Concordia College - White and Blue Yearbook (Milwaukee, WI)

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GYMNASIUM

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DIR. G. CHR. BARTH The children living in Weltes, Indiana, would often stop at a certain blacksmith shop to see glowing iron forged into things strong and useful. Among those on-lookers there was a slight-figured boy who felt, at least on one occasion, that the smith was surely a man to be envied. Some day he, too, might strike sparks from iron, he thought. This was shortly after his father had left the parish at Sandusky, Wis- consin, where the lad had been born. The intense religious training received at the hand of this pious parent continued until he made the confirmation vow, in 1896, at the age of thirteen. Then, one day in the following Septem- ber, the name Gotthelf Christian Barth appeared on the roster of Con- cordia College, Ft. Wayne. Since early schooldays he had cherished a desire to become a minister, and his entrance to Concordia Seminary in 1902 was the result of six years of anticipation during which the desire had height- ened into a passion against which no other ambition could do battle. And now, as our Director passes his forty-fifth milestone, he can look back down a long straight road of twenty-three years of actual service, and can tell of five years spent in a pastorate at Bertrand, Nebraska, eleven years in a parish in St. Louis, and almost seven years devoted to the interests- business and spiritual-of our college. Nov. 1921, marks the beginning of his Directorship. Doubtless, the memory of his own college career aids him greatly in hammering character out of malleable, heated youth. For he became that which once, in a moment of reverie, he had guessed he would sometime like to beea. forgeman tempering glowing iron into things strong and useful.