Lindsay Noble Calkins, ’77, died on August 29, 2023, after an eighteen-month battle with ovarian cancer. Lindsay worked at Charles River Associates in Boston for two years after graduating from Wellesley; earned a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan; and moved to Cleveland to join the economics faculty at John Carroll University. She spent some of her years at John Carroll as associate dean of the Boler School of Business, yet she was happiest as a professor and proudest of her achievement in raising her four children, Sarah, Brad, Tricia, and Haley, while working full time. In addition to her children, Lindsay leaves her grandchildren George, Isla, Grace, and Evan as well as her sisters Becca and Vicki, who followed her to Wellesley (Class of 1986).
 
Margaret Atwood has written that “in the end, we’ll all become stories.” Our Lindsay stories are many and varied, and sharing them makes us smile and cry: working at Woolworth’s in the Natick Mall; playing tennis instead of studying during freshman finals week; early mornings in a crew shell on Lake Waban, where Lindsay rowed stroke; sunbathing on the roof and trips to the beach; driving to Boston/Cambridge in Lindsay’s VW bug, which stalled whenever she braked; fishtailing in her successor car (this one without working windshield wipers…) in a freak snowstorm in early May 1977, on our way to Newton to get our senior theses automatically copied and collated—we just made the deadline for submission; Lindsay running Bates all-house meetings as president; our Green Street apartment and the carrot diet that turned our fingers orange; getting snowed into that same apartment during the blizzard of February 1978—Lindsay climbed out a second-floor window to dig us out; the square dance in the barn the night before her wedding; more recent trips to the Cleveland Art Museum, where we realized that we were older than many of the artists; wine tasting and reminiscing in the Finger Lakes region before COVID; Lindsay’s courage these past months during our “Bates Mates” Zoom calls. Days before she died, Lindsay quipped to Ginny that she was finally using the philosophy side of her double major as she looked into the unknown. Her own philosophy of life is perhaps best understood in a quote from Michel de Montaigne that she gave Ann many years ago: “The most manifest sign of wisdom is continued happiness.” Thank you, dear friend, for modeling that way of being in the world. We will miss you always.
Lesley Baier, Ann Crigler, Ginny Donahue King, and Helen Plant Pratt