Barbara Talbot Goodell

Barbara Talbot Goodell, Dorothy's second child, spent her childhood at Loda, Ill. "We loved to watch the trains," she recalls. "'Course in Loda there wasn't much entertainment. We'd watch the fast mail train snatch the mail bag with great excitement. But just two miles south of Loda was the highest point of the main line of the Illinois Central between Chicago and the Gulf of Mexico. And the freight trains would have to go thumping up that hill, I think it gets up to 600 feet there or something like that After that it's all downhill to New Orleans."

It was during her years at Loda that her grandfather Arthur Newell Talbot rode the Illinois Central's streamliner The City of New Orleans on its maiden run out of Chicago. "I recall he rode in the cab with the engineer. I forget who was president of Illinois Central then but everybody's been a student of Grandfather's. It was a great occasion. Everyone all along the route turned out to see it. He rode it as far as Champaign and then when they had an engine stop he got off."

Barbara started high school at Loda, but after her grandfather died, she moved with her family to her grandfather's house in Urbana, and finished at Uni High. In 1944 she entered Radcliffe in political science. "I graduated in 1948, and got married a week later, as was the custom in those days." Her husband, William Fuller, "was at Harvard as a returning veteran when I met him. He then went to law school at Columbia. And then we moved to the wilds of Oregon."

Three of Barbara's children -- Anne, Abigail, and Sarah Jane (Sally) were born between 1950 and 1960, while Barbara and William lived in Gold Beach, Ore., near the California border. Their fourth child, Ted, was born after they had moved to San Francisco. Barbara and William were divorced in 1970; he died in 1986. "I 've lived on the West Coast since 1950, so there are a lot of the family members that I haven't seen for a long time, just because of the distance."

"I was a mother and housewife for a number of years; then after 1 was divorced I went to work in the library at our community college, Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill," just north of Walnut Creek where she lives. "And I've been working in the library ever since. I retired in 1986 and I'm still working up there one day a week, which is a lovely situation." The library is converting to an on-line system, "So I've been doing the retro conversions. Now I think I can do the cleanup on it for the next 10 years."

"It's lovely because I can work up there and then when I take off on one of my crazy trips, I tell them I'll be back in a month and they just sort of look at me." Barbara's most recent trip was to Antarctica in 1994. "I t's been on my list and I finally decided that I'm getting old enough that I don't know how many years I have left of climbing in and out of Zodiacs.... When I first retired and started traveling, my brother sent me a cartoon that showed an in-and-out basket on a desk, and one basket was labeled 'Now' and the other was labeled 'Never'. Every time I think 'Well, should I go on this trip or not?' I think, 'Well, I'd better go while I can."' Barbara especially enjoys hiking. "I 've been on several hiking trips in England, and I just went in Hawaii this past spring; and three years ago I did a trek in Nepal which almost finished me off, but I loved it."

Barbara's oldest child is Anne, born in 1952. Anne Fuller now lives in Juneau, Alaska, is married and has one daughter, Rebecca. She works for the state of Alaska's Department of Labor. She and her husband originally went to Alaska "when she was teaching school out in the bush. The school teaching seems to run in the family," Barbara claims. Her husband, Michael Sakarias, works in electronics and donates much of his time to the public radio station in Juneau.

Barbara's second child, Abigail, was born in 1954. "She's married and now lives in Gig Harbor, Washington. She graduated in chemical engineering from New Mexico, but is now manager of a small company, Point-Of-Sale Data Products, in Gig Harbor. And now, this year, she's going back to get her MBA." Her husband, Kenyon Cooke, is a photographer. They have one son, Samuel.

"Sally was next, born in 1958," Barbara continues. "She died of a brain tumor at age 13, while in middle school."

Barbara's youngest child, Ted, was born in 1962. "By that time we had moved to California, so he's the native Californian and he likes to point that out to us!" Ted majored in journalism and worked briefly for a newspaper, but is now a technical writer for UNISYS, where he rewrites computer programs that were done in the '50s and '60s, and provides technical documentation. "He interprets what the engineers think they mean," Barbara explains. He and his wife Kathy Marie (Leach) Fuller live in Aloha, Ore., near Portland. "They have a delightful new granddaughter, only a year old, and her name is Hannah, which I believe was my grandfather's grandmother's name."