Norman Barker ’72 was still an undergraduate at the University of Southern California when he heard an investment banker describe the ideal recruit for his firm, Eastman Dillon; the potential hire, Barker learned, should be a young CPA, a lawyer or, even better, both. He or she could expect a starting salary of $75,000, the equivalent of more than $500,000 today.
Barker will never forget his reaction as he sat there, smoking, in the last row of a room in Bridge Hall. “My cigarette hit the ashtray,” he says, “and my back hit the wall.”
It was an epiphany, and it changed Barker’s life. While he had always known to work hard, he had long struggled to discover which career path was right for him. But during that guest talk in Bridge Hall in September 1968, he morphed from a psychology student without a goal into a young man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. Reflecting on the experience he says: “I found out who I was at USC, just 120 paces away from the law school.”
Barker, who is now a principal with AllianceBernstein, a private wealth management firm in Washington, D.C., grew up in Inglewood, Calif. His father was a CPA and his grandfather a criminal defense lawyer in Oklahoma, but neither man attended college. “We don’t come from wealth, we don’t come from privilege,” Barker says. “Middle class American, good values — that’s my family.”
Barker remembers his parents as being like yin and yang. “They balanced each other out,” he says, “and I’m the better for it.”
His father, whose background was English, had felt during the Dust Bowl the pain of poverty. He was always cautious, conservative, risk-averse. Barker’s mother liked adventures. Of Pennsylvania Dutch descent and an extrovert, she fled Ohio at 18 to make it out west. This was during World War II, and she arrived in California, where she soon met Barker’s dad, carrying little more than $200 in today’s value.
Barker inherited from his mother a gusto and talent for storytelling and from his father the drive to plan well, whatever the endeavor. From the time his daughter was 7 years old, he used to spend five hours preparing to teach her 40-minute Sunday school class. “I can’t wing anything,” he says. “That’s not who I am.”
Going into college — he started out at a community college in Torrance — Barker thought he wanted to be a psychologist or maybe even earn a medical degree. But then he almost flunked chemistry, and during his second year he fainted in a health education class after seeing pictures of patients with venereal disease. He got the message: The medical profession was not his calling.
It took two more years and the revelation at USC for Barker to figure out that his path was to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. He added as many accounting classes as he could to his psychology major, applied to the USC Gould School of Law and spent his summers interning for Ernst & Young. Having passed the California bar exam and the CPA exam on the first try, he worked for almost three decades for EY where he was a senior tax partner. He joined AB in 2002.
Feeling fortunate, and grateful to USC, Barker and his wife, Kathy, have funded a scholarship at the law school and have just committed to funding a second. Earlier this year, he joined the First-Generation Professionals program at the law school, which supports students who are the first in their families to earn a college degree. He regularly hosts alumni and admitted student events in Washington, D.C.
During a visit to Los Angeles he recently spoke to USC undergraduate students on the topic of lawyers as business professionals. Laying out his own story and that of two fellow alumni, he presented his young audience with a set of questions: Who are you? Who will you be, and where will you be in 10 years? In 40 years?
Barker had prepared the talk well and with an objective in mind: to help students find their path. Remembering the guest lecture in Bridge Hall that changed his own life decades ago, he said after his presentation: "If the people in the audience today learned one thing they find useful, then I have reached my goal."
