Daily Pilot

Hitting the century mark
Daily Pilot Thursday, July 26, 2001
 

Now 100 years old, a Costa Mesa resident discusses his favorite composer who died before his birth.


Mathis Winkler
Daily Pilot

Had he been born six months earlier, Donald Leroy Bartels would have been alive at the same time as his favorite composer, Giuseppe Verdi.

The Italian died Jan. 27, and Bartels was born July 21. The year was 1901.

“He was a great composer,” Bartels said Wednesday. “It’s hard to imagine anybody any greater.”



 
Together with his only daughter, Catherine Welch, and friends, Bartels celebrated his 100th birthday at Costa Mesa’s Silverado Senior Living home, where he recently moved from Laguna Beach. Dorothy, Bartels’ wife of 37 years, died in 1975.

A South Dakota native, Bartels came to Southern California with his parents as a 2-year-old and grew up on a farm in Downey.
re at USC in 1923.

He was one of two students in the first graduating class from the School of Architecture

Bartels who suffers from dementia, said he couldn’t quite remember what kind of projects he worked on. Welch helped out a little and said her father had designed the interior of the Robinsons-May department store in Fashion Island and built homes in Los Angeles’ Park Los Angeles Brea area after World War II.
He also designed a bomb shelter for a Beverly Hills businessman.

“We did a lot of things for rich people,” Bartels said. “That was a normal thing for a rich person to want.

”It seemed like a normal thing to do,” he said.


While struggling to remember his professional accomplishments, Bartels began to smile when asked whether he really was a self-confessed chocoholic.

“Chocolate? Are you kidding?” he said, adding that he prefers the darker kind. “I don’t care for milk chocolate.”


Photograph:
Donald Bartels and his daughter, Catherine Welch, reminisce about Bartels’ 100th birthday party, which was held Saturday at the Silverado Senior Living Center in Costa Mesa.

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Silverado Senior Living - Newport Mesa