Recently I met someone who is the kind of activist I admire and sometimes wish I were. How did she get to be the person she is?

In her heyday, which lasted decades, Joan Callaway of Davis made things happen. She created institutions, particularly in the area of mental health, that put Davis on the map. At the same time, she raised four children and ran a couple of stores.

Her name has been on my radar for years.

I am most familiar with All Things Right and Relevant, a consignment store she envisioned and helped open that benefits 10 nonprofit agencies in Yolo County.

In the 1970s, she co-founded Bereavement Outreach, for people dealing with grief, and in the 1980s, while president of the Yolo County Mental Health Association, she helped found the Yolo Community Care Continuum, an innovative program for people with mental disorders.

More recently, she organized Be Smart, a literacy program that was active at my children’s school, Patwin Elementary, in the 1990s.

During the same period she opened her own jewelry, pottery and art store, Centering, and a clothing store, Tarika, that eventually had branches in Davis and Sacramento.

Joan Callaway is doer. I am an observer. She observes as well, as evidenced in her new book, but above all she makes things happen and gets things done. I had never met her, never knew any details about her life, until I read her book and asked for an interview.

Her book’s title, “It’s an Ill Wind, Indeed…that Blows no Good,” might puzzle you at first, but it captures one of her motivating ideas: out of pain, something good can come.

The ill wind that changed her life at age 39 was an unthinkable tragedy: her husband, Glen Snodgrass, 39, and her youngest child, Keith Snodgrass, 12, perished in the wake of a fire in their house on Mulberry Street in Davis on Jan. 1, 1971.

Although her book doesn’t cover the earlier part of her life (that’s the subject of a second book, just released), Callaway was already a doer, but as a wife and mother of five, most of her efforts were family-focused, and she told me that if her husband had lived they might have stayed that way.

Maybe. But she had already volunteered at a daycare center. She also worked part or full-time. This lady didn’t sit around.

Until recently.

We met in her Davis home where, at 80, she greeted me using a walker and then sat at her desk. This makes her sound elderly, but her thoughtful speech and awareness of current trends, not to mention her Facebook habits, belie the impression that she’s slowing down.

The first few chapters of her book, where she recounts the tragedy, are painful to read. We’ve all read sad stories, but somehow knowing that the person who experienced this is sitting in her home only a few blocks from me, as are two of her adult children, makes the sadness more intense. The fact that the book goes on to tell many Davis stories keeps reconnecting me to the original tragedy.

When I asked Callaway why she wrote, she said she hoped to reach people who are grieving, who often don’t find the support or hope they need. Although her book will indeed help grieving readers, I was drawn to the issue of activism and the choices Callaway made after the tragedy.

Confirming the connection between tragedy and activism, Callaway opens her first chapter by writing, “I became who I am on this day (January 1, 1971) just weeks before my 40th birthday.”

Would she have been a different person without the tragedy?

It’s clear that her turn towards mental health issues was related to her suffering and that of her children. Becoming a shop owner was related, too, because her memory loss and inability to concentrate were so acute after the deaths that she didn’t feel competent to go back to transcription work.

But much later in the book she describes her entrepreneurial spirit that “gets aroused at the thought of a startup of anything.”

Was that entrepreneurial spirit part of her from birth? Or could it have come from something that preceded the tragedy, her parents, for example, or something that came after, such as the support of her second husband?

Callaway chose to keep extremely busy, but not in a way that distracted her from what had happened. Instead, she focused on it, at least as far as her mental health work was concerned, beginning with a support group she created for widows that was imitated state-wide.

Would I be less of an observer and more of an activist if I had suffered a tragedy like hers?

How would any of us be different?

Seattle-based activist Michael Meade has said, “We have a seeded self that begins to germinate at birth. Our true goal in life is to become that self.”

Is that the way it works? Do we all have a self we were meant to be? Or is our self formed by life experience, and can it be altered — strengthened even — by tragedy and loss?

This is the core mystery I’m left pondering after reading Callaway’s book.

— Marion Franck lives in Davis with her family. Reach her at [email protected]

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