Island Profile: Global exec’s smalltown roots made Island’s library familiar

When the Shelter Island Public Library opens its newly refurbished space with a public reception on Saturday at 4 p.m., Ed Barr will be among the guests. One of the library’s most generous donors, Mr. Barr says it will be a truly rewarding event for him.

He started loving libraries and their contents as a boy. He grew up in a small town near Reading, Pennsylvania, named Pennside.

His mother, a teacher who introduced him to reading early, would walk with him the three-quarters of a mile to the library, where the librarian would have books picked out and waiting for him. That started “a lifelong love of books,” he said recently. “I’m a reader —  books, newspapers, I’m not really one for getting my news from TV. I find it very limited.”

His children gave him a Kindle recently but he’s found it hard to get friendly with it. “I like a book. I’m kind of a print person, so there’s something I like about being able to pick up a book and read it, put it down and come back to it. So sitting up in bed at night and reading a Kindle? That doesn’t do it for me.”

Both the local library and the Shelter Island School have always felt familiar to Mr. Barr. For his first six grades, he had 21 classmates. The number increased to 37 as he approached high school age. He wanted to take Spanish and calculus so his mother arranged for him to attend Reading High School in the nearby “big city.” When he transferred, he joined a class of 714.

“But,” he said, “it was good preparation for college. It was good to be out of your comfort zone and preparing new comfort ones. I met people of different backgrounds. If your goal in life is to excel, in a class of 37 that’s not so hard, but to excel in a class of 700, that’s a little different thing.”

He won a full scholarship to New York University at the age of 16 and was off and running. In I957, he went on to Harvard Law School.

“In the town I grew up in, there were only three kinds of successful people. There were doctors, and I didn’t want to be a doctor.

There were people whose families had a business and we didn’t have a business, and there were lawyers. But I decided,” after he’d been at Harvard a while, “that I really didn’t want to practice law. I actually found it boring. I never regretted going to Harvard because the legal training helps you to think logically, prepare and stay focused.”

What ultimately interested him was economics and finance so he entered the doctoral program at the University of Michigan.

He returned to New York, however, before completing the degree. Married and with a first child, he “joined the chemical business.

I had joined what was a little company called Sun Chemical Corporation in 1962 and retired as chairman and CEO and partner with their Japanese group in 2004. The company brought in $16 million the year I joined, $4 billion the year I left.”

They were the biggest company in the world in pigments, particularly organic pigments for paints, plastics and cosmetics. They were also the world’s largest producer of printing inks and coatings for supermarket products that keep foods fresh. His job was not to invent products but to see that they got made, sold and supported and that they made a profit.

“It was great. I must say I enjoyed every day getting up and going to work,” he said. It was with regret that he retired in 2004.

Always an “island person” and a sailor, Mr. Barr formerly had a home on Martha’s Vineyard. When transportation from New York City to the Vineyard and back became too time-consuming and complicated, he looked for another island. “I got my sailing charts out. Nantucket was even further out, Block Island was impossible to get to, and I’d never heard of Shelter Island before, but I got in the car one November and drove out here. We bought the following fall in Silver Beach in ‘68, then after more children, in the Heights, then on Big Ram in 1998.”

He’s been married to his wife Nancy for 39 years. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1970. He has two children, Uta and Edward, from that marriage, and then he had Christopher and Andrew with Nancy. But they experience themselves as simply a family, he says.

“I got to know the library here,” he said, “and there was such excellent leadership even before, but [Library Director] Denise [DiPaolo] has taken it to a whole new level. It’s absolutely fantastic and so dynamic and also so creative in how she’s expanded the library’s role.”

This particular library, he thinks, is very much a part of the community, which is the way he remembers libraries when he was growing up.

He had always donated to the Shelter Island Library from the time he first moved here because he believed in supporting local institutions. But when the fundraising drive began for renovating the space downstairs, he was contacted by Linda Kofmehl, the Library Board’s development chair. She, Board President Jo-Ann Robotti and Ms. DiPaolo “gave me a lot of time.”

Mr. Barr said he believes that putting challenges in front of a group is not just an interesting way of raising money but getting other people really involved. He named a sum that he said he would give flat out, then and there. And if the library would raise twice that much, he’d give the same amount a second time. The library pulled it off and he fulfilled his pledge.

In addition to his generous donations, Barr also took it upon himself to approach other friends and associates, significantly increasing the impact of his involvement. According to Jo-Ann Robotti, Mr. Barr “brought in several very significant donors.” She said they had told her, “You sent the right person to see me. I gave because Ed asked me.”

His and others’ donations will be announced and listed in the printed program to be distributed Saturday when the grand opening of the renovated downstairs takes place. So if you’re free on Saturday afternoon, come see and celebrate what Ed, and so many other Islanders, have worked so diligently to create for all of us.