Barbara Factor, nee Currey, of Santa Barbara, California, passed away Thursday morning, July 2, 2020, at her home in Santa Barbara, CA. She was in her 97th year. Barbara was born October 3, 1922, in Evanston, Illinois to Samuel George and Agnes Engdahl Currey. Barbara was 14 months younger than her older sister, Nancy Louise Arthur Gill, who passed away just about 16 months ago.
Barbara grew up in Evanston, Illinois and studied ballet. After determining she was too short for ballet, she was encouraged by her father to develop her talent for drawing. At nineteen, she was offered a full scholarship at the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles, CA. In remembering her formative years, Barbara once stated, “I never had the least interest in having children of my own. I don’t know why, it just never occurred to me.” Upon graduation from art school, she opened her own advertising business in San Francisco. “The street car ran right by my office,” she reminisced.
In 1948, she drove cross country with a friend to Miami, Florida, where she departed for Cuba to join her friend’s father who was head of United Fruit in Cuba. “Let me tell you, they led a VERY comfortable life there, and I would sneak off to paint the nearby towns and smoke cigarettes.” She recalled watching Fidel Castro playing on the plantation’s baseball team. “Yes, even then, he was an imposing figure.”
Returning to San Francisco after 6 months in Cuba, Barbara moved to Los Angeles. She married James Wood, a lawyer. “Oh, he was brilliant! His mind enthralled me as he would tell me about the intricacies of his cases.” Married for four years, they divorced after she returned from an 8-month sabbatical with Parsons School of Design in Paris. Years later when once sharing a glass of champagne with her nephew, Barbara exclaimed after looking at the name on the bottle, “Oh, Taittinger! I spent a weekend at the chateau, and what I remember is everyone making love to everybody else!” Barbara was living in a new era! Feminism was bubbling to the surface and years of discussing women’s rights and interests would forever be Barbara’s passion.
Soon she was hired by Carson/Roberts Advertising. “They needed someone who could draw ads for women. I found I was good at understanding the product and producing the art. What did they do? Those men! They met with the clients, chatted them up and got the business, but I produced the product!” She was promoted to Art Director, and then became the first, woman Vice President of an ad agency in the United States.
Having treatment for an ulcer, she found herself curious to discover more of her thinking processes and began seeing a Jungian Analyst. “Oh, I loved it,” she enthused. “I learned how and why I thought about life. I spent 15 years in analysis, and enjoyed every minute. Well, not really enjoyed,” she paused. “I just learned who I was.”
In the mid ’60s, she met and married Ted Factor, the West Coast President of Doyle, Dane and Bernbach (Wikipedia: Their campaigns for Volkswagen throughout the 1950s and 1960s were said to have revolutionized advertising.). “Ted was brilliant, enjoyed people, and loved the luxe life,” Barbara laughingly enthused. “When we traveled to Europe and New York, we ate at the best restaurants, stayed at the best hotels and met very interesting people like Jonas Salk and various Hollywood stars.” After pausing, she said, “Ted had a mind and facility with people that just endeared him and earned him Advertising Man of the Year in 1972. He was a very dear, sweet man. I loved him. He was witty which I loved and would regale me in stories. And I was a good listener. At parties, I often wound up in a corner with some celebrity giving me his/her life story.”
Once again in pursuit of her art, Ted and Barbara separated in the 1980s so “[she] could find herself as an artist.” She elaborates, “I had this God-given talent where I could draw and paint so I needed to do that.” For the next twenty years she immersed herself in her art work leaving behind hundreds of sketches and paintings.
An ardent feminist to the end, she often opined with disgust in a rising voice, “Men! They’ve screwed up this world for hundreds, no, thousands of years. Now it’s time for women to take control. We can’t do any worse.”
Barbara Factor is survived by two nieces and four nephews, twelve great-nieces and -nephews, and fourteen great-great-nieces and -nephews who all would visit this forceful, dynamic Aunt, and all would agree, “Aunt Barbara did not suffer fools lightly.” She often opined, “This life is a curious business.”
