Felicia Campbell, UNLV professor who studied gambling and pop culture, dies at 89
Felicia Campbell had been employed as an English teacher, a young PhD student in english from Wisconsin and a former marine but she became intrigued by the gamblers, particularly the older ones. She wondered why they were playing, and what did they reap from it because they didn't intend to win in any meaningful way?
As she discovered, it is culture that they acquired a zest for life and a rise of self-esteem. One unemployed and depressed gambler said the slot machines made her feel as though she was being watched.
For her work on the beneficial consequences of gambling, Campbell's findings were the grist in which she acknowledged that the gambling instinct is the same danger propensity that propels humanity forward, scientific discoveries and the moon. Her elderly gamblers, as she wrote in the futurist in 1976, were "a gallant breed that makes a option for life itself, far from losing its scant wealth gambling".
Campbell died July 27 at a Las Vegas hospital. She was 89 and continues to lecture, the university's longest-serving professor. The cause was COVID-19 problems, as her daughter, Tracy Tuttle, said.
Campbell's classes in had become diverse. She taught detective novels and chaos theory, science fiction, asian and african American literature, and pop culture.
"She is so unconservative, she functions very much like an open window", - Charles adams, an English department colleague, was quoted as saying in a university profile in 2016. "In many ways, she permitted fresh air to flow through the university".
Campbell was born on 18 April 1931 in Cuba City, Wisconsin. Her parents, Frank Churchill Florine, a pharmacist, and Irene (Bower) Florine, ran the Drugstore and Pharmacy 'Florine and Son's', where their daughter worked as a soda jerk. She joined the marines after graduating from the University of Wisconsin with undergraduate and master's degrees in English because, she said later, she decided to see how she could do it.
After six months Campbell left with an honorable discharge, not because she wasn't up to the challenge but because, as she told her daughter, she was annoyed by inefficiencies in her unit. She threw her Marine's duffel bag out of the window as she boarded the train on her way home.
Campbell was the founder and executive director of the Far West Popular and American culture association and the organizer of its meeting, held annually in Las Vegas, with programs that may include a symposium on Frank Zappa or the Texas armadillo cult (featuring live armadillos), a night devoted to Tarzan (featuring Johnny Weissmuller's appearance) or a workshop on bumper stickers semiotics.
Campbell herself was a risk-taker, but not at the gaming tables. She filed for a back pay after she learned she and her peers at the university were paying less than the men. She used some of the funds to fund a 300-mile trip across the Himalayas after the lawsuit was settled almost 10 years later, even though she had never camped before and at 52 she wasn't sure she would succeed.
She, like her elderly gamblers, had a life-affirming and life-altering experience by the end. As she told a local newspaper during the voyage, she had risked her own neck to test her hypotheses.
"The bottom line was that risk-taking could be a preservative impulse, breaking the monotony, allowing normal people to control their own destiny, to be intensely alive for a moment".
Felicia Campbell
