The other day, I was looking for a way to get the obituary written for the NY Times by the late Senator John McCain from Arizona and former POW in tribute to the last surviving member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of American communists who fought during the Spanish Civil War. As a teen trying to grow up during the Vietnam War, I loved For Whom the Bell Tolls. Providentially perhaps, I came to love Goya’s revolutionary depictions of war, and then I met my future wife on the plaza in Madrid where Goya immortalized peasants as they were slaughtered by Napoleon’s troops; her parents lived through that Spanish Civil War as young adults.
     Back to my McCain-NY Times problem. I seldom read, listen to, or watch news. So, I have no subscriptions (except to NPR…because I like the music; I do not listen to the news). It turns out The Times no longer gives me any free access to its articles, not even to obituaries. I should have “Print to pdf”ed the obit when it came out and I had access; it seems that even death notices are For Sale now. Perhaps it is a sign the pandemic is declining (though my fully-vaccinated, very active, and healthy sister just had a severe case of Covid, and we have several older friends who have had Covid recently).
     It was this momentary moment of non-buyer’s remorse that brought back some memories from more than 40 years ago, when I was a 21-year-old first-semester graduate student in Colorado under the direction of Hugo A. Ferchau, Sr., a “Connecticut Yankee,”¹ educated at the College of William and Mary and then at Duke, before moving west. I spent one crazy summer camped out myself doing my research at 10,000 feet that included riding in a helicopter driven by a Vietnam vet, almost being crushed to death by a herd of elk as I slept in my tent, and almost freezing to death…in
the middle of a June day.
     But enough about me. My McCain-NY Times conundrum had reminded me of two very unlikely, very different, and much older, female friends from my Colorado days. My second summer in Colorado, I took an Aquatic Ecology lab because I only needed one credit to keep my teaching assistantship. And one of my fellow grad students was Dr. Theo Colborn (1927-2014)², a 50-something, part-time pharmacist from New Jersey, who had married and then divorced a sheep rancher in Paonia (I never asked her about it). Theo was a delightful person, we spent the summer in a canoe taking water samples and then analyzing them together in the lab for one Martyn Apley³. When I think back on it, Theo would NOT have gone for it, but I should have asked her out despite the 30-year gap in our ages; we were quite the unlikely couple that summer. Theo and I even remained in touch by email later as she pursued her PhD in Wisconsin, but we lost touch when she went to D.C. as a world expert in how synthetic chemicals affect the human endocrine system, writing the book, as they say, Our Stolen Future.⁴ Then in May 2022, some 20 years after our last contact, and eight years after her death,
I met up with another friend from another college, who I had not seen since the mid-1990s, and we talked about… Theo Colborn, the friend’s hero.
     Now for the McCain connection. The second unlikely member of our unlikely menage-à-trois was also pursuing a master’s degree in the Ferchau’s lab, but her story was much different. Beth Calloway (1926-2009), also in her 50s, was married to Howard “Bo” Callaway, Nixon’s Secretary of the Army during the Vietnam War, and later owner of a Colorado ski area where I worked the winter after my summer of aquatic outings with Theo. Irrespective of one’s politics, Bo Calloway’s life story is
worthy of reading.⁵ Beth’s story? She seems to have no story, though this lady of the South, no doubt, participated in her husband’s political career.⁶ In any case, it was strange for me, a mutant teenage anti-warrior just a few years earlier to know anyone like her or Bo. During the Vietnam War, my world was in limbo, and like McCain, the bellicose Bo and Beth were from the Post-Bellum South, a big part of a failed war that was always going to fail⁷ (also, I had gone to college in “The Deep South”; I knew the script and did not like the plot, the characters, or the ending of that story either). Yet Beth Calloway, Theo Colborn, and I took classes together, and Beth and Bo even invited all us grad students to their condominium for a catered dinner!
     I looked for a Wikipage for Beth, but not surprisingly, I found none for this softly-spoken Republican woman from Georgia, at a time when many southern Democrats were white supremacists whose names deserve no mention except on their tombstones. But I did find Beth’s obituary⁸ (thankfully, it was NOT run in The New York Times). And when I think about politics AND especially how the media today does nothing but try to up stir up anger and resentment to turn a profit (FOX is NOT the only one), I marvel that I had the chance to know and work in harmony with two older persons who could not have been more different in every way from each other and from me.
     In closing, once in a conversation I was asked, If you could choose to live in another time and place, when and where would it be and with which famous person? Are you kidding me? I grew up listening to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and the Doors. So, I answered like Thoreau (a conscientious objector who went to jail during a war): I was born and have lived in exactly the right time and places (pandemic included), and I have known exactly the people that I would wanted to know.
     I should give this tribute to dead persons with “Rest in Peace.” But I recall that a Spanish-born Harvard professor named George Santayana, whose good luck it was to live in Rome during WWI, the Holocaust and WWII, without ever going to war, wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Unfortunately, as a former POW named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr⁹ wrote, this wise maxim is not true. But one can remember the past and be thankful for the people whose lives informed and inspired one’s own life, people like Theo and Beth. McCain and Vonnegut. Hugo and Martyn too.

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¹ Thankfully, I visited Hugo, a world-class expert in strip mine revegetation, in 1992, nine months before his death. The reason? I was spending the summer co-teaching a hands-on course in ecology for high school and university students in central Colorado.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Colborn

³ According to an internet search, Dr. Apley, now retired and in his 80s, lived about two hours from Las Cruces, in western New Mexico, and may now live within a mile of my house.

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Stolen_Future

⁵ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Callaway

⁶ It is said the only three women’s names appear in Shakespeare’s play titles: Juliet, Cleopatra and Cressida.” But surely the title “Macbeth” also refer to Lady Macbeth?

⁷ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_Gardens.

⁸ www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/atlanta/name/beth-callaway-obituary?id=28083441

⁹ https://activehistory.ca/2013/12/lessons-from-history-santayana-vonnegut/