Jon Barnard (“Barney”) Gilmore was born in northern California in 1937. As a child he lived in the San Francisco Bay area, and later at Lake Tahoe, just across the Nevada state line in the town of Crystal Bay. After graduating from high school (at Truckee, California) he attended Stanford University, expecting at first to major in Biology, then in either English or History, then in Economics, and finally in Psychology. His last year at Stanford he was editor of the Stanford humour magazine The Chaparral. In the fall of 1959 he began Ph.D. studies at Yale University specializing in Child Development and Clinical Psychology. In 1964 he undertook his first full-time academic job in Ontario, Canada, at the University of Waterloo. Four years later he joined the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto. He became a Canadian citizen a few years later.
Gilmore was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1980. He taught a number of undergraduate and graduate Psychology courses during his academic career. However, his primary teaching responsibility was usually the Introductory Psychology course. (That course combined his enduring interests in history, in scientific method, and Psychology.) The Introductory course was generally taught in very large sections, and for a period of time, only Gilmore taught it. The consequence was that by the time he took early retirement in 1993, Gilmore had taught an estimated 14,000 students. He was named the CASE “Canadian Professor of the Year” in 1987. During his years as a professor, he also maintained a small private clinical practice. His various blog posts following his retirement in 1993 have generally focussed on existing social and cultural inequalities, with the costs and dangers these pose, and an exploration of the potential policies that might reduce them.
Gilmore has had a number of hobbies over the years. Curling is the most recent of these. He once learned to fly gliders. Between 1984 and 1993 he had three shows of his photographic work on the U. of T. campus. After retiring he spent time feeding his reading habit and supplementing his pension by creating indexes for forthcoming books. In total he created the indexes for more than 70 Canadian books, four of them his own. His first book, published in 1998, was a history of medical research into the causes and the means of transmission of the common cold. It is titled In Cold Pursuit: Medical Intelligence Investigates the Common Cold. His second book, published in 2010 is titled On Retirements: Playing Seriously with the Work of Growing Older. His last two books, self-published in 2021 and 2022 respectively, are titled From the Corner of an Eye (a compendium of haiku poems by the author) and Viewpoints (a selection of aphorisms and brief commentaries by historical figures and by the author.)