My friend Barry Campbell would have turned 58 today.

Barry and I met at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, which is a residential high school created to cater to students interested STEM fields. You apply in tenth grade just like you would to a college (you take the SAT, write essays, have interviews) and if you are accepted you spend your eleventh and twelfth grade years in Durham.

We lived in dormitories, and for my first year I was in Wyche House. I was living on the first floor and Barry was on the second, and while I don’t remember when I first met him, I assume it was through the dorm.

Now at this point I didn’t know much about his background, but compared to my rural upbringing Barry seemed really sophisticated. In fact I mentally compared him to the character Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H, which was a very popular show at the time.

I don’t mean that in any negative way, he just seemed more worldly than me, and he was very knowledgeable in a range of fields. He was one of the people who made me question how the hell I got accepted to the school in the first place.

I was really into music back in those days, and Barry had a very strong singing voice. I would often sit outside with a boombox and sing along with the music, and he would occasionally join me.

It was senior year when we really started working together as we were both on the Quiz Bowl team. As being the team from NCSSM we were expected to win and we did get all the way to the State championship. We lost in the quarterfinals (probably due to the fact that I was appointed team captain for some reason) on the question: What does AWACS stand for?

I was certain, as was everyone on the team, that we had won. The Reagan administration had caused a bit of a stir by offering to sell these aircraft to Saudi Arabia, and so they were in the news a lot, but it soon became apparent that none of us knew the answer. Barry threw out “Aerial Warning Against Counter Surveillance” off the top of his head, which was amazing considering the pressure.

It was also wrong, the correct answer is “Airborne Warning and Control Systems” which I will remember until the day I die. The crowd erupted when the other team correctly answered it and we lost.

What’s funny is that in researching this post I found the video. They actually aired the Quiz Bowl championship on TV. Our bit starts around 06:30 and the AWACS question is at 14:40 (click to view):

After graduation I went off to California and we sort of lost touch. I know that Barry ended up marrying a classmate of ours named Angela and that he pursued a law degree and passed the bar (which seemed fitting). When I returned to North Carolina our paths crossed again in the nascent world of online communication, specifically Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes).

He ended up running his own BBS, focused on Macintosh software. During a recent move I found a flyer he had printed.

I remember for some reason I had to be near Chapel Hill and I ended up spending one night with Barry and Angela. He cooked “peel and eat” shrimp. Weird why I remember that, but it was tasty.

Barry was a good cook, and I can remember him inviting a few of the BBS folks over to his house before a Paul McCartney and Wings concert at Carter Finley Stadium in Raleigh. Through the magic of the Internet I now know that this was in July of 1990.

Before the show he had made quite the feast, and while I can remember little about the concert I do remember we had packed up all of the leftovers for use in an after concert tailgating party. One of my talents is making friends so I managed to find some folks with extra wine, and someone with a set of drums, and I got us all together. I have fond memories of sitting in the parking lot after the show for a couple of hours, listening to music and just hanging out on a summer evening.

It gets a little fuzzy after that, and I need to point out that I learned Barry suffered from a number of health issues, both mental and physical. It was some time after this that he became interested in firearms (he told me he was involved in some sort of arms supply operation in eastern Europe which resulted in him being briefly jailed, but I’m not sure how much of that I believed). He also opened a gun shop in downtown Pittsboro (a town which would become my home). I visited him there once and we walked across the circle to a convenience store to get a drink, and he slid a Walther PPK into his back pocket.

I’m not sure if this side of Barry was the result of some of the demons that plagued him, but I know it cost him his marriage. Some years later would find him living in New York City in the West Village (I once said East Village in his presence and was quickly corrected). He had met a woman named Carrie and they had married. When I visited him Carrie was battling cancer, and the only thing that would help her eat was marijuana (this was before legalization). I was sitting with him in their apartment (along with their two dogs, Chow Bella and Chow Fun) when the buzzer rang announcing “Wild West”. Wild West was his pot supplier, instantiated in the form of a young Jewish college student.

This was the first time I had been exposed to home delivery of drugs, and so I had questions. So many that Barry had to assure her that I wasn’t a cop. The one I remember asking was “aren’t you scared to be walking around Manhattan with all those drugs and money?” and the answer was “No, because I work for Carlos and everyone knows that if they mess with me he’ll kill them”.

Barry made life interesting.

He was also dealing with aging parents. His father had been in a wheelchair for most of Barry’s life due to being paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. When he passed away, Barry ended up taking care of his mother. He told me some horror stories about getting her care, including one where a caretaker took his mom to the bank to get her to co-sign a loan. The bank thought it was suspicious and called Barry. While I was lucky to never see that man angry, my guess is that the care company got to see it in full force.

Barry and Carrie moved back to North Carolina, and occasionally they would hold parties at their house in Chapel Hill. With this new thing called “social media” Barry had developed quite the following on Facebook, and so it was always fun to see old friends and make new ones at these gatherings.

Our paths crossed again when I hired Barry as my Director of Communications in 2010. I had started a computer software company and we had grown to the point where I needed someone of Barry’s talent. Unfortunately, I made a series of bad decisions (I trusted someone who I thought knew more than they did) and by the end of that year we had to sharply cut costs and I needed to layoff a number of people. Barry was amazing and took it well, and he ended up getting a job helping a company get FDA approval for a new medical procedure to treat dry eyes.

We didn’t see each other much after that, but I know that his mother died and he and Carrie moved into her house in Raleigh. The next time we would talk, which would be our last, was in 2019.

I had been in a bad car accident, and Barry came to visit me in the hospital. It was early on in my stay and I was under very strong pain killers so I don’t remember much of it, but I do remember the tone was somewhat rambling and odd. He said that he and Carrie were going to break up and that he was moving to Florida, and I got the sense that his demons were back.

After I go home and was recuperating, I tried to reach out to him but he had gone totally dark. He left social media, let his domain names expire and his GMail inbox was full (do you know how much mail it takes to fill up a GMail inbox?). I reached out to Carrie and she gave me a mailing address, so I sent him a letter. While it was never returned I also never got a response.

Last year just before Thanksgiving, the NCSSM alumni network was blowing up with news about Barry’s death. It had been posted on Facebook by Carrie but no one had any details.

Now the first stage of grief is denial, and when no one could tell me details about where he died or how he died I began to get suspicious. Most people said he died in Florida, but they couldn’t give me a city. While we didn’t have any superlatives in high school, if we’d had one called “Most Likely to Fake His Own Death” I would have immediately thought of Barry.

I mean, I have his full name and date of birth, but I was unable to come up with any objective proof he had died. His voter registration is still active (and no, he didn’t vote in this week’s election). I could have probably reached out to Carrie for details but we weren’t that close and I wasn’t sure how amicable their parting was, and, this is important, what if she was helping him fake his own death?

In retrospect I know I was being silly, but the lack of anything just reinforced my belief that he was off living somewhere under an assumed identity.

This came to a head a few weeks ago when I attended my fortieth high school reunion. Every semestre the students at school would create a slide show, and it is a reunion thing to watch one. Barry was in a number of pictures, which brought him to mind, and of course he was listed as one of our class who had died. Side note: we have only had ten deaths out of over 200 students in 40 years. That seems statistically pretty good.

Bringing together all of the brain power among my friends, I was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. My friend Suzy was able to get one of her friends on the case and we found out that Barry died in Raleigh on November 21, 2023 of natural causes, but the death certificate wasn’t filed in Wake County, NC, until February 6, 2024.

I guess I could investigate further, but that was enough for me. It still bothers me that Barry doesn’t have a proper obituary, so here is one.

Barry Todd Campbell, 57, died on November 21st, 2023 of natural causes. He was a force of nature. His is survived by the hundreds, if not thousands, of people he touched and in doing so made their lives better. The world is just a little less interesting without him in it.

Requiescat in pace, my friend.