Barbara Fiske Calhoun

Barbara Fiske Calhoun (born Isabelle Daniel Hall; September 9, 1919 – April 28, 2014) was an American cartoonist and painter, one of the few female creators from the Golden Age of Comic Books. She co-founded Quarry Hill Creative Center, one of Vermont's oldest — and, in many ways, its most intellectual —alternative communities,^[1] on the Fiske family property, in Rochester, Vermont.

Biography

Family and early life

Isabelle Daniel Hall was born in Tucson, Arizona, on September 9, 1919, to Isabelle Daniel Jones and John Hall, Jr., both newspaper reporters. Both were scions of upper-class Southern families who uprooted after the Civil War and traveled West. Barbara's mother Isabelle, called "Belle," came from Asheville, North Carolina, where she had modeled for the papers, and was known, with her sisters Mary and Polly, as one of the "beautiful Jones sisters of Asheville." Around 1912, she and her brother A. V. (named after the patriarch of the family and the close friend of John C. Calhoun, Abraham W. Venable) who had tuberculosis, came to Tucson seeking the warmth of the desert and hoping it would cure or remit his illness.

John Hall, Jr., was from Alabama, though he had been born in Jacksonville, Florida. His mother, Lucy Herter Hall — a Yankee from Boston who had somehow defeated the prejudices that followed "The War Between the States" to marry John Hall, Sr., also had tuberculosis. After her husband, John Hall, Sr. died, Lucy came to Arizona with her three sons, John, Richard and Harry. John Hall and Belle met in Arizona during this time.

A.V. died in 1915, and no longer needed to care for her brother, Belle finally felt able to marry John, a few years younger than herself. Belle and John married on March 20, 1918, and "Babs," from the Scots word for "baby," was born in September the following year. Sadly, her father was caught up in a late wave of Spanish Influenza and died in February 1920, when Babs was only six months old. She grew up with her mother (who never remarried), her aunt Mary (Polly) Caldwell, who had also moved West to live with her sister while her husband worked as an engineer in various places around the world, and two cousins. John's mother Lucy lived on long enough for "Babs" to know her, but she was never allowed to touch or kiss her grandmother.

Babs grew up in rebellion against the rigid rules and mores of the Southern society of her family. She was not allowed to play with non-Southern children, and later, was forbidden to go out with a Mexican boy whom she liked. Eventually she rebelled against this and played with a family of Northern children, dropping the lush Southern upper-class accent, which her family kept as pure as if they were still living on Slate Hill, a plantation of her ancestor, Patriot Nathaniel Venable (1733–1804). She also vowed that when she grew up she would marry a Jewish man — another goal that she made come true when she married Irving Fiske. She was aware of her beauty—she had blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, and a beautiful body. | | Citation: interview with daughter, Isabella Fiske McFarlinn, Fiske Family Archive, Rochester, VT.

Everyone in the family had a talent or artistic bent of some kind; Babs grew up always drawing. "I just drew," she would say. "I could always draw." Even so, in a family of artists, her gift was considered special and to be given its due and care.^[2]

Harvey Comics

Barbara attended art school in Los Angeles, moving to New York in 1940.^[3] During World War II, after showing her portfolio to Harvey Comics in 1941, she was hired to draw the comic feature Black Cat. Barbara was one of the few female comic book artists in the United States during the World War II era.^[4] Living in the West Village, she met her husband-to-be, writer and playwright Irving Fiske, who suggested that she change her name to "Barbara Hall," which she did. She signed her work "B. Hall" because female cartoonists were not held in high esteem.^[5]

Her next strip was Girl Commandos, about an international team of Nazi-fighting women. This feature focused on Pat Parker, war nurse,^[3] a "freelance fighter for freedom." While stationed in India, Parker recruits a British nurse, an American radio operator, a Soviet photographer, and a Chinese patriot. Hall continued Girl Commandos until 1943, when it was taken over by Jill Elgin.^[6]

Hall also created the Blonde Bomber (aka Honey Blake), a newsreel camerawoman, chemist, and crime-fighter with a sidekick named Jimmy Slapso. The Blonde Bomber was a regular feature of Harvey's Green Hornet comics.^[3]

Quarry Hill Creative Center

On January 8, 1946, she married Irving Fiske and began to use the name Barbara Hall Fiske. On April 10, 1946, she and her husband, both wildly unconventional bohemian intellectuals, used wedding money to buy the farm in Rochester that later became the artist's retreat and "hippie commune" called Quarry Hill Creative Center.^[3][7]

They had two children: Isabella Joachim Fiske (born 1950) and William John Fiske (1954-2008). Though she had given up drawing comics, to the loss of the world of cartooning, she continued and developed the sophistication of her artwork in the mediums of egg tempera and pastel. In the mid-1960s, Barbara opened a storefront, The Gallery Gwen, in New York's East Village. There Barbara showed her paintings, along with those of others, and Irving began to give public talks on Tantra, Zen, Sufism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and atheism, among many other things. Hundreds of young people, including many who became well-known, such as R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman (who dated the Fiske's daughter Isabella)^[8] and Stephen Huneck, began to visit Quarry Hill Creative Center. Many stayed to build houses; Quarry Hill is now the oldest and largest alternative lifestyle group in Vermont, and one of the largest in New England.^[9]

She attended Vermont College and got an MFA in Art History during the 60s, and returned to Quarry Hill after a time of living in Randolph, Vermont. She divorced Fiske in 1976. After a period of some tension, they reached a state of friendliness and mutual support, with the shared desire to see Quarry Hill continue. With the assistance of her son, William, and others, Barbara created a corporation to own the land, Lyman Hall, Inc.^[10]

In 1989, she married Dr. Donald Calhoun, a Quaker writer and sociology professor who had been her mentor at Vermont College. Barbara also became a member of the Society of Friends ( Quakers) in Middlebury, VT during the 1980s. They both lived at Quarry Hill into their 90s. Donald Calhoun died on May 5, 2009.^[11]

Barbara lived at Quarry Hill Creative Center till she was 93,^[3] teaching art and encouraging the young.

Illness and death

Finally, increasing ill health and disability led her to enter Brookside Nursing Home in White River Junction, Vermont. She was visited frequently by her family and friends. Her daughter and son-in-law, Brion McFarlin, were with her for almost all the last days of her life, reading her favorite books and poems. She died without anyone present, but in apparent sleep and peacefulness up to a few moments before her last breath, according to her nurses, on April 28, 2014.^[12]

References

Notes

Sources

• Braunstein, Peter and Michael W. Doyle, eds. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 330
• Miller, Timothy. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999, p. 8
• Trausch, V. "Where Have All the Flower Children Gone?" Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (August 2, 1987). Archived at the University of Vermont
• "Fiske Family Women Honored," The Herald of Randolph (Feb. 21, 2002).