One of Carla Barber’s tasks at Sunshine Meadows Retirement Community in Buhler is to create the memorial booklet of recently deceased residents. The home hosts a memorial service for the residents and staff members who weren’t able to attend the funeral, and invites family members as well. This helps residents and staff work through the grieving process and happens as needed, usually at least quarterly, but sometimes as often as six times a year. When initially given the task, it was simply to print the obituary and the chaplain’s scripture, but soon Barber wanted to make the booklets more meaningful, so she began publishing a photo of the resident and tried to find out more about each person in order to create pictures, poems, or song lyrics that were important to, or representative of, the one who passed. In doing so, she became engrossed with these people’s lives.
One of the residents had been born to missionaries in the African Congo. Barber had met this woman and enjoyed her warm, outgoing personality. The family supplied a picture of Ruth as a pigtailed young girl, riding a bicycle with her two pet monkeys on her shoulder and handlebars. At another time, though, Barber was amazed to learn that a teacher, composer, and concert pianist, a single woman who’d lived to be 98, had earned two master’s degrees in music and music theory, received two Fulbright Fellowships, and completed post graduate studies in Salzburg, Austria, at the Mozarteum and at the Vienna Academy of Music, before obtaining her doctorate in Music Composition from the Eastman School of Music in 1969. The picture provided by her family was of Norma as a very young woman, vibrant and beautiful. At her service, Barber learned that Norma had brought her grand piano with her to her new home, and, upon admission, asked, “Is there anyone else here like me?” This brought Barber to tears.
Aware of the life she’d missed out on knowing, Barber determined to not let slip the opportunity to be enriched by the residents. Sunshine Meadows has begun featuring a resident in the quarterly newsletters, and, where appropriate, in local newspapers as a human interest piece. The most recent article is on the man who invented the serpentine belt. “These stories serve to not only enrich our community, but also to remind us all that the people we serve are, and have been, vital, industrious, valuable members of our society, with much to teach and to share,” Barber said.
An Amazing Life: Jim Vance
By Carla Barber
I introduced myself to Jim Vance, one of the residents of Sunshine Meadows, by saying that in addition to working here, I also do a bit of writing, so when there’s an interesting story to be written, I’m usually asked to do it.
“What story?” he asked.
“I’m told you invented the serpentine belt,” I replied.
He gazed evenly at me, snorting. “Ha!” He said. “Big deal!”
I told him I’d checked the Internet and had found his name in at least three places as the inventor of the belt. His eyes widened. “Really?”
Born in Coldwater, Kansas, in 1935, and raised by “poor dirt farmers,” Jim finished high school and enlisted in the Air Force, where he remained until he was 33. He said his family had no money for college, so he chose the Air Force “to pay for an advanced education to finance my future.” He remained in the Air
Force until 1968, when he began working for the Gates Rubber Company in Denver, Colorado.
Jim bought some land in the Front Range, west of Denver, cut down and milled trees on his property, and built himself a house. His 38-minute commute to work from that lovely spot was worth it. He worked for Gates until retirement in 1994, at age 59. During that time, he visited every continent except Australia, built two airplanes, and created 140 inventions, the most well-known being the serpentine belt, which moves power from a vehicle’s engine to the belt-driven accessories in today’s vehicles.
Prior to that time, there weren’t so many accessories available on most cars, such as power steering and air conditioning, and each item required a belt. The simple old single V-belt-driven power steering pump, alternator, cooling fan, A/C compressor, water pump, etc., were stuffed into an ever-shrinking engine compartment, due to aerodynamic designs and smaller vehicle frames. Manufacturers sought a belt diminishing noises and vibration, increasing durability, and transmitting the ever-increasing power demands of the devices that it was intended to operate, all while remaining flexible under extreme temperatures, dealing with engine oil, coolant, road grime, etc., yet still bending more than 100 times a second.
“It was an interesting challenge,” Jim said. His serpentine belt was a single, continuous belt used to drive multiple peripheral devices in an engine. To allow the belt to pass over more than three pulleys with a large enough wrap angle to avoid slipping, the addition of idler pulleys create the belt’s serpentine shape.
“We put together a drive system that worked, and it was very successful, so GM asked us to make ten thousand of them! Then they gave us only 90 days to develop the manufacturing and get them out. We had that to deal with, and we had to convince the managers that they had thought of it,” Jim said with a grin.
Solving problems was something Jim enjoyed. “Here’s my 30 second commercial,” he told me. “So many people are intelligent and have intuitive knowledge of how things work, but do they use it? When you’re a dirt farmer, you have to be inventive. This is something so many people miss out on. I like a problem. If I can help someone get a jumpstart, I will.”
