'It was quite a varied career'

He’s weighed trucks with beam scales and weighed them with computers. He’s seen multiple revolutions in law enforcement in Missouri.

Now David Barnhart, 62, Carthage, is ready to take up black powder deer hunting and helping out on two farms in Bates County.

“It was quite a varied career,” said Barnhart, who has served as Chief Commercial Vehicle Enforcement officer for Troop D for the past 18 months.

Barnhart retired from the Missouri State Highway Patrol on April 1 after 39 years with the patrol. He started out in February 1970 working at a set of weight scales on the then-new Interstate 70 at Odessa monitoring the weight of the trucks that carried the commerce on America’s brand new system of superhighways.

Before that, he spent four years in the U.S. Air Force as a loadmaster on C-130 Hercules transports, stationed in Scotland, England, Germany, Ethiopia, and Korea.  He also spent one tour of duty in Vietnam, assigned to Cam Ranh Bay.  David is married to the former Elaine Gilliam, also a native of Butler. They have three sons; Mike, who lives in Fayetteville, Ark., Karl, who is a captain in the Air Force and stationed in San Antonio, and Greg, who graduates from Carthage High School this year.  The Barnharts also have one grandchild.

Barnhart said he literally married the girl next door.

“Her parents had an adjoining farm to mine in Bates County, so I married the girl next door,” Barnhart said.

Barnhart originally applied to be a trooper, but 20/40 vision in one eye disqualified him from that.

“I had just gotten out of the military and decided it was better than no job at all and went from there,” Barnhart said. “It has changed, we started out as weight inspectors because that was originally the only part of the job. Now they’ve changed it to commercial vehicle officers, which identifies that we do everything, all of the enforcement, having to do with commercial vehicles. We enforce all of the regulations and the troopers enforce the traffic laws.”
Only four years into his career, Barnhart transferred to Troop D, which serves the southwest corner of Missouri.

“When they were talking about building the Carthage satellite, I transferred to the old D-3 scales here at Carthage, which is where Wal-Mart is now and worked there until they got the satellite built,” Barnhart said. “Then they created a job they called office manager, which was basically a communications job and I transferred to that in 1976 and left commercial vehicle enforcement.

They changed the job title several times, although they never really changed the job, then in 1997 they closed the satellite and I transferred back to the commercial vehicle division and went to work at the scales there west of Joplin. Then some strange things happened and I started making rank and I ended up as chief.”

Barnhart said he’s never regretted moving to Carthage.

“At the time of the transfer, they told us if the satellite went, they would make us radio operators which would be a tremendous increase in pay,” he said. “That actually ended up never happening, but I still feel good about the transfer because I have three boys. They were all born here and raising a family here was much better than raising a family in the Kansas City area, so it’s been a good thing.”

Barnhart talked about how the job of commercial vehicle has changed.

“When I first started, the actual weighing of the vehicle was one of the main parts of the job,” Barnhart said. “We also checked and enforced license authority and things of that nature.

“The job now, weighing the trucks us still a part of it, but it’s really kind of a minor part of it. Safety inspections are the major thrust of the jobs now, where you actually go under the trucks and look at its brake components and look at its frame springs all of that stuff. We still enforce weight laws, we still enforce license and the authority and all of that and that’s become a larger portion of it partly because of the computer age where we can get information from other states and find out for sure if these people have authority in just a few minutes. To do that back in the beginning would sometimes have taken weeks.”

Barnhart said the drug trade and the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001 cause sweeping changed to the commercial vehicle enforcement job.

“Criminal interdiction, which is both drugs and terrorism and equipment theft has become a much larger portion of what we looked for,” Barnhart said. “Back when I started no one was doing drug interdiction. The troopers didn’t do it; if you found something it was kind of a surprise. We didn’t really know what to look for and weren’t looking for it.
“

Now it is something that every stop, you’re alert to the possibility and it’s something that is a major part of the job to ask the questions and look things over and get an idea about whether or not you need to start asking the right questions.”

As for what he plans in retirement, Barnhart said he’s probably not going to slow down much.
“I’m a deer and turkey hunter,” Barnhart said. “I’ll probably take up the black powder deer season which I’ve never done before and fall turkey which I’ve never done before. I’ve got plenty of work around the house that’s been neglected for the past couple of years. My brother in law is still farming basically both of our farms in Butler, so I have a lot to do there. Plus I’m considering coming back to the patrol for what they call a thousand-hour employee to do school and bus inspections about eight weeks in spring.”