Joanne O’Kelly Ferguson died peacefully on Saturday evening, the 15th of January 2022 at The Forest at Duke, in Durham, North Carolina. She was 91 years old.
She was predeceased by her husband of seventy years, Oliver Watkins Ferguson, who died on the 4th of April, 2019.
Joanne O’Kelly was born in Morristown, New Jersey, on April 9th, 1930, the younger sister of Mary Pat O’Kelly, daughter of R. Edwin O’Kelly and Jessie Freyschlag O’Kelly. The family moved from Succasunna, New Jersey to Murfreesboro, Tennessee where Edwin taught Chemistry at the Tennessee College for Women. When Edwin was diagnosed with a brain tumor, the girls’ mother moved the family back to Jessie’s home town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Jessie’s mother and father still lived. After Edwin’s death in 1938, Jessie earned her Master’s degree in English from the University of Arkansas and took a job there as an instructor in the English Department (Jessie taught at the University from 1944-1968).
Joanne matriculated at the University of Arkansas in 1948, where she met Oliver Ferguson. The two were married on August 18th, 1949. In 1950, Oliver and Joanne moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where Oliver received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois in 1954 and Joanne completed her undergraduate degree in English (B.A., Highest Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, 1953). She also took her first position in publishing, accepting a job in the College Bulletins Division of the University of Illinois Press (1953-54).
In 1955, the couple moved to Columbus, Ohio, where Oliver held a position on the English faculty at the Ohio State University and Joanne worked in the OSU library. Their first child, John Andrews, was born in Columbus in 1956. Joanne and Oliver moved to Durham, North Carolina in 1957, where Oliver had accepted a position as an Associate Professor at Duke University. Their second son, Charles Edward, was born in Durham in 1959. Joanne spent the boys’ early years at home, caring for her young family; but after John and Charles had started elementary school, Joanne took a position, in 1965, as a part-time proofreader at the Duke University Press. The job proved interesting and flexible in the variety and scheduling of its demands–fitting perfectly into her life as a wife, a mother, and friend to an expanding circle of Durham neighbors and young Duke faculty families. As her sons grew older, her position at Duke Press expanded: she became a copy-editor at the Press, then an acquisitions editor, and then Editor-in-Chief. She was a brilliant, imaginative, creative editor, working in a convivial circle of extraordinary creative talent gathered at the Press from the late 1960s through the 1980s.
When the American Dance Festival moved its headquarters to Durham in 1978, Joanne responded by creating and fostering a remarkable series of books about dance. She pursued her lifelong interest in gardening not only literally, at 1212 Arnette Avenue, where she and her family lived from 1967 until 2006 but also in the books she cultivated at Duke Press: her series of gardening books, with a particular focus on Southern gardens and the regional history of horticulture, became another bright page in the Press’s catalog. Her astute, deeply informed investments in the work of contemporary American writers manifested itself, too, in the Duke Press lists; she also augmented the Press’s offerings in American (particularly Southern) history. To read her correspondence from these years is to hear a voice at once assured and inviting–idiosyncratic, lyrical, witty, compelling, warm, and vivid. It is little wonder that authors wanted to publish books with her: among other things, they would be assured of a continuing exchange of letters with their editor.
Joanne retired from the Duke Press in 1990, shortly before Oliver’s retirement from Duke’s English Department in 1993. In their retirement, the couple traveled regularly to Europe and the U.K. with a dear family friend, Charles Wheeler (retired from the English faculty at Ohio State); the three also continued to spend weeks each summer at Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Joanne continued to garden, to read widely and avidly, to bake bread and cook fine meals, to attend dance concerts at Duke, to entertain friends in Durham, to delve into genealogy. She and Oliver were devoted grandparents to Henry and Margaret, children of John and Gale Whittier-Ferguson, whose lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, were enriched by visits from Oliver and Joanne.
In 2006 Joanne and Oliver sold their house in Durham and moved into The Forest at Duke, where they continued friendships begun long ago in Durham and found sustaining pleasures in new circles of friends made among the residents at The Forest. Joanne delighted in her last editorial position: she was editor of The Forester (the newspaper of The Forest) for a decade, in which capacity she interviewed staff and residents, newcomers and old-timers, with an editor’s keen eye for the powerful story, the memorable phrase, the expressive photograph. She held up to her readers their own fascinating lives and showed them what equal fascinations lay around them in their community. She continued what she had been doing all her adult life: finding and publishing — literally “making public” — that which was worthy of attention but which otherwise might have escaped notice.
In this vein, and as a garland for her memory, consider this passage from a letter she wrote to the writer Allen Lacy, who quotes it in his book, The Garden in Autumn:
“We went to Jersey in mid-October and during the three-day visit, even as we watched, the maples began to flame. It took me back to my New Jersey girlhood from which my most intense memories are of fall and pumpkins and Halloween and red and yellow maples. We came back home to an entirely different world. The tips of the oaks were just beginning to redden. But at that moment the shad tree was perfection. It grows out of the base of a huge white oak, and it wasn’t until it made its quiet way up to a second-story bedroom window and covered it with its lacy branches, that I paid it the attention it deserves. Its diameter is no more than six inches, and its blossoms in spring are what is known as insignificant, followed by a few berries to each twig. Its summer color remains a tender spring green. The leaves are no thicker than a few layers of tissue paper, with the result that the pale yellow leaves of fall are translucent. The delicate color is at its best just as the sun is dropping below the horizon, when its unearthly beauty erases quite easily the memory of the gaudy maples. It is rather like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, who is thought to be somewhat plain in contrast to the vivid presence of the other characters, until one becomes gradually aware of her fine eyes and quiet grace. The mockingbird eyes us through the window and eats the berries one by one. It’s an agreeable sight.”
Joanne is survived by her sister, Mary Pat O’Kelly, of Ann Arbor, Mich., her sons, Charles Ferguson (Manhattan, N.Y.), and John Whittier-Ferguson and her daughter-in-law Gale Whittier-Ferguson (of Ann Arbor, Mich.), and her grandchildren, Henry Whittier-Ferguson (Portland, Ore.), Margaret Whittier-Ferguson (Boston, Mass.), and Clara Hudson Packard (Pittsburgh, Pa.), as well as her niece, Susan Gass (Ann Arbor, Mich.), and her nephews, Richard Gass (Cincinnati, Ohio), and Robert Gass (Chicago, Ill.).
— The News & Observer, Jan. 29, 2022.