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A memorial for Laurel Locke Hobbs will be held on October 14th at her house.
The following is the eulogy that Jerry Hobbs gave at her funeral ceremony on September 15th 2007.
You all know Laurel did some amazing things. But you may not know how many amazing things she did, and how amazing they were.
You may have heard of the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die. She saw them.
She began as a miracle. If they hadn't learned about the Rh-factor just a few years before she was born, she wouldn't have survived more than a day or two.
Every minute of life after that was precious to her, and there wasn't a minute when she wasn't going someplace, seeing something, or creating something to make the world a little brighter.
She discovered the world outside California at the age of 20 when she spent a summer touring Europe, and after that, there was no stopping her. She worked in Yosemite and Yellowstone and knew them well. She hiked in the High Sierras, in the Grand Canyon, on most of the Appalachian Trail between Pennsylvania and Vermont, in the Cotswolds in England, in the Black Hills of Germany, in the Bernese Alps, and among the alligators, tapirs, and giant river otters in the Pantanal in Brazil. She climbed Mount Kila- manjaro before people did that sort of thing.
She worked as a secretary for a shady Financial company in Geneva; fortunately only the CEO went to prison, not the secretaries. She wrote about her travels for the Dinuba Sentinel. She was a buyer of women's clothes for Sears, and a crafts editor at Women's Day Magazine in New York City. Her designs appeared in national magazines. At the age of 40, she took up ice skating and was actually in performances. In recent years she imparted her love and knowledge of ber arts to senior citizens in Mountain View. She hung out in Ibiza in Spain before it became trendy. She travelled from London to Capetown in a Land Rover. She went through rebel territory in northern Kenya in a military convoy. She travelled across the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the 1960s when few foreigners ventured there. She hitchhiked around Europe, as far north as Hammerfest and North Cape in Norway. She lived on a Greek island, shopping everyday for bread and tomatoes and yogurt. She was on the rst available tour to China when it opened up in 1979, when everyone was still dressed in blue and filled the streets with bicycles. She was the one who kept the family alive, healthy, and sane on trips around Eastern Europe when the boys were 6 and 10, and around West Africa when they were 10 and 14 (and traumatized), and around Indonesia when they were 12 and 16. She visited the ancient cities of Uzbekistan. Everyone nowadays wants to tramp around Tuscany and Provence. She knew them intimately. She never stopped. In the last year of her life, in failing health, she made trips to Oaxaca at a time when the city was in rebellion and the Mexican police were afraid to go there, and to Petra in Jordan when the Middle East was on the verge of blowing up. In the last two months of her life, in spite of diffculty breathing in high altitude, she insisted on seeing two of her favorite places, Yosemite and Santa Fe, one more time.
Think of a place that evokes faraway and exotic mystery: Samarkand, Bali, Singapore, Timbuktu, Shanghai, Siberia, Istanbul, Bombay, Kathmandu, Calcutta, Marrakech. She went there. Think of the great natural wonders of the world: Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, Iguazu Falls, the Greenland icecap, the Sahara desert, the Blue Nile Falls, the Matterhorn, Mount Everest, Mount Fuji. She saw them. Think of the classical manmade wonders of the world: the pyramids of Tenochtitlan and Tikal, the precip- itous ruins of Machu Picchu, the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Stonehenge, the prehistoric cave paintings of Dordogne, the classical ruins of Italy and Greece, the Kremlin, the Roman ruin of Leptis Magna on the shores of the Mediterranean in Libya, the pyramids and sphinx of Egypt, the ruins of Pe- tra excavated from red cli s, the high mortarless walls of Zimbabwe, the Taj Mahal, Ankor Wat in Cambodia covered in jungle, and the Great Wall of China. She was there. The great cities of the world she knew well. She lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Geneva, and Tokyo. She visited Paris 16 times. She knew London, Florence, Venice, Rome, Athens, Rio, Buenos Aires, and Sydney.
She rode a horse in Mineral King, a donkey on Santorini, a camel in Mali, and an elephant in Cambodia. She rode a bike in Nantucket and a bus across Australia, and flew to Timbuktu in a Russian cargo plane. She hitchhiked across the desert in Libya to visit the ancient oasis of Ghadames, in a Land Rover driven by 5 men intent on chasing gazelles across the sand dunes. She saw a hundred movies a year, in addition to going to every concert, play, and art exhibit that came anywhere near where she happend to be. She watched the firefall in Yosemite, celebrated Mardi Gras in New Orleans, bought hashish from a man with a violin case in a back room in Tangiers, studied ikebana flower arranging in Tokyo, took in the scene in Greenwich Village on mescalin, went to a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, witnessed men going into trances at a celebration in Bali, and circled the globe to attend the Sydney Olympics.
She visited 105 countries, touring the 105th in March of this year as cancer consumed her.
Negative things happened in her life, but she had a gift for putting the negative behind her, assessing the current situation rationally, and moving ahead with a positive attitude to achieve whatever the new situation allowed. This continued to the end. In her final few weeks, she realized there would soon come a time when all she could do was lie in bed. She didn't despair. She had us move her backyard fountain to where she could hear it through the window. She knew she could still listen to music, and the morning of the day before she passed away, she organized her CD collection so Thomas could put them on her iPod.
She had many friends, more friends than she knew. She felt a bit guilty that they were doing so much for her in her illness when she thought she had given them so little before. But they explained that her enthusiasm had made them live life more fully. As Pat Kalish said, "Oh, without Laurel life would be a bore!"
Her greatest accomplishment and the one she cherished the most was raising two of the finest young men in the world, William and Thomas. She gloried in their successes and revelled in the stories of their adventures. A measure of her success in this is the way they dropped everything and rushed to her side when when they learned she was ill. She was bursting with pride when William married Karen, a wonderful, beautiful young woman, and it was one of the greatest sources of satisfaction to her in her nal months that she lived long enough to hold her grandson Oliver.
She was an artist in textiles, in pottery, in interior decoration, in parenting, and in life. She made the world a more beautiful and more exciting place while she was here. She left us too soon.
