Ruth Howell was born in November 1916 in Houstonia, Mo., to Grace (Montgomery) and John Herring, and died peacefully of natural causes Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010, in San Luis Obispo. After attending secretarial school in Sedalia, Mo., she worked for the US Department of Agriculture in Nevada, Mo., and then the Department of War. She was stationed in Midland, Texas, as a secretary in a hospital for “shell shocked” soldiers. There, she and William Robert “Bill” Howell, Army Air Corps Lieutenant from Nevada, Mo., became engaged. They married in Long Beach, Calif., February 6, 1944, and their daughter, Janet was born in 1945. They moved to Lakewood, Calif., and their son, Mark was born in 1950. Ruth and Bill helped found Lakewood First Presbyterian Church, where she taught Sunday school. She volunteered for the Community Hospital of Long Beach for over 40 years and helped run the gift shop. In 2002, Ruth moved to San Luis Obispo and enjoyed living at the Palms, then Garden Creek Assisted Living. Ruth loved family, children, music, art, traveling, sewing and gardening. She was an active, involved and beloved mother and grandmother. Her engaging sense of humor earned her many friendships over her long lifetime, and her youthful spirit was reflected by the fact that her hair never turned gray. Ruth is survived by her daughter, Jan Howell (Steven) Marx of San Luis Obispo; son, William Mark (Sonia) Howell of Lakewood; grandchildren Joe (Amy) Marx of Ketchum Idaho, Claire Fisher of San Luis Obispo, Emma (Travis) Smith of Long Beach and Marie Howell of Santa Barbara; step-grandson, Mitchell Benjamin; great-grandchildren Ian Fisher, Ethan Marx, Abel Marx and Lucas Green; sister, Mary Helen French of San Diego; as well as numerous nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her husband of 40 years, Bill; brother, John Herring; sister, Louise Butts; and cousin, Dorothy Cronk. A memorial will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 27, 2010, at Garden Creek Assisted Living, 73 Broad St. in San Luis Obispo. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to Hospice Partners of the Central Coast, 277 South St. Ste. R, San Luis Obispo, CA 93401, or Central Coast Memorial Society, P.O. Box 679, San Luis Obispo, CA 93406.

Thank you all for coming.  My mother had three happy years in Garden Creek Assisted Living, and many of her friends still live here. We decided to hold the service here so they could attend.  I would like to thank Garden Creek for allowing us to be here today.

Emma Ruth Howell was born in Houstonia, Missouri 1916, four years before women got the right to vote.  She told me that her earliest memories were of horses, buggies and carts.  Her great grandfather Reverend John Montgomery was a pioneering Presbyterian minister and her great grandmother Katherine Lee Rennick was descended from Mayflower and Jamestown Lee families.  Her 93 years saw the Depression, WW II, and the advent of computers and cell phones. Just imagine the changes during her lifetime.

She told me that 16 was her lucky number because she was born in 1916 and she was 16 in her heart.  I remember her at her happiest as an energetic, fun loving, creative young mother in Long Beach California.  She helped found Lakewood Presbyterian Church, taught Sunday school and volunteered tirelessly for the local hospital, the PTA and the community. We had all kinds of pets and she turned our backyard into a garden. She always wanted to be “modern.” She enjoyed living in a brand new town, having a shiny Formica kitchen table, a new Chevy with tail fins, and her very own washing machine. She was proud our family was the first on our block to have a television.

She loved her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.  She took excellent care of us children, her husband Bill, her grandchildren and of herself. She worked out with Jack LaLanne when he was on TV and later at his gym in person. After Bill, our Dad and her husband of 43 years died, Ruth carried on and enjoyed her independence.  She traveled to Japan, Israel, Egypt and Africa.

Even in her old age, she had an active and curious mind and wanted to know all about the news and the latest technology.  She loved the Bible and was fascinated with its history and archeology. She taught us habits of punctuality, honesty, responsibility, thrift, hard work and the importance of walking on “the sunny side of the street.” She valued relationships above all else. She made friends even during the last days of her life, as shown by the presence of her Hospice nurse and her last caregivers here at this service.

It was a rare privilege for me to have spent the last seven years living close to my mother.  We got to know each other as adults and had lots of “sister fun” together. Ever since she died, so many people have been telling me how much she meant to them, how she reached out and lifted their spirits.  I miss her and I know I will miss her every day of my life, but I am thankful that she no longer has to contend with the aches and pains of her last year. I do not believe that her love has died, because we all still feel it in our hearts.  As Emily Dickinson wrote:  “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”

I’m concerned about your continuing purchase and sale of fish on the Monterey Aquarium’s Red List.

The comment on your bulletin board responding to customer concerns about this is so vague it sounds like a brushoff: “When we do offer seafood species on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch “red” or “avoid” list, we undertake additional steps to fully understand the ways in which those items come to market to be sure they fit with our customers’ needs and concerns. We’re also evaluating alternatives to those red list species.”

I appreciate being able to shop regularly for most of my groceries at Trader Joes, partly because I have confidence your products come from healthy and sustainable sources. A response like this undermines that confidence.

I believe that many of your customers share a concern for saving what’s left of fragile ocean fisheries. Abiding by the Red List recommendations now is the only way to allay those concerns. However if you find it inconvenient to do that, I believe you owe it to your customers to at least label the fish that are on that list accordingly.

I would appreciate a response to this inquiry. I tend to be sceptical of the Greenpeace campaigns like “Traitor Joe’s,” so I am asking you to please provide information that will prove them wrong.

Luscious sounds of rumbling thunder and rain tapping on skylights.  Still dark at 6:30.

After preparing a solo dinner last night with rappacini from the farmers market and a glass of wine, I lay down on the bed for a nap, which lasted until this morning. Tensing with the pains in my back and joints all day left me exhausted.  Settling under the old feather comforter felt wonderful, as if I had been up all night or spent hours at hard labor in the cold, even though it hadnt been a strenuous day, especially by comparison to Jan’s, who was at a Council meeting that would probably go till midnight.  I’d accompanied Lucas and Claire to the dentist in Arroyo Grande, driven home for lunch, driven back to A.G. at Dennis’ request to take Ian out of school and get his cast removed, gone with him to the beach to look at  storm waves and topple little sand cliffs, and then stopped at the nursing home to see Ruth.  It was a shock to find her no longer dressed in her wheelchair, but sprawled in bed in a flimsy hospital gown without glasses or hearing aids or false teeth, her mouth shriveled and gaping, her hair lusterless, her skin gray, her brow  furrowed.  I announced my presence and took her hand.  She squeezed it once, then pushed it away,  shuffled on the mattress, and resumed fingering the edge of her gown. One word escaped her: “help.”  Then she quieted, apparently off to morphine-induced sleep, though her brow never relaxed.

The night before, Jan prepared an elegant dinner for Patricia whom we hadn’t seen in two years, since before her cancer diagnosis, radiation, chemo, and surgery.  She was as vital, busy and considerate as ever, full of lighthearted stories of her ordeal and triumph, of recollections of experiences we’ve shared, of questions about us and the family, and of her own burgeoning plans for this year”directing six productions at PCPA while teaching full time.

On the topic of feeling pain during her new exercise-physical therapy routine I was especially engaged”trying to distinguish between the benefits of pushing limits of  endurance and recognizing signals to pull back, use drugs, seek medical help.  The knee surgeon had told me two weeks ago to take four Aleve per day to see if that reduced swelling, but after reading of the long-term side effects of such regular use, I was experimenting with doing without it and working in the yard.  The results were not encouraging.

All this wintry local experience takes place within the darker framework painted by the news flooding in on radio, internet, and newspaper.  The failure of Obama’s promise, confirmed by the fizzling of the Copenhagen talks on climate change,  the widening of war in Afganistan,  the increase of debt and reduction of government services, and by yesterday’s Republican victory in Massachusetts.  And behind this political gloom lurks the metaphysical horror of the earthquake in Haiti.

I’m in the habit of preceding my morning meditation with prayers to a god whose existence I don’t believe in. I make three silent utterances beginning, “Thank you,” “Please,” and “I’m sorry.”  The Please is most often for cure of disease or alleviation of suffering by friends and family members: “let the chemo work for T¦, let the tumor  be benign for P, let R rest in peace.”  These requests affirm my concerns, discharge obligations and create the illusion of sending  positive influence their way through my obeisance to a higher power.  But when I think of the suffering in Haiti, the Please bounces back at me.  Even suspending disbelief and regressing to the innocence of the first graders in Ian’s  school who a dozen times a day hear of God’s benevolent intentions, I cant imagine a personality who would unrelentingly torment so many people while allowing me to listen to their story on the radio as I cook myself supper.

Ketchum December 28 2009 7:30 AM

I woke up at 6:00 AM after a night of many trips to the bathroom and unquiet rest.  Before going to bed at 9:30 I sat for a while at the kitchen island looking at my hands in the beautiful overhead spotlight, feeling contentment.  Joe, Amy, and Jan and the two boys had watched the show I’d been thinking about since I cleaned and scanned the slides in the Art History lab: 150 or so images from 1978 to 1984 projected on the white wall behind the couch.  Most of the pictures were of the trip to England we took from Lund in June 1978.  Joe was Ethan’s present age and I was two years younger than he is now. It was a time of fulfillment and promise for our young family then, as this is a moment of fulfillment and promise for his young family now. Jan and I pieced together a story line about the trip, and Joe filled in details both of us had forgotten.  He marveled at the similarity between my past and his present appearance.  The kids watched patiently for more than an hour, even though exhausted, and Ethan asked many questions. We agreed that just as Joe now remembers those events of 31 years past, Ethan will remember this present when he is Joe’s and grandpa’s age.

As I copy these words written a week ago, they recall yet another déjà vu.

Dear Chancellor Reed:

At the advice of your office, I am submitting some input on the search for the successor of Warren Baker as President of Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo.

I have taught here since 1988 and am recipient of the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Scholarship Award and the CSU Systemwide Quality Improvement Award.

During his tenure President Baker has led Cal Poly to become one of the country’s preeminent Polytechnic Universities. I believe the primary mandate of his successor should be to transform Cal Poly into one of the country’s leaders in Education for Sustainability”the long-term approach to integrated solutions of economic, social and environmental problems.

It is crucial that the Trustees Committee for the Selection of the President incorporate terms in the job description and advertisement that call for successful experience in leading such institutional transformation and that they make promise in advancing sustainability an important criterion for final selection.

Doing so would serve the interests of Cal Poly’s students, who seek employment in emerging fields, of the institution, which needs more cross-disciplinary collaboration in teaching and research, and of the larger community, whose health and welfare depend upon the next generations’ commitment to addressing these problems effectively. (see  http://presidentsclimatecommitment.org/documents/Leading_Profound_Change_ExecSum_final7-28-09.pdf)

In support of this opinion, I refer you to the University Sustainability Learning Objectives recently adopted by Cal Poly’s Academic Senate and ratified by President Baker:

Cal Poly defines sustainability as the ability of the natural and social systems to survive and thrive together to meet current and future needs. In order to consider sustainability when making reasoned decisions, all graduating students should be able to:
¢    Define and apply sustainability principles within their academic programs
¢    Explain how natural, economic, and social systems interact to foster or prevent sustainability
¢    Analyze and explain local, national, and global sustainability using a multidisciplinary approach
¢    Consider sustainability principles while developing personal and professional values

It also bears mention that the “Top Ten Best College Presidents” selected by Time Magazine in November 2009 are all Sustainability Champions. (http://www.aashe.org/blog/top-ten-college-presidents-also-sustainability-champions)

In recent years Cal Poly faculty and students have collaboratively demonstrated initiative and talent in developing major sustainability projects in and out of class”e.g. the Solar Decathlon (http://www.solardecathlon.calpoly.edu/mainpage.html),
Focus the Nation (http://focusthenationslo.wordpress.com/about-focus-the-nation/), the Sustainable Agriculture Resource Consortium (http://www.sarc.calpoly.edu/), the Business of Green Media Conference (http://www.californiagreensolutions.com/cgi-bin/gt/tpl.h,content=2983) ”and Facilities Departments have moved forward in conserving money and resources, thereby teaching by example (http://www.afd.calpoly.edu/facilities/sustainability.asp). What is now urgently needed is creative, daring and seasoned leadership at the top to articulate the vision and summon the resources to strengthen this focus.

Dear Professor S Marx

RQ has received a review copy of English Mercuries: Soldier Poets in the Age of Shakespeare by Adam McKeown (Vanderbilt University Press). Would you agree to write a 700 word review due no later than February 10th?

Renaissance Society of America
365 Fifth Avenue, 5400
New York, NY 10016

*******

This book’s scholarly subject is literary works about war produced between 1551 and 1632 by English writers who fashioned themselves both soldiers and poets. Three introductory chapters frame that subject: an account of the author’s experience as an English professor and Marine Lieutenant Colonel deployed in Djibouti during 2006, where questions raised in a class he taught on Shakespeare’s Henry V generated the project, a discussion of an 18th-century pamphlet pretending to collect eyewitness accounts of 16th century warfare, and a description of similarities between the conditions of expeditionary forces under the command of Elizabeth 1 and George Bush 2. The whole book addresses what the author calls a “glaring omission”(11) by voicing perspectives of veterans then and now about war and militarism.

McKeown analyzes texts dealing with military activity during  Elizabeth’s regime. “Age of Shakespeare” in the subtitle alludes to a sentimental characterization of Early Modern England he challenges and to responses to Henry V that begin and end the book.  His readings undermine the hawkish propaganda usually associated with military writings and critique policies leading to the “calamity” of expeditionary war.  Instead, they emphasize the paradoxical, nuanced and invariably tormented experience of soldiers in battle, on deployment or returning home.

In Thomas Churchyard’s 1575 account of  The Siege of Leith, McKeown finds both a critique of the military strategy that fruitlessly sacrificed many lives and disdain for the diplomacy that eventually brought peace yet discredited the sacrifices of those who fought.

Contrasting George Gascoigne’s 1576 The Spoil of Antwerp with Alarum for London,  an anonymous 1602 play based upon it,  McKeown finds the earlier soldier’s account of the English mission in the Netherlands better informed and more judicious than the later adaptation, which converts it into anti-Spanish propaganda.

John Donne’s utterances on the subject “ask their readers to see war as both a testing ground for personal and national valor and a destructive force that ravages human pride and renders whole countries bare, peace both an Eden on earth and a state of gnawing restlessness and internal anxiety.”(19) McKeown states that the purpose of these emblematic paradoxes is to stimulate spiritual awakening, but he finds their source in Donne’s harrowing military experiences in the Cadiz and Azores expeditions.

McKeown juxtaposes John Harington’s popular translation of Ariosto’s war-glorifying Orlando Furioso with his reports on the disastrous Irish campaign for which he volunteered and with his complaints of ingratitude by “the country that scorned him when he came home.”(20)

The book concludes with an affirmation of martial virtue in Ben Jonson’s The New Inn and The Magnetic Lady, where the playwright presents exemplary veteran soldiers who, during the revival of English militarism after the death of King James, warn “Caroline England of its moral and physical unfitness to get involved in foreign war.”(20)

McKeown’s third chapter, “English Mercuries,” begins by presenting a document about heroic soldiers that lionizes Elizabethan military achievements. At the end of a long paragraph he reveals that it is an 18th century hoax often quoted to support 19th century English militarist propaganda.  “Mercury” signifies reporter, as in the names of newspapers, and “English Mercuries” is used by the chorus in HenryV (2.0.7) to describe the king’s recruits. The term appears in emblems and a familiar motto signifying the Renaissance ideal of soldier-scholar: Tam Marti quam Mercurio. But Mercury also represents a liar and thief, alluding to the unreliability of both Chorus and King, as witnessed by the play’s cynical other voices. McKeown restores the term’s honorific meaning in reference to his real soldier-poets.

McKeown’s paradoxical method is prominent in the introductory chapter, entitled “Ecole Lemonier” after the “forward antiterrorism base” in Djibouti U.S. forces shared with the French Foreign Legion.  Here, McKeown tells us, he taught Henry V to fellow marines who wanted to know if Shakespeare ever served. He describes this class to reporters and to NPR listeners he addressed in a commentary as neither “the story of one sensitive intellectual’s attempt to create a meaningful experience in a war otherwise without meaning” nor that of “a patriot who risked the censure of an elitist and hypocritical academy to serve his country and give Shakespeare back to the regulars guys fighting the war.”(12) Rather he claims, “it was a real war story by real soldier about other real soldiers fighting in a real war.”

The book concludes by repudiating the perennial use of Henry V to promote military adventurism. In the self-portrait on the back cover, the author wears no uniform, but his black t-shirt, shaved head and fierce smile convey the message, “Semper Fi.” Speaking both for and as one of the English Mercuries, he characterizes soldiers as “morally strong people¦who are not stooges of the state or servants of its whims¦They are above all products of political violence and witnesses to how people come to terms with political violence not as an idea but as an action they must commit or endure.” McKeown provides valuable insight to outsiders about what military people for five hundred years have thought about their profession.  But in this age of a volunteer army, I still fail to understand his meaning of  “must.”

A few ideas for the future of San Luis Obispo City Agricultural Development at Calle Joaquin

A.    This project has many potential benefits

1. It can produce healthy nourishing food for local consumption with minimal energy and water consumption.  The soil is excellent, the water is on site, the market is nearby.
2. It can provide both a learning experience and employment for farmers, a valuable profession in decline for 50 years but now beginning to revive.
3. It can serve as site for education about local history and sustainable food systems and for recreation.
4. It can serve as a wildlife preserve for butterflies, birds and beneficial soil organisms.
5. It can contribute to the worldwide movement for sustainable agriculture, healthy eating, and stronger local communities.
6. It can bring fame, fortune and foundation support to the City of San Luis Obispo.
7. It can provide retraining and employment for people who need it as agricultural and hospitality service workers.

B.    The site has many advantages:

1. Proximity to commercial and residential areas and a huge volume of freeway traffic that will allow for easy publicity of successful development, assuming that poisons are not used.
2. Proximity to Laguna Lake Park, which already attracts recreational uses which could be linked”e.g. hiking and equestrian trails, wildlife habitat, views of mountains and valley
3. A varied set of present uses and resources that fit well together for potential development, e.g.
4. Historic barn and farmhouse”for education center and livestock facilities to be used by public and 4H, Cal Poly Ag Education program, local schools
5. Creek and tributary riparian areas”for pleasant landscape and riparian uses
6. Heritage Eucalpytus grove for wildlife habitat and park
7. Enough class one soil for a variety of sustainable agriculture uses, including leasing to local farmers or coops, e.g. New Frontiers, Cal Poly Organic Farm, Central Coast Ag Coop, community allotment gardens, Non-profits like Growing Grounds

C.    Priorities

1. I believe making a significant portion of this land financially viable as source of local food production is highest priority. Potential for longer term leasing, easy access to water and distribution outlets and a history of successful cultivation could allow for both profitability and a pricing structure making access to organic produce, including perhaps poultry, dairy and eggs, available to lower income customers.  Linkage with local Food Stamp and Food Bank and School Lunch programs could be encouraged.
2. Education is a second priority.  The present existence of Ag Education programs in County schools and at Cal Poly promises extensive use of this potential.
3. Recreation and tourism.  Places like Fairview Farms, Avila Barn, the original Knott’s Berry Farm, demonstrate the potential in this area.