sniper with a camera. Mr. Barker’s more like the cavalry, coming over the hill. And this is Ron and Sue Barker, as seen through my lens — Hudson Old.
From The East Texas Journal, February 1995
By Hudson Old, publisher
With his good arm. Cole Barker leaned into the handlebar on his four-wheeler, twisting one front tire against the bois d’arc gate post leading into the horse lot behind the barn.
His broken arm, rigid to the elbow in a Mt. Vernon Tiger purple cast, was a hindrance to the effort.
He paged help from the house.
“Mom!”
Then louder. “Mom!”
Behind the horse-lot gate, the day’s rain had turned the trail leading from the pasture to the stalls into a mud track, a perfect racetrack.
There was a good half hour of light left. It was Friday afternoon, his sister was gone for the evening, he’d wrangled a deal to cook his own hamburger for supper — a perfect world except for the four-wheeler being stuck he strained again at the handlebars. No luck.
“Mommm!” he called.
Sue Barker came out through the screen porch, cracked the door enough to see out without letting the pig in.
“Come help,” Cole said. “I’m stuck.”
“Umm, Cole, looks like a job for dad,” Sue appraised. “He’ll be home any minute.”
Dad is Ron Barker.
In the 70s, he was the upscale photographer in Mt. Pleasant.
In the 80s, he was the Lakeshore builder and developer, rolling big and high. One of his offices was a caboose, well located at the 1-30 exit ramp to Lake Cypress Springs.
His other office — at the lake — was a 50s-era Chris Craft cabin cruiser, docked beneath an air-conditioned tree house.
By the 90s, the caboose and the boat were gone. Barker’d gone belly up and was between opportunities.
Theoretically, he was opening a commercial studio in Dallas office space, a friend’s charity.
It wasn’t rolling.
Sue wasn’t a happy camper either.
“I remember wishing so much he’d just get a job,” she said, “and knowing him well enough to know he wouldn’t.”
Instead, at a time when he was saving change in a velvet Crown Royal sack to buy gas for an aging old Buick that took him back and forth to Dallas, he paid $500 for an aptitude test.
“I wanted to know what somebody else thought I should be when I grew up,” he says.
The bride was less than thrilled when he called home and announced the results.
“Hey, guess what, honey,” he said. “They say I’d make a perfect sheep herder.”
She was asleep when he got home. On the drive home, he’d already been designing his business cards.
He was using information the $500 testing experts had told him about himself.
“Thinking in three dimensions,” it said. “Working on a genius level,” he added. For good measure, he threw in a facet of his military training.
A unique individual, Ron Barker is the only photographer in three counties whose business card proclaims him to be, among other things, a “jungle expert.”
He couldn’t wait to tell Sue what he’d decided, but she was asleep when he rolled in.
Feeling playful, Ron shaved off his beard, trimmed his mustache into an imitation Hitler-style.
“Honey,” he announced the next morning as she. hooted with laughter at his mustache. “I dreamed the testing people were wrong. I dreamed I should be a Fuhrer.”
Ron Barker’s studio’s been just south of the Mt. Pleasant business district for three years now.
His marques spells out ever changing messages as you drive by — my personal favorite was a pet promotion.
“I’ll shoot your dog for $10,” it said.
As he pulled in the driveway, he spotted his 10-year-old son with the four-wheeler stuck in the horse lot gate. From the garage, he retrieved an 8-foot two by six and wedged it up under the engine block for leverage.
“Here,” he said, handing the board to Cole, giving directions even as he was walking off. “Pull up on that as hard as you can.”
To me, he said, “Come on in and let’s shoot this portrait. I’ll have Sue call her pig.”
