Costa Mesa, CA, April 1, 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.
He was one of two students in the first graduating class from the School of Architecture at USC in 1923.
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.
