This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.
When Felicia Campbell first saw the campus of what would become the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 1962, she said, “My God, it’s a gas station.”
The campus consisted of just five small buildings plunked down in the desert. The de facto faculty lounge was the bar at the Tropicana hotel and casino, a front-row seat to the burgeoning gambling scene there.
A young doctoral student in English from Wisconsin and a former Marine, Professor Campbell had been hired as an English instructor, but she became fascinated by the gamblers, particularly the older ones. Why did they gamble, she wondered, and what did they gain from it, when they did not expect to win in any significant way?
As she learned, they gained a sense of community, a new zest for life and a boost in self-esteem. One gambler, retired and lonely, reported that the slot machines made her feel seen.
Professor Campbell’s observations became the grist for her dissertation on the positive effects of gambling, in which she noted that the gambling impulse mirrors the same inclination toward risk that propels civilization forward — to laboratory discoveries, to the moon. Her elderly gamblers, as she wrote in the Futurist magazine in 1976, were “a gallant breed who, far from wasting their meager resources gambling, are making a choice for life itself.”
Professor Campbell died on July 27 at a hospital in Las Vegas. She was 89 and still teaching, the longest serving professor at the university. The cause was complications of Covid-19, her daughter, Tracy Tuttle, said.
Ms. Campbell’s courses were eclectic. She taught chaos theory and detective novels; science fiction; Asian and African-American literature; and pop culture. “She is so unconservative, she functions very much like an open window,” Charles Adams, a colleague in the English department, was quoted as saying in a 2016 university profile. “In many ways, she permitted fresh air to flow through the university.”
Felicia Campbell was born on April 18, 1931, in Cuba City, Wis., in the southwest part of the state. Her parents, Frank Churchill Florine, a pharmacist, and Irene (Bower) Florine, ran Florine and Son’s Drugstore and Pharmacy, where their daughter worked as a soda jerk. After earning undergraduate and master’s degrees in English at the University of Wisconsin, she joined the Marines — doing so, she said later, because she wanted to see if she could handle it.
Professor Campbell left after six months with an honorable discharge, not because she wasn’t up to the task but because she was irritated by her unit’s inefficiencies, as she told her daughter. After she boarded a train home, she threw her duffel bag out of the window.
Professor Campbell was the founder and executive director of the Far West Popular and American Culture Association. She organized its annual conference in Las Vegas, with programs that might include a symposium on Frank Zappa or the armadillo cult of Texas (featuring live armadillos); a night devoted to Tarzan (featuring an appearance by his movie incarnation Johnny Weissmuller); or a session on the semiotics of bumper stickers.
Her marriage to Ritzman Campbell, a craps and poker dealer who had been a student of hers, ended in divorce after about a decade, when Ms. Tuttle was 5 and her brothers were 8 and 10.
Fiercely independent, Professor Campbell taught Ms. Tuttle to say, when asked her name, “I am Tracy, and I am my own little person.”
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Campbell is survived by six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Her son Jedediah died in 2017; her son Adam died on Sept. 5.
Professor Campbell was herself a risk taker, though not at the gaming tables. When she discovered that she and her female colleagues at the university were paid less than the men, she sued for back pay. When the case was settled nearly 10 years later, she used some of the money to finance a 300-mile trek through the Himalayas, even though she’d never camped before and, at 52, wasn’t sure she would survive.
By the end of the journey she had experienced a life-affirming and life-altering experience, just like her elderly gamblers. She had risked her neck, as she told a local newspaper after the trip, to test her theories.
“The bottom line was that risk-taking could be a preservative impulse,” she said, “breaking the monotony, allowing normal people to control their own destiny, to be intensely alive for a moment.”
Felicia Campbell, Professor Who Studied Gambling and Pop Culture, Dies at 89
Ms. Campbell was the longest-serving professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She died of complications of the novel coronavirus.
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