| IN MEMORIAM
By Royal Calkins
Some individuals, maybe many, will keep in mind Karen Ravn because the pug girl of Pacific Grove. For a number of years early within the century she was on the market two or 3 times a day on the sidewalks or the Rec Path herding her trio of tan, flat-faced purebreds wherever they wished to be herded.
She was the final word canine lover however she was way more. One of many very best-educated individuals on the Monterey Peninsula, a Peninsula brimming with the effectively educated and achieved. Even presumably the neatest. A really shy girl who took an odd profession path, who as soon as had her personal line of Hallmark greeting playing cards and will translate dense Russian into English. Somebody who had mastered a few of the most superior types of arithmetic.
Karen died at age 75 just a few hours into the New Yr at an assisted residing house in Pacific Grove. She died of pure causes, sufferer of a raft of medical circumstances that had turned a pure athlete — swimming and tennis — right into a frail shell of herself.
The pugs had been lengthy passed by then however she was comforted by one other canine trio, a mom and daughter pair of rescued Pekingese, like pugs however with far an excessive amount of hair, and a deaf and blind Pekingese pup. The rescue group despatched the pup to her realizing she would by no means say no.
After a fall at her Pacific Grove house, Karen had been confined for weeks to a chilly nursing house room in Santa Cruz. There she spent Christmas and her Christmas eve birthday basically alone, no guests allowed as a result of she had contracted a light case of COVID by means of the nursing home’s inattentiveness. Those that knew her are grateful she was in a position to spend her final couple of days within the assisted residing place beneath precise blankets and a blanket of dust-mop canines.
Karen was my pal for practically twenty years. The conventions of journalism require that I name her Ravn, Ms. Ravn and even Dr. Ravn due to the doctorate from Stanford, however I can’t do this. I’ll must name her Karen right here. Hope nobody minds.
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Karen Ravn within the Nineteen Eighties | Offered
I met her in 2002. In search of a brand new profession for which she was already extraordinarily effectively certified, she had enrolled within the science writing masters program at UC Santa Cruz. It has produced quite a few scientifically minded writers who went on to a few of the high science publications on the earth. The scholars had been required to intern at publications within the space. On the time I used to be metropolis editor of the Monterey Herald and we had been fortunate sufficient to attract Karen for the primary quarter.
She didn’t have the cash for second-quarter tuition, nonetheless, so she left UCSC and joined us on the Herald as a full-time reporter and columnist. I’m unsure why however she was already residing in Pacific Grove. Her job on the Herald didn’t make PG inexpensive, however she acquired by by some means.
- Ravn lived with congenital anosmia, a uncommon situation. Learn her first-person account here
She excelled, no shock. She excelled at something she tackled, besides the mundane. It was one of many smartest hires we had ever made, and so was she.
After I gave her an task she didn’t have to listen to the entire spiel. She knew whom to name, individuals whose names and numbers had been written in her tackle e-book within the tiniest handwriting possible. I requested why she wrote like that. She shrugged an “I don’t know” again at me. I suppose it was a manifestation of her need to not be seen. It was OK to admire her work however I believe she might need preferred to have been invisible. She usually answered her cellphone in a voice as small as her handwriting.
Issues went effectively on the Herald however after a pair years she grew uninterested in being inspired to write down much more about science and fewer in regards to the pugs. Did I point out she was cussed?
She confirmed us by transferring on to write down for the Monterey Bay Aquarium after which to supply common columns for the Los Angeles Occasions science web page, for Scientific American journal and different weighty publications. She wrote about advanced subjects however made every little thing accessible, the way in which solely good writers can.
‘She was a real authentic’
‘She was a real authentic,” recalled Rosie Mestil, her editor on the Occasions and once more later at different publications.
“My favourite piece she wrote for us was the first-person column about being born with no sense of odor. (See her story here). However all of the tales she wrote had a sure sparkle — an originality of humor and switch of phrase — that you just can’t educate somebody. I used to inform her, and wasn’t joking, that by rights she needs to be wealthy and well-known.
“Oh, and since she wrote for the LA Occasions we used to generally obtain requests from individuals desirous to contact her and acquire permission to make use of a bit of poem she had as soon as written whereas working for Hallmark. Learn it here.
“One girl wrote asking for permission to make use of it as a tattoo, if I’m remembering appropriately. And so, as a part of the joking forwards and backwards that she and I used to do, I as soon as wrote a pretend letter from somebody referred to as Cap’n Jim asking if he may inscribe the poem on the prow of his boat. She was not fooled.”
Karen grew up in Colton, an unremarkable suburb of San Bernardino maybe greatest often known as the house of the nation’s busiest railroad crossing with out an overpass or underpass. Her father taught English at Colton Excessive, her mom was Katherine Ravn, nee Wassenaar.
Phrase has it that she earned excellent scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Take a look at, one thing achieved by about one among each 50,000 college-bound highschool college students. She had excellent scores as effectively on the Graduate Report Examination, based on her transcripts. About 4 p.c of GRE takers report excellent marks.
She graduated in two years from UC Riverside and acquired a grasp’s diploma in math there as effectively. She accomplished the work for a doctorate however didn’t full her dissertation. I don’t know why.
Then there was a grasp’s in journalism from USC and a postgraduate interval learning poetry at Sarah Lawrence.
I can’t be certain in regards to the chronology however I consider that’s when, within the late Nineteen Seventies, she answered an advert and have become a author of greeting playing cards on the Hallmark headquarters.
“Quickly after she arrived at Hallmark in Kansas Metropolis, Karen turned some of the admired and revered writers within the social expression business,” stated her Hallmark editor, Ed Cunningham.
“Together with her form coronary heart and beneficiant spirit, she created sentiments of mild prose or lyrical verse celebrating household and friendship, caring and love. Karen excelled on the craft of serving to individuals share what they had been feeling for each other in instances of pleasure and instances of disappointment and instances in between.”
One other pal in Kansas Metropolis stated Hallmark retailers put in particular orders for Karen’s playing cards as a result of they offered so effectively. She even had her personal line, beneath a pseudonym that nobody has been in a position to recall in these latest weeks.
She additionally wrote books for Hallmark, inspirational poetry and quotations, the form of thinnish books you may ship to your aunt, and youngsters’s books. I’ve a replica of her “Mighty Machines at Work,” a pop-up e-book however not simply any pop-up e-book. Like different kids’s books written by Karen, it was produced in session with the founding father of the kids’s nursery program at Stanford.
One other pal from Kansas Metropolis, Jeannie Thomas, stated Karen understood kids.
“She had a particular genius with kids that mirrored her unconditional respect and excessive regard for them. She listened to kids fastidiously with full and energetic consideration and had a means of letting them know she was on their aspect on the earth.”
Ed Cunningham’s spouse, Gail, who additionally wrote playing cards, remembered that Karen had cats then and that greeting card colleagues usually requested her to cat-sit.
Karen’s math abilities additionally had been put to good use in Kansas Metropolis, nice use really,
At a tennis membership, she turned a pal of a federal lawyer who was concerned within the avalanche of litigation set off by the July 17, 1981, collapse of two overhead walkways on the Hyatt Regency Resort in Kansas Metropolis.
100 and fourteen individuals had been killed; 239 had been injured. It was the nation’s worst structural collapse of the twentieth Century. Everybody sued everybody.
Karen’s lawyer pal advised her months later that the armies of legal professionals concerned had been having nice issue determining the fairest strategy to apportion thousands and thousands upon thousands and thousands of {dollars} in settlement cash for the victims’ households. The problem was to fulfill the plaintiffs, the defendants, the insurance coverage firms, the judges and others.
‘Karen to the rescue, Karen and her sensible mathematical thoughts.’
Karen to the rescue, Karen and her sensible mathematical thoughts. What she did was provide you with a system, a quadratic equation, that decided how the settlement fund could possibly be adjusted equitably down the road as bigger awards on the high had been distributed.
As one of many key legal professionals concerned, Bob Fisk, stated years later at a federal judicial convention, “We had a system that just a few mathematicians and Professor Francis McGovern … can perceive.”
McGovern was the Duke College regulation professor who pioneered strategies to settle tremendously advanced authorized instances by means of negotiation and equally advanced formulae equivalent to Karen’s.
The primary half of her equation regarded one thing like this:
x=(𝐴𝐴 + 𝑃𝑃 + 𝑆𝑆) ± √ 𝐴𝐴2 + 𝑃𝑃2 + 𝑆𝑆2 + 2𝐴𝐴(𝑃𝑃 + 𝑆𝑆) + 2𝑆𝑆𝑃𝑃 – 4𝑆𝑆𝑃𝑃
Karen ought to have gone on tour to assist demolish the notion that women and girls can’t achieve math. Right here’s one thing she wrote about that in a column for the Herald
… Which brings us to a brand new examine printed within the journal Science final month contradicting some age-old, extensively held stereotypes by displaying that women are simply pretty much as good at math as boys are.
The examine analyzed standardized take a look at scores from greater than 7 million college students, in grades 2 by means of 11, in 10 states together with California. And it discovered no distinction between women’ and boys’ math scores.
The examine additionally put the kibosh on the notion that math genius is only a man factor. True, amongst whites, boys scored within the high 1 p.c extra usually than women. However amongst Asian People, women did so extra usually than boys.
Boys do outperform women a bit on the mathematics a part of the SAT. However the examine authors chalk this as much as the truth that many extra women than boys take the take a look at — which dilutes the ladies’ pattern when it comes to the top-notched-ness of their tutorial efficiency.
Nonetheless, the stereotypes persist. Too usually, women should not anticipated to do effectively in math — by their lecturers, their mother and father, themselves.
So after they run into a tough downside — or must resolve whether or not to join a tough class — they might be tempted to grouse, as I did Saturday (whereas she was making an attempt to put in a lock at her house), “I don’t want this. I don’t like this. This isn’t my factor in any respect.”
But when I’d given up on my venture, I’d have left a giant gap in my door.
And when women surrender on math, they depart a giant gap within the ranks of scientists and engineers.
Putting in a brand new lock is a far cry from fixing a differential equation.
However women can do each.
For causes she by no means defined to me, and maybe to nobody, Karen determined someday within the early Nineteen Eighties that her future was not in greeting playing cards or math however in psychology. So it was off to Stanford, the place she was to earn a doctorate in cognitive psychology.
As she wrote later in an utility to UCSC, she researched language acquisition and the distinction between the way in which individuals may describe issues and the issues that they really are. As a partial clarification, she wrote that somebody may describe their hungry canine as a rubbish disposal. She took a deep dive into the way in which toddlers study to tell apart the phrases huge and small however the way it can take years to make sense of the totally different ideas they will characterize. I’d have beloved to have heard an evidence of all that, however I by no means acquired the prospect.
Karen is survived by her sister, Cecelia Traugh, a university administrator in New York, and her brother-in-law, Andy Doan, a retired instructor.
Traugh means that any memorial contributions go to the donor’s native humane society. I add an alternate: a donation to medical technician Gloria Kumer on the assisted residing house the place Karen spent her final days. Gloria’s household adopted the Pekingese canines, together with the particular wants pup, and should need assistance with the vet payments. Present playing cards or no matter could possibly be despatched to her at Del Monte Assisted Residing, 1229 David Ave., Pacific Grove, 93950.
Which jogs my memory to provide a shout out to Dr. Nick Macy and the stunning employees at Pacific & Santa Cruz Veterinary Specialists in Santa Cruz, who cared for Karen’s canines through the years, and whereas she was making an attempt to get better from the autumn.
Featured picture: Karen Ravn | Offered
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