Margaret "Peg" Winter Kearney Campbell was born on March 5, 1907, in Negaunee, Michigan. She was the older sister of Dr. Joseph A. Winter (1911-1955) and the second wife of John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971), longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction/Analog magazine. She assisted both in their development of Dianetics and her husband in his later research into supposed psionic phenomena.
According to Alec Nevala-Lee, Margaret Winter graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a master's degree in English literature and philosophy. Her minor was educational psychology. (Astounding, p. 274) Someone on the website Find A Grave has written that she had six years of education after high school. I don't have any reason to doubt that, for the numbers add up just right. Mr. Nevala-Lee called her "strikingly intelligent." (p. 274)
Margaret Winter taught at Luther L. Wright High School in Ironwood, Michigan, in 1931-1932. On October 15, 1932, she married Everett W. Kearney (1898-1951), a merchant, in her parents' home in Negaunee, Michigan. The couple honeymooned in Chicago.
After marrying, Margaret Kearney gave up teaching but became involved in the business of knitting and selling yarn and items made from yarn. Those endeavors proved successful and she kept at it for decades afterward, even after she remarried.
Everett and Margaret Kearney had two children. Born in 1934, their son Joseph H. Kearney graduated from Luther L. Wright High School in 1951 and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on June 12, 1955. Five days later, on June 17, 1955, he was killed in a car accident while driving to Chicago for summer classes. It was a terrible and devastating loss, and my heart goes out to the family, even now, sixty-seven years after the fact. We should remember that Dr. Joseph A. Winter, brother of Peg, had died just eight days before.
Joe Kearney was to have studied sociology at Harvard University beginning in the fall of 1955. The soft sciences--psychology and sociology--seem to have been of special interest to members of the Winter, Kearney, and Campbell families. His mother and uncle studied these things, as did his stepfather and sister, as well as the husband of his cousin Mary.
Everett and Margaret Kearney were divorced on April 19, 1951, in Gogebic County, Michigan. Less than two months later, on June 15, 1951, she and John W. Campbell, Jr., were married in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Campbell had of course been married before. His first wife, Doña Stebbins Campbell (1913-1974), had left him while he was heavy into Dianetics. His involvement in that business seems to have been the last straw for her. Peg Campbell, on the other hand, "became involved with the movement at once, teaching classes and investing five thousand dollars in the [Dianetics] foundation." Mr. Nevala-Lee adds, "She also became Campbell's auditing partner." (Astounding, p. 274) Like L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), Peg had red (or reddish) hair. Unlike his, her eyes were blue. If the supposed folkloric belief that red-haired, green-eyed people are demonic, then she escaped that influence by maybe only a few wavelengths. By the way, Everett W. Kearney died on October 3, 1951, in Gogebic, Michigan, less than seven months after their divorce.
The Kearneys' younger child was a daughter, Jane Kearney. She attended Wellesley College and the University of California, where she received a bachelor of arts degree in psychology in 1959. She married twice but was to have been married to another man before any of that happened. That man was science fiction author Gordon Randall Phillip Garrett (1927-1987), known as Randall Garrett. The Campbells announced their daughter's impending nuptials on November 24, 1956. Garrett was a friend and associate of other science fiction writers, including Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) and Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). He was also what used to be known as a bounder. Campbell found out about him and the wedding was called off.
John W. Campbell, Jr., died at home on July 11, 1971. It was his wife who found him in his chair. She survived him by eight years, dying on August 17, 1979, in Waterville, Maine. Perhaps she lived close to her daughter at the end. Peg Campbell was seventy-two years old when she died. It is that same number of years that separate us now from the beginnings in print of Dianetics.
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Peg Campbell has the following credit in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb), as Mrs. John W. Campbell:
- "Afterword: Postscriptum" in The Best of John W. Campbell (1976)
She is also in Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee (2018, 2019) and in The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1 (1985), presumably, too, in its sequel. Science fiction author George O. Smith (1911-1981) wrote a tribute to her, "In Memoriam: Margaret Winter Campbell," in the February 1980 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. In completing this account of diverse family dramas, I should point out that George O. Smith was married to Doña Stebbins Campbell after she and Campbell were divorced. Actually she ran to Smith during her first husband's mad obsession with Dianetics in 1950-1951.
You can find photographs of Peg Campbell on the Internet. You might start with one entitled "John W. and Peg Campbell at Medieval Tourney event, Baycon" (1968), from the Jay Kay Klein Collection at UC Riverside, Library, Special Collections and University Archives, by clicking here. Note that in the picture, Peg is wearing a scarf. I wonder if it's one that she made herself.
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| The Best of John W. Campbell (Nelson Doubleday, 1976). The cover, by Chet Jezierski (b. 1947), illustrates Campbell's most famous story, "Who Goes There?", originally in Astounding Science-Fiction in August 1938. In that first publication, Campbell used a pseudonym, Don A. Stuart, a tribute, I guess you could call it, to his first wife. "Who Goes There?" was of course made into a movie, The Thing from Another World (1951), and a remake, The Thing (1982). The first version was released on April 27, 1951. At the time, different kinds of dramas were being enacted in the lives of its original author and the people around him. Campbell was wrapped up in Dianetics. The woman who was to be his second wife was securing a divorce from her husband. And on June 15, 1951, she and Campbell were married. Scientists don't come out very well in The Thing from Another World. It's no wonder that Isaac Asimov didn't like the movie. Campbell was more sanguine. Maybe he would have liked the remake better, as it is closer to his original conception than The Thing from Another World. Note that the introduction to The Best of John W. Campbell is by Lester del Rey (1915-1993), who opposed Dianetics. |
Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley
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