Joan Kellam Fox

Joan "Joann" Kellam Fox Joann K. Fox passed away on July 25, 2013 at the Hoosier Village Retirement Center, Indianapolis, at the age of 92. She was born February 10, 1921 in Indianapolis, the oldest child of Fred and Grace Kellam, living most of her life in the Indianapolis area. Having a natural aptitude and interest in science and mathematics, she aspired to be an engineer like her father, who discouraged that idea. Instead she attended Andrews University (then Emmanuel Missionary College), earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry in 1942, graduating as valedictorian. Her first job was in the quality control department of Monarch Steel, where she met her first husband and father of her two sons, John W. Sellers. After WW II she found herself in the difficult position of a single mother of two without a job in hard economic times. She found employment in the Research and Development Department of the RCA Victor Record Division, a world leader in the production of phonograph records. There she had a successful career specializing in plastic compounds used in the record industry. In 1963 she married Ralph Fox, acquiring a second family of stepchildren. After Ralph's children were grown, they retired to their wooded acreage near Zionsville where they enjoyed a secluded life before health issues forced them to move to an assisted living facility in 2009. She was a voracious reader and enjoyed planting trees and otherwise landscaping their country home. Joann was preceded in death by her parents, ex-husband, and brother James Kellam, and survived by her husband Ralph Fox, also a resident of Hoosier Village, sons John W. Sellers, Jr., Spring Valley, Ohio and James F. Sellers, Willoughby Hills, Ohio, sister Alice Higgins, Athens, Alabama, brother Douglas Kellam, Shelbyville, Indiana, sister-in-law Helen Kellam, Speedway, Indiana, and stepchildren Mary Brown, Sumter, South Carolina, Ruth Larsen, Bountiful, Utah, Paul Fox, Indianapolis, and Anna Olsen, Williston, Florida. A memorial service will be held at 10:00 AM, Tuesday August 6 at the chapel of the Hoosier Village Retirement Community, 5300 W. 96th St., Indianapolis. The family requests that contributions in lieu of flowers be made to the Hoosier Village charitable organization, the BHI Foundation, 5415 Bearberry Lane, Indianapolis, IN 46268. My mom, Joann Fox, has passed away. Her life has become a finished work, leaving us to ponder its meaning. Here are my thoughts. We want to remember the happy times, but before getting into happy reminiscences, we should pause and admit that in a lot of ways, Mom had a tough life. She grew up during the Depression, graduated from college in the midst of World War II, and for reasons beyond anyone's control, her first marriage—to my brother Jim's and my father—was short, leaving her in a very tough position as a single mother of two young children at a time when jobs were scarce. But Mom was tough too. In time she found a job in her field that paid well, and parlayed that into a successful career. By the time Jim and I were ten years old she had learned to drive, bought a car and a house, and begun to live the successful middle class suburban lifestyle. When Jim and I were teenagers well on our way to becoming what we would become, Mom met the man who would become the love of her life, Ralph Fox. They were married in 1963 and would have celebrated their 50th anniversary later this year. But the early years of their marriage were not for the faint of heart, involving an epic custody battle that many of us in this room still remember very well. I always felt like Mom and Fox got cheated some, by health problems that limited their ability to travel in retirement, but that didn't prevent them from enjoying many years together in their home in the woods near Zionsville. They had hoped to live out their lives there, but that was not to be, as health issues gradually made independent living in a very handicapped-inaccessible house impossible. But be all that as it may, let's think about the unique, wonderful, individual that I was so lucky to have as a mom. From a very early age Mom was an independent thinker. One of her expressions was, "Independent as a hog on ice." When you think about it, a hog on ice would be mighty "independent", but maybe not so purposeful. Mom was a purposeful kind of independent. Mom related the story that one time as a child she decided that school was a waste of time. (As smart as Mom was, she may have had reason to feel that way.) But that put her crossways of Authority, and Authority was bigger than she was. Her parents told her she had to go to school and if she wouldn't, they would spank her until she did. She didn't, and they took turns spanking her until she gave in. That was probably the start of Mom's tendency toward rejection of authority figures which was part of her makeup and which she passed on to us kids. And when you look at authority figures nowadays, that's probably a good thing. Mom attended what is now Andrews University, a Seventh Day Adventist institution (and a highly regarded one, by the way) which was then known as Emmanuel Missionary College. The very name of the school conjures up images of straight-laced inflexible rules. Jim and I, of course, never heard Mom's stories from her college days until after we had successfully graduated from college ourselves and were no longer in need of an upstanding role model. To name just one story, there was a rigid policy regarding "lights out" in the women's dorm. At the designated time for "lights out", someone would shut off a master power switch which was then locked off with a padlock. Mom perceptively noticed that the padlock was not locked when the switch was "on" during the daytime, so she bought a matching padlock down at the local hardware store and locked the switch in the "on" position. So "lights out" wasn't enforced for about a week until the powers that be got around to sawing off the new lock. Mom's grades qualified her as valedictorian of her graduating class, but she was suspected—but not convicted—of sufficient numbers of disciplinary infractions that the Dean of Women was not going to let her participate in commencement. When she informed her father of this he said he would get there as quickly as he could. Mom was petrified that her dad was angry at her. But when he got there she realized that angry, powerful father figures were not such a bad thing when they were on her side. By that time Granddad was a high level official in the Indiana Highway Department, and the Dean of Women of Emmanuel Missionary College was nowhere near a match for him. Mom graduated with her class. World War II was on when Mom graduated with a degree in chemistry, and there were all kinds of jobs for anyone with technical skills. Mom took a job in quality control at Monarch Steel. Think about that for a minute—a 22 year old girl going to work in a steel mill. That was one gutsy young lady. Steel mills back in those days were mighty dangerous places. One of her jobs was inspecting the linings of open hearth furnace to decide if they were safe for another heat. She said the furnace foremen—not generally paragons of gentlemanly behavior—treated her with the utmost respect, if for no other reason that their lives might very well depend on her judgment. One of Mom's closest calls in that job came when she climbed into an empty gondola car in the rail yard to take some samples of scrap steel they had received. Monarch melted a lot of scrap steel and they had to know the composition of the scrap to know what alloys to add to it. She climbed up the ladder on the outside of the gondola car and was climbing down the ladder on the inside of the car when it suddenly broke loose. Now, she was in a very tight fix. She couldn't climb out of the car, and nobody could see her from the ground. She pounded on the side of the car with a hammer, but in the noise of the rail yard, no one could hear her. Sooner or later the empty gondola car would be hitched to a train and taken somewhere else to be filled with more scrap. What happened, essentially, is that she was saved by the Hand of God, in the form of an alert overhead traveling crane operator who happened to come over and see her plight. He stopped the crane over the car and lowered his hook until she could climb onto it like a horse, lifted her out, and set her gently on the ground. He then tipped his hat to her and moved on. Mom didn't work many years at Monarch Steel, but it was there she met our father. They were divorced not long after Jim was born and I have no recollections of his living with us. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, a few years later he moved across the street from us and I have many happy memories of time spent with him. Our family was just a little unusual because Dad lived across the street. By that time—the early 50's—Mom had started what would turn out to be a long and successful career with RCA Victor record division, but Jim and I were always the central focus of her life. Mom's parenting philosophy was really pretty straightforward and based on the old-fashioned concept of "common sense". Aside from a basic moral framework based on the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, we were expected to think for ourselves and exhibit as much common sense as we could muster for our age. And that worked pretty well. One of Mom's expressions of exasperation when she thought our common sense was lacking was, "You don't have the sense God gave a goose!" Not knowing too many geese, I can't say how much sense they have. The words I really hated to hear were "You know better than that", which usually meant that Mom was about to take a piece of kindling wood and apply a fresh coat of "know better" to my tender behind. But we usually did "know better" and act with "common sense". And as long as we stayed within those general boundaries, Mom handed us the keys to the kingdom with a generous hand. Thinking back on those days, it's hard to believe how much Mom trusted us. When Jim and I were 6 or 7 years old we could walk a few blocks over to the public library and check out books. My favorite ones were experimental science books for kids that showed how to make all kinds of things. And if we wanted to try some experiment, Mom was not averse to finding the materials for us that we needed to do it, including liberating small quantities of chemicals from her lab at work. Sometimes she probably had her doubts about that. When I was about 12 years old, and like any red-blooded American boy, interested in blowing things up, Mom ordered 5 pounds of potassium nitrate from Fisher Scientific so we could make gunpowder. One of my young colleagues and I made some flash powder from a recipe in a book which called for powdered aluminum and sulfur. We made a small batch and found it didn't work very well. We concluded it needed some oxidizer so out came the 5 pound jar of potassium nitrate. I was busily mixing up about half a pound of our improved formula—in a glass jar—when Mom happened to come down the basement, and asked what I was mixing up. I answered, and shortly thereafter asked, "Mom? Why are you so white?!" Without anger, she patiently explained that mixing dry powder explosives in a glass jar wasn't a good idea, since static electricity could set them off and blow me to kingdom come. This was in accord with common sense and I instantly comprehended. By the way, our improved flash powder worked like a champ! When we were still little kids, while on vacation at some lake, Mom was content to let us go off by ourselves in a rowboat. My uncle Doug is only 5 years older than me, and when we were on vacation with our grandparents, Mom would let Doug, Jim and me take off in a boat and be gone all day without undue concern. That common sense was mighty good stuff. The ultimate expression of that freedom was when Uncle Doug turned 21. I was only 16 and Jim only 14, but Mom let us take off across the country on an 8,000 mile camping trip in Doug's brand new Volkswagen. No cell phones in those days—we sent postcards home and stopped for mail at General Delivery at pre-planned post offices. But we went out, we came back, and had an experience to last a lifetime. How many parents trust their kids that much? Mom didn't push us into technical careers, but she missed no opportunity to excite the natural curiosity that is the driving force of scientists and engineers. Mom helped me build a crystal radio when I was six or seven years old, and I built my first tube radio when I was nine. Here again, that evidenced a high level of trust on her part. Old-fashioned radio tubes operate off high voltages that can flat kill you. When I wanted to get my amateur radio license, Mom went with me to classes held by the RCA amateur radio club. In those days you had to be able to send and receive international Morse code at a speed of 13 words per minute to get a general class license. Mom took the class with me and we practiced code together on the kitchen table. I got my license in 1962 at the age of 16. Mom probably could have passed the code test but she wasn't interested in getting her license—she only did it for me. Lest I give you the idea that Mom was built in an adding machine factory, she was good at a lot of things. She was a great cook! I still treasure some of her recipes, like Hawaiian Beef. In my bachelor days I would make that for pitch-in dinners and it would always sell out. Pizza was just beginning to get popular in the late 50s and Mom developed her own recipe. She had a wonderful thin crust I have never seen anywhere else. On a weekend when she had time to do it, she would make up several cookie sheets of her thin crust and we would cover them with tomato, cheese, and whatever else came to mind and bake them. In addition to conventional toppings like pepperoni and anchovies she tried hamburger and tuna fish, long before such things became popular. We called it her "Swedish Pizza". If memory serves, the family would put away half a dozen cookie sheets full of the stuff on a Saturday evening. My wife says I married her because she could make potato salad just like my mom's. There were other reasons, but there is some truth to the claim. By the time Mom had escaped poverty and we were living in her first house on 17th Street she began taking in stray cats that happened to come along. Our first cat was named Casey (from, "The mighty Casey had struck out") shortly followed by Susie. Since those days I myself have had two or three generations of cats named Casey and Susie. Then a black cat showed up who they naturally named Ivan. I think Mom and Fox had a couple of generations of Ivans. Mom always had plenty of reading material around the house. She was an avid reader and my brother and I became so. Mom was a science fiction fan back in the 50s and 60s—now known as the Golden Age of science fiction—and Jim and I grew up with Robert A Heinlein's heroes. Mom had a subscription to Astounding Science Fiction back before they changed the name of the magazine to Analog for enhanced respectability. (It was better before it was respectable.) I was off to college much of the time that Fox's kids were growing up and I really don't know much about what kind of relationship they had with Mom. Since then all of us kids have scattered around the country and I really haven't seen much of the Fox kids. Just today we were talking, and my wife Barb asked Anna what kind of a stepmother Mom was for her. Anna's answer was "She was an awesome mother." I don't think Anna can know how much that meant to me. Thank you, Anna! When Barb and I retired ten years ago, we bought an Airstream travel trailer and joined that curious tribe of nomads in the wandering lifestyle. When Airstreamers part company, our standard good by is "We'll see you down the road." The older I get, the more I appreciate the eternal truth of those words. So long, Mom. You were an awesome mom, and we hope that we told you often enough how much we love you. And by and by, we'll see you down the road. You are invited to go to the Guest Book page to pass along your personal message or tell a story. Sincerely, -Your friends at Flanner and Buchanan