F. (Fred) Eugene Barber was born on a sharecrop farm in the Midwest at the start of the Great Depression and first attended a rural school with nine other students ranging from the first to the sixth grades. He trapped for furs, hunted, fished, worked on farms and ranches mending barbed wire fences, branding cattle, and vaccinating calves until joining the Air Force just after graduating from high school at age seventeen. During the Korean War, he was an engine mechanic on B-29 bombers for a short time on Pusan Airfield, Korea and then later, a Crew Chief and Line Chief assigned to the 5th Field Maintenance, 9th Bomb Group, 15th Air Force, Strategic Air Command, Travis AFB on SAC's huge Atomic Bomb carrying B-36. After discharge in December of 1952, the former Staff Sergeant used his GI Bill and earned an AS in engineering, a BA, and an MBA over a eighteen-year time span. Mr. Barber has worked all around the world; North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean, the UK, Scandinavia, Europe, Polynesia, Russia and Russian Siberia, Finland, South Africa, China, Korea, Japan, Australia, and the Middle East; Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. He and his wife lived for a time in Yorkshire, UK where he was part of the Status of Forces on a covert Spec Ops base in Yorkshire. Fred has worked in Aerospace, DOD, DOE, FAA, and covert INTEL Agencies most of his working life and still occasionally consults on special projects. Some of Mr. Barber's recent tasks have been on the Airborne Laser Project (ABL) at the Birk Flight Test Center, Edwards AFB, CA, as a contract/consultant in Minnesota on large remotely controlled Navy guns, on a small covert base in the desolate Nevada Desert working with UAVs in the Special Projects Office supporting the DOD, in Washington on a composite aircraft, and lastly lecturing on ISO9001 and AS9001 Quality Systems in ten major US cities.