Chapter 1: New York 1939
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| Inez Marie Heyman Campbell |
My mother, a luminous young Communist, was involved with the WPA as World War II developed. Her lifelong motto had already formed: "As long as a soul in the world is suffering, we can never be happy."
Looking at them now, 55 years later, in the black and white photos of many sizes which they posed for and kept, and reading the numerous missives to family and friends left behind in dusty boxes, they seem Fitzgeraldian - slender, elegant, articulate - and full of energy, good looks, and hope for a better political future. In these faded moments trapped on camera and old notepaper, they are forever pausing somewhere on the arc of motion between beginning to move and coming to rest.
They were born in small towns within 300 miles of each other - my mother in Crystal Lake, Illinois just northwest of Chicago near the Wisconsin border; my father in Peru, north central Indiana. In all these years, I am only now looking for these places in a road atlas where I find the two states bordering each other both geographically and alphabetically.
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| Angus, Mary, Marjorie and Malcolm |
My father's siblings numbered two brothers and three sisters, all with Scottish given names to match their heritage. He was fourth in line in what several of them have told me was "dour" family, a word I have never in my life heard anyone else but them speak aloud. It has the Scottish meaning of "barren, rocky, infertile, or otherwise difficult or impossible to cultivate" according to my father's huge Random House Dictionary of the English language which rests on a stool in my study.
My father's father was a high school Latin teacher and he moved his wife and children to Portland, Oregon where he eventually became a high school and middle school principal. As a child, I visited the house they lived in and remember it as large, with much solid, dark trim on banisters and mantelpieces, dark red carpets, an upstairs with a porch where my father slept growing up, and a mysterious attic full of books and esoteric treasures which drew me like a magnet in spite of my apprehension of dim and cobwebbed places. Above all, it was dark, self-contained - as they were.
They were an intellectual family which prized education and the correct employment of the English language (or any other languages they studied). All of them went to institutions of higher learning and all three brothers achieved Ph.D. degrees. They went out into the world in their different capacities, though rarely did anyone from the outside world disturb their insularity at home. Inside this boundary, the family dynamics produced six adults who learned to cover fragility with a veneer of impatience which ranged from amused sarcasm to deadly bitterness. My father, I believe, may have been the most sensitive, and most cynical, of them all.
My mother's father was of German background and also tyrannical, creating in my mother an enduring resentment of male dominance. He was my political grandfather, stumping the Oregon countryside on behalf of public power, subscribing to agricultural journals from Communist China, and supporting the Progressive Party in the time of Henry Wallace. He was seminary educated, spent time as head of an Oregon boy's shelter, and finally settled as a small farmer on the banks of the Willamette River. This farm was to be the landscape of my childhood.
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| Orpha Mae Brumbaugh Campbell |
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| Henriette Ludwig Heyman |
Both my grandmothers made their escape before I arrived, their bodies shutting down with the strain of it all. My father's mother departed in a cloud of barbiturates prescribed for Parkinson's disease and my mother's mother perished the year I was born of kidney failure due in part to overuse of medication for migraine headaches. Both were reportedly gentle spirits clearly overshadowed in the match for family influence.
My mother had one brother, and from my early years on the farm I recall him as slight and shy with a propensity for swearing and drinking to deal with a raging case of bursitis. He was her younger brother and incontestably surpassed by her in terms of sheer energy and the will to seize life and wrest a meaning from it.
My mother's family, also, had come west to Oregon. Eventually, they sent my mother to college and it was here that my parents met. Reed College was the choice of almost all my father's brothers and sisters - a private liberal arts school with a reputation for high scholastic achievement and encouragement of individuality on a small beautifully landscaped campus dotted with brick buildings topped by the figures of gryphons.
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| Malcolm Campbell |
My father was a year ahead of my mother and was following both of his older brothers into the field of psychology. My mother became an English literature major. I wish I could ask them now how they were drawn together in that beginning.
In July 1939, they had been married for ten years. My father had graduated from Reed and entered the University of Oregon in Eugene for his Master's Degree. In the summer one year later they were married on the lawn of the wayward boys' school where her father was then employed.
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