Barbara was born in Munich, Germany. Her mother was a U.S. Marine and her father was an WWII Air Force pilot, shot down over Germany, held in a POW camp and liberated by the Russians. She spent the first twelve years of her life in Europe where her father was stationed at various bases. When they returned to the States, they lived in Spokane, Washington and Idaho before going to Vegas where her father found employment as an FAA air traffic controller. While there, she first worked at the Nevada Test Site and then joined the Army serving on active duty for seven years. After basic training she was sent to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C. for surgical training. Initially she was stationed in Camp Zama, Japan as a surgical technician but also served as a criminal investigator. She left the Army in 1977 and went to college at the University of Hawaii earning a degree in human development. Later she earned her nursing license from the University of New York. She met her husband, Mike, in San Antonio in 1970 when she was working in the hospital at Fort Sam Houston. He had stepped on a booby trap in Vietnam and lost one of his legs. Barbara stayed in the surgical field until Mike had a stroke in 2009 when she retired. After Mike's death, she went back to school and learned blacksmithing, soap making, bread, cheese, baking, pottery, spinning and carding. She was in the Hawaii Kai Fun Runners and trained for and ran in several marathons and has gone skydiving, which was on her bucket list. She went to the World Shoot in 1993 and kayaked down the Rogue River in Oregon. In her younger days, Barbara was a rodeo queen and did cattle drives and cutting and branding. She still has gator hunting on her bucket list.