“Welcome to our home away from home.”
That’s how Dan Barber greets visitors to his comfortably arranged personal care suite. Since he and his wife, Carolyn, have moved to Homeland Center, they’ve enjoyed the people and even bring their own family to activities.
“We’re happy here,” says Dan. “Everyone’s so nice.”
When Dan and Carolyn celebrate their 70th anniversary in October, they will look back on a life of raising a family and traveling to magnificent National Parks.
They grew up knowing each other from their Harrisburg neighborhood. Carolyn was born in Ohio. Her father grew up in a farm family where the brothers were expected to go into farming. Still, he chose otherwise, eventually bringing the family to Harrisburg for his job as sales manager for Manbeck Bakery.
Dan is a first-generation American — the youngest of 12 children of Italian immigrants who met in Steelton. The age gap from Dan to his oldest brother was so wide that his nephew was born 12 days after him. The two grew up like brothers, so tight for life that a picture of them as boys hangs on the wall in Dan’s Homeland suite.
Dan’s parents died when he was a teenager. After high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, serving from 1951 through 1955 at Tachikawa Air Base, outside of Tokyo, Japan. There, he was in troop transport.
“We assigned men to planes, and they flew to combat zones in Korea,” he says. “I can assure you, when I saw those fellows go on those planes, I was wondering, ‘Are they coming back?’ Korea was an awful war, and I never knew whether I’d see them again.”
While in Japan, he was once named Airman of the Month, and he played second base for the post baseball team.
When Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio toured Korea with the USO, they flew in a plane from Dan’s unit. On their return, his group got to see the famous couple up close.
Was Marilyn as beautiful in person as she was on screen?
“Oh, my gosh, yes,” Dan says. “And Joe DiMaggio, he was quite a baseball player. It was quite an honor.”
After Dan left the Air Force, he and Carolyn met again at a wedding.
“He took me home from the wedding and asked me if I could go out that night, but I had a date,” Carolyn says. “So we did something the next afternoon.”
“We’ve been together ever since,” says Dan.
After they married, Carolyn encouraged Dan to enroll in college. They were already raising a family, and he worked jobs with his father-in-law, brother, and in an ice cream parlor, but he would carpool to Elizabethtown College with other veterans. In 1960, he graduated with a degree in business administration on a Monday, and their second son was born that Friday.
Dan spent his career in insurance, starting with Nationwide and retiring from Ohio Casualty. They raised their three sons in Chambersburg.
“We did a lot of outside things, and they all played baseball,” says Carolyn. “My sons are my gift to the world. They’re so good.”
They have visited 22 National Parks, mostly on vacation trips to see family members out west. Her favorite was Zion. His was Yosemite.
“They were all magnificent,” says Carolyn.
At White Sands, they were cooking when a storm chased them into their camper, and a bear came by.
“I felt him,” says Carolyn. “Our camper moved. I thought that you had to go to an outside shower and bathroom at this campground. What if you ran into a bear?”
In addition to having only sons, all of their grandchildren were boys. Finally, they got their now 2-year-old great-granddaughter.
“She’s our little girl,” Dan says.
The Barbers came to Homeland in March. They’ve enjoyed outings to Longhorn Steakhouse and 3B Ice Cream. They play bocce ball in the Gathering Room, just like they played at home. When one of their sons and his family visited recently, “they loved it here!” Carolyn says. “They played bingo with us.”
Carolyn first knew about Homeland and thought it was nice when she would drive members of her church circle from Homeland to services. As friends looked into retirement communities, she disliked “the ones that looked clinical.”
“Homeland looked like a hotel,” she says. “You don’t see so many things that are health-related. I didn’t want that feeling, so that’s why we came here.”
“We’re privileged to be here,” adds Dan. “Everyone’s so friendly, and the staff is so helpful.”
