Mavis Ruth Campbell

Mavis Ruth Campbell was born January 14, 1924, in Indianapolis, Indiana where she spent her childhood. She was a fraternal twin and the only daughter of Raymond L. King and Anna Ruth (Stoxen) King.

By vocation, she was a magazine editor, writer and school teacher. Mavis began her career in the Chicago area. She attended Wheaton College 1941-43, later studying at Northwestern University in Evanston and taking a degree from Butler University in her hometown. Her writing talent caught the attention of the Ladies Home Journal for which she wrote a four-part series. She was a contributing writer and staff editor for Sunday magazine in Chicago, later titled Christian Life. In 1950, she moved to Southern California where she obtained her teaching certificate and taught elementary school over a period of 30 years.

While teaching, she became active in the outreach of Hollywood’s First Presbyterian Church where she met her husband Sam Campbell, a newspaper editor. They married in 1953, and in the following years became the mother of three daughters and a son.

However, from that point, Mavis focused her interest on homemaking and child-rearing, while hosting Bible studies and church meetings in her home in Garden Grove, CA.

In the mid-1970’s with the arrival of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees to the U.S., she gathered up household supplies and visited the crude facilities that the government had provided for the newcomers. She wrote a newspaper report that began, “When a Cambodian baby cries, it sounds just like an American baby.”

Bannered under eight columns by the Orange County Register, the article reached 240,000 households and was followed by an outpouring of blankets, clothing and food from the private sector, along with closer government attention to the plight of Cambodian refugees. Short weeks later, she was able to report for the newspaper that the camps were now well supplied and livable under the circumstances.

On retiring from teaching at age 56, Mavis worked on the membership drive of the Christian Women’s Club while she was living in Fullerton, CA. She wrote and illustrated a newsletter for the club. Attendance rose from 125 to 300 per meeting. In 1983 after her husband’s retirement, the couple moved to Fayetteville, AR where she continued her volunteer work with the Christian Women’s Club of Northwest Arkansas. In her retirement years she also enjoyed crafting and spending time with her grandchildren.

In her later years she was plagued by ill health, and spent her last 7 years in the home of her daughter Melinda and son-in-law, Harold.

At age 91, Mavis passed away peacefully at home on August 17, 2015, in the presence of her loved ones.

She was preceded in death by her husband, Sam, in 2005, and her son, Sammy, in 1994, as well as her parents and two brothers.

Mavis Campbell is survived by her three daughters and sons-in-law: Melinda and Harold Craun of Sapulpa, OK, Lee Ann and Gahlen Crawford of Colorado Springs, CO, and Robin and Colin Byers of Fayetteville, AR, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.