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Josh
Barkin (1918-1982)
(From "Josh
Barkin’s Gutter Walk: An Urban Appreciation" by Alan
Kaplan, Legacy magazine, September/October 2005)
 Joshua
Aaron Barkin (“Josh” to everyone), was born in
New York in 1918 and passed away in 1982. He has been called
a “naturalist’s naturalist,” yet his first
paying job in the park field (at 43 years old) was as a maintenance
worker. Pablo Casals, the virtuoso cellist, called Josh an
adequate cellist but Freeman Tilden, the National Park Service’s
guru of interpretation wrote, “Josh…you are my
interpreter, remember. I almost feel that I discovered you.” Josh
graduated from the University of California–Berkeley
in 1944 and worked on tugboats, in a family grocery and restaurant,
in a lamp factory, and in a shipyard. But he also taught
at the most prestigious of training academies for park rangers,
for the state of California at Asilomar, and for the National
Park Service at Mather Center and Albright Academy.
Josh Barkin was an innovator in the profession of interpretation, introducing
classical music (he founded one of the first Baroque quartets in the San
Francisco Bay Area) to programs, like a slide show of creatures set to
the music of Saint-Saen’s “Carnival of the Animals.” He
may not have introduced puppetry to the profession, but his hand-sewn puppets
(many made by his wife, Pearl), his witty scripts that taught the value
of “good park manners” and fire prevention, and his willingness
to “take the show on the road” to conferences and workshops
throughout the United States, brought respectability to using puppets in
interpretation.
He brought poetry to his programs, and used the writings of classical naturalists.
He once wrote, “The average naturalist goes to the local handbooks…etc.,
gets the information- accurate, clear, concise, and dull.” His skill
was in going beyond the facts and finding the connections throughout life
and history. And his most innovative take on this was “The Gutter
Walk.”
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