Roberta Brown Barnes

"I made a pact," Roberta Barnes insists. "After the death of the boys' mother, I was determined to see they did not sever their relationship to their family. It has been a fostering, caring relation. It paid off, I think. We always invited [Lucy's sister] Barbara to our family events, and vice versa, due to our proximity. Barbara and I hit it off pretty well. The year before last we all had Christmas together down on the beach."

Roberta still recalls when Dorothy Goodell learned who might be raising Lucy's sons. "She was upset, just as I would have been in her place," says Roberta. "'Who is this woman?' I'm sure she thought She flew out to California to check out the situation. To myself, I said the only thing to do is invite her to my home, to see how the children react with me, and let the chips fall where they may." The chips must have fallen in the right place. "Dorothy came for visits many, many times. Even my daughter Susan calls her Grandma Dorothy -- Susan had three grandmothers for a while.

"Dorothy was very interested in women's suffrage; women's rights has long been an active concern of mine, too."

Dorothy and Roberta were not alone on the issue of women's rights. "I still cherish a letter that [Barbara Fuller's daughter] Abby sent me after she had worked for a while in a non-traditional-for-females role. I want to thank you,' Abby wrote, 'for helping to pave the way for women in the work force.'"

In 1975, Ivan and Roberta moved the family to New Zealand for a year, while Ivan worked on chemical properties of geothermal water with the New Zealand equivalent of the U.S. Geological Survey. He also lectured in Australia.

During the next few years, they traveled to conferences where Ivan presented papers. Once Roberta and Ivan each presented a paper in Czechoslovakia. Other assignments took them to Poland, China, Russia, Japan, and Iceland.

"After that, I began winding down my activities at the Survey. The boys were teenagers then," Roberta says. Ivan continued his interests in volcanic activity, particularly after the Mount St. Helen's eruption, which produced worldwide geological effects. Ivan died in 1989 while on a temporary assignment in Portland, Ore., where he was also an adjunct professor in a graduate program at the Oregon Graduate Center in Beaverton.

Roberta, as well as the three sons and their step sister, all live in California. Roberta resides in Palo Alto.

Michael, born in 1959, is unmarried. He attended UC-Berkeley through his junior year, then joined Genentech, a genetic engineering company in San Francisco. He has since worked with other biotech firms. Michael is now living in Brisbane, working at Khepri, a biotechnology company in South San Francisco. "He has plans now to go back to school and finish his degree," Roberta adds.

Peter, born in 1961, graduated from San Diego State University in religious studies, and lives in San Diego. He was in real estate, loans brokering, and now in insurance. "He is an avid rock climber," Roberta says, "and is talented in art. He started out with a T-shirt with a rock climbing symbol he designed, showing it at rock-climbing shops, where he left a few for them to sell. It really took off. He's selling them now on the East Coast -- he has four designs he has copyrighted. 'I've made more money on these T-shirts than anything else,' he jokes. He and his wife Nora Bunnell Barnes are expecting their first child in March 1995."

Andrew, born in 1964, graduated from UC-Santa Barbara in geology. He recently moved from Newport Beach to Costa Mesa, and works in environmental geology at Dames and Moore, headquartered in Los Angeles. The company has offices throughout the U.S. and abroad. Andrew and his wife Mary Bilsborough Barnes -- "another Mary Barnes!" says Mary Westergaard Barnes -- have a daughter Carolina (pronounced Caroleena).

Susan Barnes, born in 1970, graduated from UC-Santa Barbara in 1994 in English literature. "She had been working at the Devereux Foundation for mentally disabled adults, and she was planning to accept a job with KJ Communications, Inc., a new company involved with media relations and marketing communications," Roberta says. "But she has decided to join the Peace Corps. She'll be spending two and a half years in Guinea Bissau (formerly Portugese Guinea)."

Roberta likes to tell an interesting Talbot family story about Michael. After high school, Michael took a job for a year on a barge out of New Orleans, servicing oil rigs in Gulf of Mexico. "When that ended," she says, "he got on his bike, pedaled his way up to Louisburg, N.C., where my sister Lois Wheless lives. He showed up at her doorstep a ragamuffin, totally unannounced, and very much in need of a bath. What a shock for her! After he rested, he headed north, to Hu and Mary's in Pennsylvania, where Hu fixed his bike. After that he went to Boston, where he stayed with Rachel Westergaard. She was getting on up in age, and living in a big house by herself. Michael and Rachel really hit it off! If he'd had the opportunity, he probably would have stayed there forever. Then he made his way to Urbana, to Dorothy Goodell's. Dorothy was horrified that he intended to keep going, and bought a plane ticket to Denver for him and his bike. Eventually he got to Portland, Ore., by pedaling and hitchhiking, and pedaled his way back to San Francisco."