Edie, as she was known to all her family, friends, and co-workers, was born in Mojave, California, to Clyde Emerson and Dorothy Elva Keith of Trona, San Bernardino County, California.
She did all of her elementary and secondary schooling in the Trona Joint Unified School District. The day after her 1959 high school graduation she drove herself the 125 miles to San Bernardino to start Skadron Business College and find employment. Within a very short time and several months before she turned 18, she accepted employment with a small but well-respected law firm in Rialto, California, where she would be trained on the job to be a legal secretary.
On July 2, 1960, she married her high school sweetheart, John Thomas (“Tommy”) Barrick, in service presided over by the pastor who had headed her Trona church when she and Tommy had first met. The ceremony took place in a small church in Rialto. Tommy had just returned from military duty in Munich, Germany, and mustered out of his Army enlistment. When he was unable to find employment in the vicinity of Rialto, he resumed his employment at the chemical plant in Trona. That meant that Edie drove back out to the desert on her weekends off and he drove down to Rialto on his “long changes”. The long-distance arrangement continued for almost 2 years.
They rented modest living quarters in Rialto for the first 4 years of their married life. Then they bought a house in San Bernardino. Their home was always welcoming to friends and family and the gathering place for every holiday and many other celebrations. However, they never had children.
Edie worked diligently at her career. She was critical support for five separate members of the local legal profession who successively terminated her employment as they received appointments to assume judicial office in San Bernardino. Only one lawyer-employer chose not to follow that path during her 1959 to 2001 career; she retired from his practice.
Edie attended and helped develop formal legal assistant/paralegal courses at the University of Southern California to augment the many years of on the job training she gained in legal practices concentrating on litigation, personal injury, family law, probate, and estate planning. Over the course of a 43 year career, she saw law office technology transition from manual typewriters through personal computers and computer networks.
She was active as a member and as an officer in the local, state and national professional associations for legal secretaries, paralegals, and legal assistants. In 1985 she was recognized as “Legal Secretary of the Year” by her peers and the legal community in San Bernardino.
In retirement she provided caregiver services to her husband who had been forced into early retirement by a vehicular accident in 1996. Due to health issues for both spouses, they became homebodies after 2006, and ultimately engaged professional caregivers in their home. Prior to 2006, they had traveled within 28 of the states, including Hawaii, and portions of Canada. Their 54-year marriage ended with her husband’s passing in 2014. She was a resident of San Bernardino County for her entire 76 years of life.
She is survived by her only sibling, Cheryl E. Keith, of Rancho Cordova, California; her cousin Terry Jane (Garrison) Fasana of Baldwin Park, California; her cousin Colleen Baker of St. George, Utah; her cousin Judith Hamblin of Henderson, Nevada; and many other cousins in Kansas, Nevada, Idaho, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Her internment was at Crestlawn Memorial Park in Riverside, California, on March 13, 2018.
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/bloomington-ca/caroline-barrick-7778626
