Alice and Doug Campbell (article by Michael Jamison)
Alice E. Campbell
MISSOULA – Alice Campbell, 80, passed away on Saturday, March 15, 2003, at Heritage House of natural causes.
She was born July 24, 1922, in Missoula, the second of four children born to Edmund and Myra Caplis.
Alice grew up in a very warm and loving family where laughter ruled supreme. Her father always wanted to know what was over the next hill. Her mother made a safe haven of any place they lived, no matter how humble. During the Depression, when her father was employed by a ski resort in California, they lived in a tent and Alice and her two sisters were home-schooled by their mother when the snow was too deep to attend classes.
Throughout her childhood, Alice displayed a keen sense of adventure and was always planning the next great escapade – outings in which her sister Pat was always a willing participant.
She attended elementary schools in Bremerton, Wash.; Hawthorne, Calif.; and Clinton. She attended Missoula County High School and Sacred Heart Academy, graduating from Sacred Heart in 1941.
Alice married Douglas Campbell on Nov. 18, 1941, in Missoula, where they have resided ever since. Eight children were born of this marriage.
During the years when her children were growing up, Alice was an active member of the St. Francis Altar Society and other church-related organizations.
After raising her children, Alice became very active in politics and community projects. In 1970 she was one of the founding members of the Missoula chapter of Mothers for Peace. In 1996 she received that organization’s Peace Award, which consisted of a quilted wall hanging depicting the time that Alice met Jeannette Rankin. Jeannette was campaigning for re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1940 when she stopped by Alice’s family’s home on Sherwood Street.
In 1972 she was a member of the local group that helped revise the Montana Constitution.
In 1985 she attended the dedication ceremony of the Jeannette Rankin statue at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. At that event, she met Ralph Nader, who referred to her as “a special lady.”
She also was a volunteer at the Missoula Food Bank, a member of the committee that founded the Mountain Line bus system, vice chairman of the Committee for Nursing Home Reform, a board member of Council Grove, and a member of the Democratic Central Committee.
She and her husband Doug were members of the Westside Neighborhood Association and were instrumental in upgrading lighting and improving streets in that area.
Alice was preceded in death by her parents, sister Mary Anne Gibford, and eldest son Patrick.
She is survived by her husband Doug; daughter-in-law Linda Campbell (widow of Patrick) of Columbia Falls; son David and wife Gail of Great Falls; daughter Peggy and husband Ed Leonard of Colorado Springs, Colo.; son Mark and wife Margie of Columbia Falls; daughter Mary and husband Rob Pounding of Neskowin, Ore.; son Matthew and wife Judy of Missoula; son Gus and wife Becky of Bemidji, Minn.; son Edmund and wife Nancy of Milwaukie, Ore.; sister Patricia Thaggard of Missoula; brother Michael Caplis of Helena; 21 grandchildren; 15 great-grandchildren; and numerous nieces and nephews.
To those who knew and loved her, Alice’s life is best summed up by the Ninth Beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God,” and the Sixth Beatitude, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice for they will be satisfied.”
We love you, Alice. We will miss you, but know that you have found the peace and justice for which you strove so zealously.
Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Wednesday, March 19, at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church followed by a reception at Reidy Hall.
The Article below appeared in The Missoulian 5/31/2009.
Doug Campbell worked hard for his family, causes
by Michael Jamison of The Missoulian
Doug Campbell was an old-school meat cutter, whose large and powerful hands tended delicate dahlias and award-winning roses.
He also was father of eight, champion of underdogs, calm, quiet, a rouser of rabble, a lunch-bucket Democrat who truly believed that none of us was more equal than another.
Campbell had little formal education, but tremendous intellect – an unschooled scholar who, while others his age slipped silent into retirement, fought hard for peace and social justice.
“He was really quite a remarkable man,” said longtime friend Michael Kennedy. “In every way, a very remarkable man.”
Campbell had the ear of councilors and congressmen.
“Doug was a good friend, and a great person,” said U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. While he never hesitated to let me know when he didn’t agree with me, I always respected, and appreciated, his honesty, his dedication and his passion.”
Campbell lobbied in Helena and in Washington, D.C., and he danced a mean polka.
“He was,” said son Dave, “the hardest working man I ever knew, and the most honest man, too.”
But more than anything, Doug Campbell remained, as he began, a humble man, still giving more than he was taking, right to the day he died, at age 93, on May 19, 2009.
Campbell’s humble beginnings were shaped by Circle, where he was born at the family homestead in eastern Montana on Jan. 7, 1916. His dad, Charles, was a hardscrabble farmer with a few lean cows, a political progressive who sometimes served as county recorder and also, on the side, wrote poetry. His mother, Almeda, was likewise a Depression-era progressive, a New Dealer whose later letters show she was not pleased at all by the unequal treatment of Native Americans.
Doug Campbell left those roots in his early teens to live with a family in town while attending high school. He arrived in Missoula in 1937, with 50 cents in his pocket and a plan to enroll in college.
“But he had to get a job, first,” said daughter Mary Pounding. “He got on at a grocery store, the old Bitterroot Market.”
The owner gave Campbell $1.50 advance on his pay, a room to rent, and then taught him to cut meat. Campbell’s big hands, like his mind, were quick, and he learned fast.
He saved for school, but never saved quite enough, and was still saving at age 27, when he met Alice Caplis, a 19-year-old Catholic beauty who worked at the local hospital.
The couple raised their first five children at their home on South Third, then swapped houses with Alice’s parents and raised three more on Sherwood Street.
“With eight kids to feed, he never did get to college,” Mary said.
Instead, “he worked really hard to raise a family on meager wages.”
By the time the third child was born, he gave up fly-fishing on the big Bitterroot. By the time a couple more arrived, he gave up hunting sapphires. By the time the last little Campbell hit the nursery, Doug had given up most of the rest of life’s private pleasures, and was working two eight-hour jobs, seven days a week, butcher and janitor and moonlighting game cutter.
But somehow, Dave said, he always had time to cook the family breakfast every Sunday. Dave laughs when he remembers his dad – hair slicked back beneath the stocking cap he wore to bed – flipping pancakes and eggs while dancing to polka around the kitchen.
“He was a great father,” Mary said. A loving guy, and a no-nonsense disciplinarian, too. Supportive, and happy, and upbeat.
Work and family and then more of both. No time for much else.
“He was old-school,” Dave said. “When the kids mess up, you kick ’em in the pants. When they do good, you pat ’em on the head.”
Campbell mellowed with age, relaxing and finding time again for those dahlias and roses and gladiolas. His flowers stunned judges at the fair, and his raspberries delighted his kids. (Later, when Alice slowed and needed care, he gave up his flowers just as he had once given up his fly rod. “That was his message,” Mary said. “Work hard, do what you have to do, don’t look back and don’t be afraid to move on.”
But retirement was slim for a lifelong meat cutter with a big family, and so in 1975 he won a landslide election to become Missoula County tax assessor. It was easy, Dave said. He’d worked at just about every grocery in town, and everyone knew him, the people-person who people loved to see.
Doug Campbell spent a decade in the taxman’s post, much to the dismay of the county’s big corporations, whom he forced to ante up their fair share of taxes.
“Dad was very serious about his fellow man,” Dave said. “He always taught us, ‘You’re never any better than the guy standing next to you.’ A gentleman, always. He was very adamant that everyone was equal.”
And that went for corporations and governments, too. Doug and Alice protested the social injustices of Vietnam, advocated for peace and equality, championed fairness, did not believe that the “golden rule” meant that those with the gold got to make the rules. He hated greed, and the dehumanization of corporate culture, and the dollar as the ultimate bottom line.
And slowly, surely, as others became more conservative with age, Doug Campbell became increasingly entrenched in progressive politics.
Pete Talbot, a friend and fellow progressive, wrote in a eulogy that “well into his 80s, Doug Campbell spoke truth to power.”
Often, he spoke it to conservatives, but sometimes he spoke it to Democrats, too, when he felt they were caving to political expediency.
“He just blossomed in his later years,” Mary said. “He became the epitome of how to mature gracefully. He had quiet wisdom.”
Campbell fought for laborers, and for a single-payer health care system, and for senior citizens, and affordable housing, and for the New Party, and both he and Alice became what Talbot called “progressive political icons in Missoula.”
“He was never an ideologue,” Kennedy said, “but he understood the difference between justice and injustice. He was firm in his beliefs, but never strident. He was never disrespectful.”
Instead, Doug Campbell was prepared, renowned for his research, quiet in the knowledge that he knew the facts and figures better than just about anyone else. He read widely and voraciously.
“He was a very quiet man, but he was powerful,” said Betty Beverly, with whom Campbell worked at the Montana Senior Citizens Association. For years, he was president there, “and everyone respected him,” Beverly said, “because he was so smart and he knew what he was talking about. He did great things for senior citizens here in Montana.”
Campbell never made it to college, but he turned out to be a first-rate student.
It’s interesting, then, to consider the number of people who saw him as a teacher. Kennedy used the word “mentor,” and so did Talbot, and several others, too.
“When I would get discouraged pursuing progressive politics,” Talbot wrote in the eulogy, “all I had to do was look to Doug Campbell for inspiration. He fought more battles on behalf of the people than I could even consider. And at nearly 40 years my senior, he was still fighting them: labor, peace, social justice, health care the list goes on and on. He continued to speak out for those who had no voice; the underdog ignored by the powers that be.”
Campbell worked hard to make his wage, worked hard to make a difference, “worked harder than you can imagine,” Dave said.
He worked for seniors, and for Democrats, and the New Party, and the Legacy Legislature, and the Missoula Demonstration Project, and the Missoula Aging Services Project. In 1995, the meat cutter was invited to the White House to attend a conference on aging there.
And yet, Dave said, when asked in those last days what he believed his lasting legacy would be, Doug Campbell summed his life’s greatest work in just two words: “My family.”
Eight kids, 21 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren.
“Before anything else, he was a family man,” said friend Jim Parker. “Everything else was shaped by that. He was a man of great integrity.”
Parker sat with Campbell the day before his death, and his old friend greeted him with a smile, and asked “Are you still kicking heinie?”
“It was his way of telling me goodbye, and reminding me not to forget the stuff that really matters,” Parker said. “He was thinking about others, still, and not himself.”
And at his last, Doug Campbell wanted Parker to let the people of Missoula know how very much he enjoyed the time he had spent with them, discussing and debating and cutting to the meat of matters.
“He was a wonderful human being and a great friend,” Parker said.
Talbot agreed. “If we had more Doug Campbells in the world,” he wrote, “it would certainly be a better place.”