An Entrepreneur and a Gentleman

From the December 2015 issue of The Rotarian

On a clear spring day at the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, the sky is azure, cherry blossoms and lilacs are exploding across the green landscape, and the majestic Doric columns of Angell Hall glow golden in the sunlight. This is the place that gave serial entrepreneur John W. Barfield his start.

But Barfield, 88, is not an alumnus. He didn’t have the opportunity to go to college, or even to finish high school. He grew up in a family of sharecroppers in the segregated South. In search of a better life, his family migrated north to Pennsylvania, where his father worked in the coal mines, and later to Michigan, to look for manufacturing jobs. After serving in the U.S. Army in Germany, Barfield was hired to wash walls in the massive Angell Hall. It was 1948. Thorough, reliable, and efficient, he soon secured a job as a custodian, making $1.75 an hour.

Like many African American men of his generation, Barfield faced limited options. He was a good custodian, but he didn’t want to be a lifelong one. So he used the job as a springboard. He came to understand the value of his time and his talents, and he learned everything he could, including how to ask for help, and how to win friends and influence people (assisted by a Dale Carnegie course in the 1950s and by his Rotary Club of Ypsilanti in the ’60s). He took what he knew and built a successful business around it – and he did it without compromising the principles of humility, integrity, and faith that his parents had instilled in him.