Barbara BANNISTER

Barbara Bannister Chance

Barbara's 2011 Autobiography

After I graduated from Staples I entered Bard College in upstate New York. At the end of my second year, I left Bard and got a job at Columbia University as a $60 a week billing clerk. Over the next eighteen years I rose through the ranks to Manager of Accounts Payable for both the Morningside Heights and Presbyterian Hospital campuses and, finally, to the position of Bursar (Ivy League term for Treasurer/Controller) for both of those campuses in the mid seventies. The computer was just coming into it's early days of acceptance and I convinced my colleagues (with HUGE opposition) to computerize our student data base and record keeping systems. All financial records were converted by 1981 and I was exhausted from five years of seven day work weeks and an overwhelming amount of bureaucratic s---

My parents had retired to the island of Grenada in the West Indies in the late 1960's. When the revolution broke out there in the late 1970's they returned to the United States and ended up in Arkansas. I thought they had lost their minds..."you're going to die in Arkansas???" I asked. But, when I came to visit for Christmas that first year I fell in love with the pristine, quiet, beauty of NW Arkansas. It was so much like the beautiful Connecticut I had grown up in!

In the summer of 1981 I decided to leave N.Y.C. and Columbia University and start life over in Arkansas. I arrived here in October, 1981 and took a position in administration with a wonderful developer of retirement communities in this part of the country. It was an exciting opportunity and I had a ball! I am now retired and live on a beautiful lake in the Ozark mountains where I feed roughly three herds of deer daily, and all other manner of wildlife with whom I share this wonderful place.

I have been married and divorced twice, but have no children...except the four legged kind! I became involved with wolves in 1984 when someone gave me a three week old half timber wolf/half Siberian husky puppy. She was my constant companion for the next twelve years. After her death I located a 93% Tundra wolf with whom I shared life (15 years) until this past February when she died of cancer. I have adopted two wolf hybrids from a local shelter because they would have been euthanized. One died two years ago, but I still have the other. In 1987 I became a "Founding Patron" of the International Wolf Center in Ely, MN and I remain strongly involved with them and try to get up to Ely every summer...didn't get there last year, but am really going to try this year! My "significant other" is a big, black 'golden retriever' whose name is Coal and he will be going with me.