Carol (Kay) McCabe

Kay was born on May 20, 1919, in Sacramento, California. She was the eldest child of Charles and Mabel Pound Adams, and spent her youth in Sacramento with her sisters, Patricia and Ruth.

As a child, Kay would listen to her mother, who was one of the founders of Pacific Yearly Meeting, as she told of the early days of Quakerism, of a history which included great-great-great-grandfathers and aunts, of sufferings and persecutions, and clear purposes and direction. After coming to this country, Kay’s ancestors escaped to Canada, because they would not take up arms during the Revolution. Living one’s life from a center of religious conviction was a model continuously repeated in Quaker history and family stories.

Kay graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Economics. There she met George McCabe while singing at a college bonfire, notably because they were both singing loudly off-key. George and Kay were married on July 4, 1941, at Hidden Villa Ranch in Los Altos Hills, California.

George and Kay moved to Santa Rosa in 1956, where they raised four children (Judith, Joan, Dori and Richard). Kay was one of the founding members of Redwood Forest Friends Meeting, offering her living room on Melitta Road as a location for Meeting for Worship.

Her daughter Judith recalls that Kay “...was always bringing people home to stay with us.” At various times, the McCabes sheltered and treated as family a Native American girl, a cousin kicked out of his house because he refused to get a haircut, and a youngster whose mother had died.

In 1958 the McCabe family provided a safe home for Melba Pattillo. Melba was a 17-year-old black teen from Arkansas who had been marked for death by the Ku Klux Klan because she was one of nine black teens (The Little Rock Nine) registered by the NAACP for classes at Little Rock's white-only Central High School.

From the beginning, Kay displayed a keen eye for identifying issues that impacted those around her. Kay approached every task with an all-consuming passion. At an early age, she served as a clerical assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt. Following her move to Santa Rosa, Kay became active in the faculty wives' association of Sonoma State University and the League of Women Voters of Sonoma County.

In the process of parenting her children, Kay became invested in educating the young. While George attended Columbia University in New York, Kay started a pre-school for other student parents. Later, she was instrumental in helping to start the Head Start program in Sonoma County, and she later served as a director of the Job Corps training facility in Calistoga. Kay used to say, “Education, that’s the key to everything.”

On a trip to Ireland in 1996, Kay became fascinated with a moving celebration there to honor the River Shannon, and she felt compelled to honor the Russian River, which she kayaked and loved. After her return to Sonoma County, she began the process of organizing a similar celebration of the Russian River and all its tributaries. In 1998, Kay, along with a number of other community members, started the Russian River Watershed Celebration, an event for which she would dedicate her time over the next six years. With the assistance of other environmentalists, her celebration was implemented in many of the small towns surrounding the river. Amid pomp and circumstance, at age 83, she canoed along the streams on the opening day of festivities.

Kay lived at Mirabel Lodge in Forestville for the last six years of her life. She was blessed with 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. She died peacefully in her sleep on April 19, 2014, just a few weeks shy of her 95th birthday.