Meet Our Board and Volunteers

Ruth Bailey and Sherril Barber (left to right)

Sherril Barber

Sherril was raised in Lafayette and went through her school years in local schools.  She studied at San Jose State where she received her California teaching credential. She returned to Lafayette and worked in special education in the Lafayette and Acalanes Union High School District schools.  She retired from the Acalanes Union High School District 50 years after she graduated from Acalanes High School.

Having grown up in Lafayette she has always been interested in history, especially Lafayette history.  She loves volunteering and working for the Historical Society doing a variety of special projects.  LHS is fortunate to be a recipient of her time and talents.

Sherril has two sons and is the grandmother of four, the oldest is 20 years old, the youngest is 20 months.  One of her sons lives in the family home in Lafayette.

Sherril loves to quilt and belongs to two quilting groups:  one group makes quilts for personal use and the other makes quilts for the Bay Area Crisis Nursery.  She is in charge of weekly flower arrangements for the sanctuary at the Lafayette Orinda Presbyterian Church.  She is a member of Assistance League and works as a back room volunteer at their shop in the Wayside Inn.  She loves spending time with her grandchildren who live in Lafayette and in Northern California.  Sherril enjoys reading, cooking and travelling in California and is a member of Questers and is also a member of the California Cookie Cutter Collecter’s Club.

Ruth Bailey

Ruth is a native of Ohio where she lived for her first 19 years of life.  Her first brush with history was on a fifth grade field trip to the Akron home of Abolitionist John Brown.  To know that she was walking through the rooms where he lived fascinated her….she was hooked for life on history, and has since visited many president’s homes and historic sites in the East and Midwest.

Ruth graduated from Denison University in Ohio with a degree in English Lit.  After college she moved to Chicago and worked for AT&T (then Illinois Bell).  She was the first woman in the 22-company Bell System named as editor of the internal/external corporate magazine, which was considered a “man’s job”.  She left Chicago in 1970 and moved with her husband to Sacramento.  In 1976 she moved to Lafayette and when her daughter started school went to work at John F. Kennedy University, eventually becoming executive assistant to the president.  In 1988 she went to work for West America Bank and two years later moved to the Bank of California.  Her best assignment there was the creation of a museum highlighting the history of the bank.  This job fed her interest in California and western history and taught her something about museum protocols.

She retired in 2000 and has since divided her time between travel, playing bridge, and various volunteer activities, particularly with the Friends of the Lafayette Library and the Historical Society.  She works in the backroom of the Friend’s Book Shop sorting and pricing donated books and is also on the Board of the Friends.  She also serves as Lafayette’s alternate County Library Commissioner.

Ruth enjoys her semi-weekly shifts in the History Room because she supports the LHS mission of preserving and publicizing Lafayette’s history and helping interested visitors discover their heritage.  It delights Ruth to know that Lafayette was occasionally on the Pony Express route.  If she had lived here in those times she would have insisted on a sign down at the corner saying “The Buckaroo Stops Here!”