Life Story of Bartlett A. “Bart” Schmidt

April 13, 1946 – September 22, 2024

Written by his longtime caregiver, Susan Morgan

Early Life

Bart was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 13, 1946, a hundred years after his great grandfather Leopold Schmidt, founder of the Olympia Brewing Company, was born in Germany.

His father Theodore F. “Ted” Schmidt was the son of Franck Schmidt, one of Leopold’s sons. His mother Maxine Bartlett was a writer and newspaper editor.

His parents met at Stanford University and married while Ted was in the U.S. Army Calvary after college. The marriage was short-lived and Ted returned to Olympia while Maxine pursued a prolific career as a newspaper editor.

“Bart Boy,” as he was nicknamed, was raised in Tennessee primarily by his maternal grandmother, Mabel Avery Bartlett. They lived near a river outside of Knoxville. 

His maternal grandfather Max C. Bartlett was an engineer in Washington state and died when Bart was a young boy. Max worked on the Grand Coulee Dam and other large engineering projects. His grandparents spent a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest on the Olympic Peninsula and along the coast where his mother got to know the coastal tribes as a young girl. Bart said her interactions with them had a big influence on her life.

Before he passed away, Bart’s grandfather Max held him every evening reading to him. Bart remembered fondly that his grandmother, though a bit strict, made him his favorite gingerbread to have after school every day.

Bart had an African American babysitter named Minnie who was married, with four children. Sometimes her husband would help on the farm. Bart spoke of her as being like a mother to him. When the family moved, Minnie wanted to go with them but was unable to. 

Bart’s grandmother often took him to the horse races. He was well liked as he was a “well behaved boy” as he put it. He met many influential people and received a lot of attention. He saw the Kentucky Derby with his grandmother who loved to bet. Bart also enjoyed placing bets.

One of his fondest memories from around the age of twelve was traveling by train along the East Coast with his grandmother in a move to New England. He was accompanied on the move with his pets—a mouse, and a parakeet that a friend had gifted him to raise from a hatchling.

Because of his mother’s career, he and his grandmother moved a lot. He spent most of his boyhood in Tennessee and his teenage years in Arizona. 

One particular move was to Boston where his mother was working for a local paper. He recalled laughingly that they didn’t stay long, only several months, before he and his grandmother had had enough. They moved back to Tennessee as they disliked Boston so much. 

One of his favorite experiences was a trip to Hawaii when he was nine. He received a lot of attention from the Hawaiian tourist agency. He had great memories of that time where he developed a love for fresh pineapple. 

Into Adulthood

Though Bart wasn’t Catholic, he attended a private Catholic boy’s school in upstate New York where he lived for a year when he was fourteen. He disliked it. Bart graduated with an engineering degree in design and materials from Cal Poly Tech Institute. During this period, he spent a lot of time with his auntie Philippine, Leopold and Johanna Schmidt’s only daughter. He spoke fondly of her, and said she was fond of his generation. In her later years she was injured when she stepped off a curb crossing a street in California and was hit by a car. At this point she moved to the Capitol Towers condominiums in Olympia to live closer to family.

Bart took care of his maternal grandmother in her final days as she was incapacitated. She passed away when he was in his early twenties. Bart said his father visited him while he was growing up. He visited Ted and Ted’s second wife Ruth in the summertime as a teen and late twenties getting to know his paternal cousins.

Family friend and relative Gingie Reder related: “When Bart was young and his father Ted brought him to Olympia, Bart came down on the beach with the other kids, but just stood back and watched. He was brought up in such a strict and formal manner and having no siblings he didn’t seem to know how to play. He never wore casual clothes.”

After his first wife died, Bart’s father Ted married Ruth Koppersmith. They never had any children. Ted owned a lot of land on the Steamboat Island peninsula. He had a house built on a bluff above Edgewater Beach where he and Ruth often had guests for the weekend, including Governor Dixie Lee Ray, a good friend of Ruth’s. According to Bart, Ted was an early conservationist. He tagged many of the big trees to protect them as his house was being built.  

Career Life

Bart began working for the government in his senior year of college. He said he was a “grunt” for the first GPS satellite project in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had a 33-year career in civil service working at the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. His specialty was contract management as an engineer specializing in materials.

Bart was an engineer for and managed multi-million dollar budgets for large government projects, including GPS satellites, F-15 Eagle nuclear warheads, Gatling guns, components for the first Tomahawk missile engine, and the 54-mile Superconducting Hadron super collider. He spent 1979-81 at NASA and worked mostly on electrical components for the first space shuttle.  

Bart worked at many Department of Energy sites. He shared a story about an alligator that was trapped and grew quite large living inside the cooling tower of one of the nuclear power plants he visited.

Another time he was invited into a nuclear power plant on the coast of California. He described walking quickly past a pool of bright blue water where cooling spent fuel rods were stored.

Bart traveled frequently for work to Raytheon, Halliburton, McDonnell Douglas, and Los Alamos among many other places. He had a near miss at a munitions factory in California that used highly explosive materials. He was leaving the building when an explosion blew the roof off.  He fell sideways but otherwise wasn’t hurt. Apparently, no one was killed as they worked behind very thick Plexiglas.

Due to the top secret nature of his work, he had many security clearances. Asked why he never married, he said it was too difficult to explain to a first date that he needed to know her birth date, birth place, and social security number, and that he could never tell her what he did for work. In the last year of his work, he was gone almost every week, coming home only on the weekends to repack for the next week.

Bart traveled so often that the captain and crew of the flights he took from Los Angeles to the East Coast got to know him quite well, treating him with his favorite foods and support. According to a neighbor, Ted told her that after a visit to Olympia, Bart left for work with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

Although he wanted to travel outside the country, he took only one international trip in the 1990s with his mother. Amsterdam would be the only place he traveled to as he was required to provide a detailed itinerary. He said that travel was so restrictive, planning and enjoying a trip was difficult. While working in New England on a government project, a naval officer was fired immediately when it was discovered he’d crossed the Canadian border to do a little unauthorized sightseeing.

Bart’s last job was in Richland, Washington at the Hanford nuclear waste site. He was working on developing a facility for dealing with nuclear waste through processing nuclear fuel rods. Nuclear waste was processed down to a quarter cup of unusable, unsafe material. Bart retired before the project was finished. He said, with a chuckle, later all of the scrapped building materials for that project were almost sold to the Chinese in a huge blunder before someone got wind of it and stopped it.

While Bart was at Hanford, the workers were bused onsite wearing old clothes to be discarded in case they were contaminated with nuclear radiation. He said he never set off the alarm.

From 1975 to 1987 Bart and his mother lived on a 52-foot tugboat built in 1910/1916 and moored in Oxnard, California. He named the tug “It’s the Water,” of course! During those days he regularly picked up pony kegs of Olympia Beer. He’d take his friends out to fish off of Catalina Island. He loved the California coast.

In 1975 Bart experienced a near-drowning accident. He fell into the harbor next to his boat. Not being a swimmer, he inhaled water prior to surfacing. He was in the water for about 45 minutes at 65°. He arrived at the hospital with an estimated 10% lung function. He spent eight hours in the emergency room and went into intensive care on 100% oxygen for ten days. He was in the hospital with pneumonia and then recuperated at home for many weeks. 

In 1987 he moved to Idaho Falls to work at the Idaho Nuclear Energy Lab. In 1991 he moved to Texas to work on the super collider. When It was shut down due to funding cuts, he moved to Richland, Washington where he lived from 1995 to 2001.

About Bart

Bart moved to Olympia with his aging mother Maxine in the early 2000s. Maxine passed in 2003. Bart remodeled the house that he purchased from his father’s estate. He read and cooked a lot, videoed the outdoors, and took care of his land. He kindly allowed neighbors to board their horses on his property. He was very supportive of environmental causes and animal welfare concerns such as “Feline Friends.” 

Bart often traveled with his mother during her career in California.  She wrote articles about vineyards and food. He developed an appreciation for gourmet foods. He loved grilling and was a very good cook. He loved big band music, waltzes, marches, some jazz, and musicals.

He was a prolific reader and subscribed to the Seattle Times, The Olympian, The U.S. Naval Institute publications, and Smithsonian magazine among many others. Bart loved spy novels by authors such as James Patterson and Tom Clancy. He had three rooms filled with books, all alphabetized. 

He never played sports and never learned to ride a bicycle or swim. While he lived in California, he worked out at a gym in Los Angeles and at one time was able to bench press 250 pounds. 

Bart was a life member of the U.S. Naval Institute and the SAE Foundation, among others. He supported The National Trust for Historic Preservation, World Wildlife Fund, Nature Conservancy, The Coast Guard Foundation, Friends of the Smithsonian, and Capital Land Trust. 

Bart loved anything canine. He had an affinity for wolves and had a wolf dog named Lady at one point. He loved wildlife and animals.

During his lifetime he lived in many states including New York, Massachusetts, Arizona, Texas, Idaho, Oregon, California, Illinois, Utah, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Washington. 

Bart was not religious. His mother had explored many different religions and spiritual practices throughout her life, but he was never interested. He was very analytical and evaluating, often holding his fingers together and palms apart speaking thoughtfully and very slowly. He loved the color yellow. 

In sharing some of his unusual life story, I hope to honor him and share insight that others, especially the Schmidt family, might find interesting. 

On behalf of Bart, a special thank you for the friendship of Joe and Kathi Reder. 

His ashes will be spread at Edgewater Beach. Typical Bart, he wanted no funeral service.