Remembering Dennis Warren Barrett

Dennis was born in 1950 at Ford Ord, California: the middle child of five in the family of Chester Garfield Barrett, an Army sergeant, and Alberta Esther McKinney. As life moved along Chet got assigned to different bases, so that Dennis and his siblings enjoyed some growing-up episodes in places as different as Okinawa and Alaska, along with several other of these United States. However, his most memorable early years were spent in Santa Cruz, California, enjoying the coastal environment. He kept happy memories of the light and air near salt water, and of the people he knew there. He became a Sea Scout and through that experience learned to sail (although he never thought he swam well enough to enjoy swimming as a sport). Later he owned a small restaurant, where he learned more about managing people than he did about cooking, although (thanks to Alberta) he had become a darned good cook at an early age. He would go snow-skiing in the Sierras and hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Dennis absorbed electrical theory, not to mention the strong work ethic that served him well all his life, by working with his dad on projects around the house, and later as an apprentice on construction jobs. For the majority of his life Dennis was an electrician, working for many years in construction and for many more for the City of San Jose, at what is now the San Jose Norm Mineta International Airport. "All electricians are basically afraid of the dark," he used to say, grinning.

In 1991 Dennis took training to become an EMT, and with that certification did a great deal of volunteer work for the American Red Cross Medical Services, Santa Clara Valley chapter (San Jose). Around a year later he met another volunteer: an amateur radio operator and Red Cross Disaster Services lead named Anne, and the two started dating. In a quite reasonable development, Dennis became an amateur radio operator as well, and moved from ARC Medical Services into ARC Disaster Services. Dennis and Anne married in 1993, and Team Barrett worked many a natural -- and now and then a man-made -- disaster for Red Cross, both local and interstate. Some of the friends they made in those early days of disaster response work are good friends still.

Dennis and Anne purchase retirement property in Butte County, in the (oddly named, they thought) little town of Magalia. He retired at the age of 55 and, after slight delays due to Anne's work, they moved there in 2008. Dennis became aware of Butte County's stance as a shall-issue county, and decided to obtain a CCW. About a month later Anne acquired her own, and the two of them began a different kind of volunteer work as teaching assistants to their own CCW instructor, Caleb Chinn.

When Caleb retired he gave the Barretts permission to preserve and use the teaching materials that he'd developed for the CCW program in Lake County, and later had imported into Butte County (and which Anne, with a technical writing background, had finessed into organized packages). The Barretts started their own firearms safety training company, Black Oak Training, through which they shared their enthusiasm for the safe enjoyment of firearms. Caleb's original material was enlarged upon in several directions, resulting in a new variety of classes. BOT offered Team Barrett a channel through which to help their community. Dennis did the teaching and Anne handled the background work of banking, student records, documentation, and in general keeping their small California corporation going.

This is where Dennis came into his own, now a knowledgable authority on firearms as well as a calm, understanding instructor in how to stay safe around them. He was a natural at teaching. He would listen to student questions, grasp the unspoken (often unrecognized) apprehensions that drove some of those questions, and then address the underlying concerns in a way that resolved concerns without causing fresh consternation. He was remarkable for showing people, for example, the logical outcomes of some unwanted habit, or why such-and-such a law existed, or how changing one's grip or shooting stance just a little would make a world of difference in their marksmanship. He showed students firearms safety under new lights, often in ways that class attendees had not previously considered, and which worked toward building more confidence. Sometime in 2022 Dennis started taking on a new associate in the teaching realm: Steve Silber. Steve was already an experienced firearms instructor, but saw the affirmative outcomes to many of Dennis' teaching tactics, and was able to thoughtfully add many of them to his own roster of techniques.

However, there's never as much time to the good stuff as we'd like. Dennis passed in the very early hours of October 26th, 2024, of issues arising from an earlier heart attack. His family miss him but know that, if such a thing is possible, he's somewhere still helping people through dire straits.

Black Oak Training, Inc., persists today and will always honor the memory of the caring, intelligent, funny, insightful, protective, circumspect, and often philosphical human being who was our co-founder, and Anne's best friend: Dennis Warren Barrett.

Now: go tell the people you love, that you do.

Anne C. Barrett

PS: with Dennis build and the last name Barrett, it wasn't too big a leap for him to be nicknamed Bear. BOT has now made a change to our logo: you'll find a bear looking upward, contemplating the black oak.