Clarence A. (Trip) Barnes 3rd, the Vineyard’s famed raconteur whose life resembled a tall tale that stretched from growing up on Park avenue in New York City to decades running Clarence A. Barnes Moving and Storage, died on Sept. 1 at the age of 83.
He died peacefully at his home in West Tisbury, his son Mike Barnes confirmed.
On an Island of characters, Trip, as everyone called him, towered above them all, literally and figuratively. He was a big man with a big personality and perhaps an even bigger heart. At one point during summers there was hardly a fundraiser he didn’t host, using his skills as an auctioneer with boundless energy — and no boundaries — to raise money for any number of essential Island causes, many of which he started himself.
“We have Trip to thank for quietly taking care of so many Vineyarders who might have been down on their luck,” said Emily Bramhall, during the 2018 ceremony for Mr. Barnes’ Creative Living Award. “We have Trip to thank for the ice arena, for Vineyard House. Wherever you look, chances are very good that Trip has been behind the scenes getting the important work done.”
At that same event, Chris Scott, former president of the Vineyard Preservation Trust, told the story about how Mr. Barnes decided to sell well-known painter Ray Ellis’s tie at the end of an auction.
“Ray would take his clothes off,” Mr. Scott said. “And the crowd would go nuts as Trip sold them. Trip had him down to his skivvies, all sweaty and naked, and the crowd was packing up, but then Trip said we should auction his tie. So he started the bidding at $25, and then $50, and then a guy in the back says, ‘I’ll give you 150. Thousand.’ So Trip says, ‘We’ve got $150,000 for the tie. Do I hear $160,000?’”
The legend of Trip Barnes begins on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he grew up attending fancy prep schools, until he became a teenager and decided a Vineyard life suited him better.
In a 2015 interview with the Vineyard Gazette, Mr. Barnes recalled wanting to drop out of the Trinity School, a private preparatory high school in Manhattan, telling his father he hated it.
“Trip, don’t tell your mom I said this, but do what you want to do, but try to be the best at it,” he recalled his father saying. “If you want to be a milkman, be the very best one you can be. Be the best truck driver you can be.”
He took his father’s words to heart and moved to the Vineyard, where his family had roots in Oak Bluffs and Chappaquiddick going back to the mid-1800s. He got a job at a dairy farm and then for Carroll’s Trucking.
Driving trucks, it turned out, suited him well and he made it is life’s work. For many Vineyarders, Clarence A. Barnes Moving and Storage became an integral part of their introduction to the Vineyard, as Trip helped pack up their lives from all over the country so they too could set down roots on the Island.
“I’ve moved everything and everyone, groceries to the Island, art across the country, fish to New Bedford,” he said in the 2015 interview. “What can I say? I like going places, moving people.”
And he always did it his way, not necessarily conforming to the rules, or even the rule of law.
“One family needed to get a piano out of their apartment on Fifth avenue, but had renovated the apartment since their piano had been moved in,” he remembered in the 2015 interview. “We had to lower it out of a third story window, me sitting on the piano on the way down to make sure that it didn’t smash a window or crash into the brick walls. The police were very nice and looked the other way on that one. Looking back, I think they just wanted me out of the city.”
Mr. Barnes gave up drinking in 1989.
“I drank like a fish when I was seventeen,” he said in a 2017 interview with the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine. He went to Edgehill, an alcohol treatment center in Rhode Island at that time. “It worked. I went to ninety-six A.A. meetings in ninety days. I did everything you’re supposed to do. I really overdid it when I got started – but I got started.”
Then, in typical Trip style, he reached back to help others in the same situation.
“There’d been something called the Captain Silver House that had been a sober house, but it was long gone,” he recalled in the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine interview. “I knew the Island really needed one, so I started one over my office. Then one day I had a call about someone who was willing to put money into an Island sober house because her son was an alcoholic who needed help and she had money that could provide the help. We ended up getting $300,000 for a house in Eastville in the early ’90s. I got together a couple of alcoholics to help clean up the place. We had 10 rooms and we decided to call it Vineyard House.”
In addition to starting Vineyard House and continuing to raise money for the organization throughout his life, Mr. Barnes was a longtime member of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, and a key figure in the Vineyard Preservation Trust, Hospice of Martha’s Vineyard, the ice arena, among many other essential Island institutions. He also took over auctioneering duties for the Martha’s Vineyard Community Services’ Possible Dreams fundraiser after Art Buchwald stepped down.
“I’m just passing on something I learned from someone else,” he said in a 2002 interview with the Gazette. “I have no formal education. But I’ve read a lot and learned from other people. If you’re nice to people, they learn to be nice back.”
He also was instrumental in the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society, and when giving out scholarships to Vineyard high school students during class night at the Tabernacle, he often brought a live pig with him to the podium, in part to remind everyone of the Island’s agrarian roots, and because it was a lot of fun.
“I never wanted to live anywhere else,” he said of his Vineyard life. “I’ve been to every state in the Union except Hawaii probably five times and maybe more, and they’re all fun to visit, and I’ve even wanted to go back to one or two of them, but this is where I live and I love the people here and I love the Island.”
Mr. Barnes is survived by his partner Joan, sister Susan, daughter Elizabeth and sons Mike and Clarence the 4th, and grandchildren Harrison, Henry and Ian.
Services and a celebration of life are planned for sometime in October.
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