Indian Amateur Teen (18 19)

When Barry was small, his mother wrote scenarios for the silent screen, but as he grew older, she began acting again, and Barry spent a good part of his childhood in the Hollywood studios or "on location," meeting many of the great stars of the silent era. Nell Shipman became a star herself, playing leading lady to the likes of William Duncan, Lou Tellegen, and Gayne Whitman, and appearing regularly in, and on the covers of, the fan magazines of the day. Nell Shipman's ambition, however, was to make her own movies, and after she divorced Ernest Shipman, Barry accompanied her on many of her filmmaking ventures. Big Bear, in the San Bernardino Mountains, was a frequent haunt. Barry spent most of 1922-1924 with Nell in Spokane, Washington, and at her ill-fated "movie camp" on Priest Lake, Idaho. His childhood adventures in the wilds of North Idaho, snow-bound in the winters, miles from the closest towns, with the colorful characters and the wild animals that made up his mother's menagerie, formed indelible impressions that he would revisit in writings much later in his life. When Nell Shipman's Idaho filmmaking venture collapsed in1925, Barry accompanied her East, to Connecticut, Florida, Spain, and Florida again, before returning with her California in 1928. Together with Nell's partner, Charles Austin Ayers, their two children Daphne and Charles Ayers (born in Spain), and good friend Dick Diaz, they set out on their cross-country automobile trek from Miami immediately after the close of Nell's stage play, "Are Screen Stars Dumb?" Barry had a major role in the play, but image-conscious Nell Shipman, hoping for a Hollywood comeback, told the press that her handsome teenaged co-star was her younger brother.

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Barry and Beulah Shipman had three children, a daughter Nina, born in California, and twin sons, Michael and Noel, born in Virginia during Barry Shipman's military service in Quantico. An amateur inventor as well as a writer, Shipman held several patents, including one for a sun-tanning device known as the "Sun Tan Tree." Professionally, he was a member of the Screen Writers Guild and Writers Guild of America and was active in both. In his retirement, he billed himself as a "Media Imaginist" on his personal letterhead. Reflecting on his mother's and his own life experiences, he sometimes mused on the financial difficulties that creative artists so often faced. Nevertheless, he wrote in 1987, "I'd rather be the author, playwright, conceiver of a good show than be the owner of six downtown parking lots."

Among the correspondents represented are his lifelong friend Dick Diaz, who joined the Nell Shipman entourage as a teenager in the 1920s in New England and accompanied them to Florida and California; Barry's half brother and sister, Charles Douglas Ayers and Daphne Ayers Feldman, children of Nell Shipman and Charles Austin Ayers; his half-brothers on the Shipman side of the family, Robert and Ernest Shipman, Jr., with whom he did not become acquainted until he was an adult; Priest Lake friends Lloyd Peters, Dorothy Winslow Overmyer, and Loie Pierson (his school teacher); World War II Marine Corps colleagues Frank Adreon and Julian "Bud" Lesser; Linda Stirling (who starred in many of the cliffhangers) and William Witney (who directed many); and a host of other friends, associates, film fans and scholars. Correspondence with Douglas Bankson, relating to their collaborative screenplay about Nell Shipman, is located in Series 4.

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