Barbara Fiske Calhoun
| Barbara Fiske Calhoun | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Isabelle Daniel Hall September 9, 1919 Tucson, Arizona |
| Died | April 28, 2014 (aged 94) Brookside Nursing Home, White River Junction, Vermont |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Barbara Hall B. Hall |
| Occupation | comic book artist, painter |
| Notable work |
Girl Commandos Quarry Hill Creative Center |
| Spouse(s) |
Irving Fiske (m. 1946 – div. 1976) Donald Calhoun (m. 1989–2009) |
| Children | Isabella Fiske (b. 1950) William Fiske (1954-2008) |
| Parent(s) | John Hall, Jr. and Isabelle Daniel Jones |
Barbara Fiske Calhoun (born Isabelle Daniel Hall; September 9, 1919 – April 28, 2014) was an American cartoonist and painter, one of the few female creators from the Golden Age of Comic Books. She co-founded Quarry Hill Creative Center, one of Vermont's oldest — and, in many ways, its most intellectual —alternative communities, on the Fiske family property, in Rochester, Vermont.
Isabelle Daniel Hall was born in Tucson, Arizona, on September 9, 1919, to Isabelle Daniel Jones and John Hall, Jr., both newspaper reporters. Both were scions of upper-class Southern families who uprooted after the Civil War and traveled West. Barbara's mother Isabelle, called "Belle," came from Asheville, North Carolina, where she had modeled for the papers, and was known, with her sisters Mary and Polly, as one of the "beautiful Jones sisters of Asheville." Around 1912, she and her brother A. V. (named after the patriarch of the family and the close friend of John C. Calhoun, Abraham W. Venable) who had tuberculosis, came to Tucson seeking the warmth of the desert and hoping it would cure or remit his illness.
John Hall, Jr., was from Alabama, though he had been born in Jacksonville, Florida. His mother, Lucy Herter Hall — a Yankee from Boston who had somehow defeated the prejudices that followed "The War Between the States" to marry John Hall, Sr., also had tuberculosis. After her husband, John Hall, Sr. died, Lucy came to Arizona with her three sons, John, Richard and Harry. John Hall and Belle met in Arizona during this time.
A.V. died in 1915, and no longer needed to care for her brother, Belle finally felt able to marry John, a few years younger than herself. Belle and John married on March 20, 1918, and "Babs," from the Scots word for "baby," was born in September the following year. Sadly, her father was caught up in a late wave of Spanish Influenza and died in February 1920, when Babs was only six months old. She grew up with her mother (who never remarried), her aunt Mary (Polly) Caldwell, who had also moved West to live with her sister while her husband worked as an engineer in various places around the world, and two cousins. John's mother Lucy lived on long enough for "Babs" to know her, but she was never allowed to touch or kiss her grandmother.
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