Enid Schantz
1938-2011

My wife, Enid Cheavens (rhymes with heavens) Schantz (virtually no one can pronounce it correctly), was born in Lima, Peru, on Nov. 6, 1938 (she would wince when I called her my “little Peruvian spitfire” when she was upset) and died at home in Lyons, Colorado, on Aug. 10, 2011 from pancreatic cancer with me, as usual, at her side. For reasons that escape me, many people had problem with the name “Enid,” calling her names like Edith. It was also her mother’s name, no doubt reflecting her Welsh heritage. I usually called her simply “E”.  Her father was a mining engineer who had met her mother who had left her native Texas for the one great adventure of her life, a move that still astonishes anyone that remembers her.  Since her father was born in Mexico, his parents being Baptist missionaries, Enid frequently had trouble making officials accept the fact that she was a natural born American citizen but had a signed document from then Secretary of State Cordell Hull to prove it.

The Cheavens family, including older sister Sallie, moved around quite a bit after returning to the United States when Enid was two, including small mining towns like Bagdad, Arizona, and Boulder City, Nevada, before setting first in Tacoma, Washington, and finally San Carlos, south of San Francisco, where Enid graduated from high school in 1956 (“We’re the class that really clicks!”). She attended UCLA, starting out as an art major before realizing that her talents lay elsewhere and transferred to the English Department, earning her B.A. in 1960. Her real love was the written word, so it should surprise no one that she never learned to ride a bicycle, having traded hers in on a bookcase when she was in elementary school. After graduating, she worked in Los Angeles and various other places in California for outfits (she used to shudder) like Carnation (where only the men were allowed to smoke at their desks and no one was allowed to have a Kennedy bumper sticker) and the Atomic Energy Commission. She married her college boyfriend but the two divorced amicably (she even co-signed his auto loan) after six years.

She was living in Berkeley when she decided to attend the famed Iowa Writers Workshop at Iowa, a move partially financed by her widowed mother who thought she might meet a man there who could “support” her, obviously having no idea of the earning potential of Workshop graduates. It was there on Aug. 31. 1968,  that she met me, just back in the U.S.  from two years with the Peace Corps in Turkey.  By chance we were assigned the same graduate advisor, who was said to be one of the leading Italian-American novelists of the day. Outside his office I found myself chatting with an undergraduate girl whose incessant cheerful babblings led me to dub her “the chirper.” My eyes instead wandered to another, somewhat older woman outside the office door who was chatting with an undergraduate male in thick-framed  Buddy Holly glasses. He turned out to be future mystery writer Max Allan Collins who would later claim credit for bringing us  together, though I maintain it was my desire to get away from the “chirper” that led me to Enid. The next day we met again by chance when we were required to register by the last two digits of our social security numbers. Though we frequently saw each other over the next two months (we both had novelist Richard Yates as our advisor) we saw other people romantically. Then she invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner with her sister’s family. Enid’s four-year-old niece spent much of the evening curled up in my lap asking if I were Enid’s boyfriend. Her question proved to be prophetic. It was the man who came to dinner all over again, since I never left,  maintaining it was because Enid was the first girlfriend I ever had who served me a green vegetable (broccoli).

We were married on Aug. 8, 1969, in our backyard in Iowa City in a nearly complete Writers Workshop wedding, the blood test having been administered to by a doctor who was in the Workshop, the ceremony presided over by an excommunicated Irish Catholic priest (also in the Workshop), and the witnesses another member of the Workshop and his wife. The vows were borrowed from a ceremony conducted in another Workshop marriage. I was just shy of 25, Enid just shy of 31. My age was quite important, as this was at the height of the Vietnam War. A fluke in the draft law, allowed me to attend one year of graduate school, the deferment having been eliminated by LBJ a year or so earlier but men who had been subject to the draft during that period (mainly a few hundred Peace Corps and Vista volunteers) got a year’s extension.  However, the odd thing about the rule was that you had to be drafted to qualify, which I was, but was told by the Colorado State Draft Board not to report to the train station in my home town of Ft. Morgan, explaining that eventually they would explain my absence. We referred to this period as my fugitive days. What this suggested to us was it was time to get out of Dodge, or at least Iowa City, and head for New York City where I was already certified to teach in public school.

On the way to New York City, I applied for a teaching job at an odd school called the George Junior Republic, which turned out to have been the model for Boys Town. It was a fascinating place, a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed teens of both sexes located on 1500 acres near the hamlet of Freeville (also the home of the Freeville Spiritualist Assembly). I taught history there. Enid applied for an editing job at nearby Cornell in Ithaca, eventually joining the staff of the Communications Department in the Agricultural (public) half of that Ivy League University. She worked as an aid but also taught magazine writing. One of her assignments was to write a paper for one of the professors on waste management. The paper won the professor a major award and a five hundred dollar check. Enid received neither credit nor money.  I had already resigned my teaching position to work full-time as a rare and used bookdealer. Enid and I had been spending every weekend scouring book barns and stores in rural New York looking for uncommon out of print books in all fields. One day, Enid came home in tears, saying she couldn’t stand going into Cornell one more day. I told her to quit and she did. (Ironically, we completely forgot that she had put two thousand dollars into a retirement fund, a fact we did not realize for some 30 years until we got a notification that the account was now worth more than $50,000. Remember her mother’s unrealistic expectations for the ability of Workshop graduates to understand how to make money?) We both turned to bookselling and publishing fulltime and never really looked back. A history of our business can be found on this website www.ruemorguepress.com.

During this period we were renting a farmhouse on 40 acres a few miles outside Freeville. The original part of the house was built in the 1820s and if you went into the basement you could still see the bark on the logs that supported the pine floorboards. We were renting because it was a bad real estate market and we weren’t going to get stuck with an unsaleable house, even though the price was only $12,000 to buy it. Our landlord even offered to apply half our rent to the purchase price anytime we changed our mind. We were too smart to fall for that. When we told him we were heading to Colorado, he put the house on the market for $28,000 and it sold in three days. Again, you might recall Enid’s mother’s monetary expectations for Workshop graduates. The day before we left we held a massive estate sale, since we figured it would be easy  to replace all the heavy antique furniture we had bought at weekend auctions, only to discover that prices in Colorado for the same antiques were quadruple. I won’t mention Enid’s mother’s hopes again.

Once in Boulder we resumed our bookselling business but also became involved in local politics. Enid managed the city council campaign for an old college buddy of mine while I did the media. Eventually, we were to work many campaigns. It wasn’t too long before I was in great demand to do the media (mainly write and design ads) but it did take up too much of our time. Enid then stepped in and did what I couldn’t—say no to candidates and campaigns. But in the mid-1990s, the one campaign we couldn’t say no to was an anti-second hand smoke ballot issue. This was years before such campaigns became commonplace and this one would be the toughest in the nation, since it would ban smoking in bars as well as other public places. Critics laughed and said it couldn’t be done. We won in a near landslide. It was the campaign we were most proud of, since it was the only one whose result truly saved lives.

Other than books, her other passions were making baskets, especially from pine needles, watching her daughter and then her granddaughter play softball, collecting mermaids, and beachcombing looking for sea glass. She embraced this last hobby after we made several trips to various island paradises, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico. While she loved the beautiful mountain valley above Lyons where we moved to after selling our house in Boulder in 2004, she always longed to visit the sea.  It was on a beach in Hawaii that the picture of Enid on this page was taken, shortly after she declared: “This is one of the best days of my life.” But it was Puerto Rico that she truly loved and we had discussed the possibility of purchasing a second home there shortly before we found out about the cancer.

It was in Boulder that our daughter Sarah was born on June 11, 1976. We had put off kids for a long time until Enid decided we had waited long enough. She became pregnant almost immediately (well, immediately) but didn’t think that possible and thought perhaps she had the mumps. She was 36 when she got pregnant and 37 when Sarah was born and had to endure being called an “elderly prima parent.” Natural childbirth wasn’t as common in those days but Enid opted to go that route, telling the doctor and me to ignore pleas for drugs no matter how much she pleaded. She did plead, we did refuse, and she was glad, as she was able to call her astonished sister minutes after the delivery to report the good news. She left this life with the same style, opting for hospice care at home and helping to plan her own cremation. As she had bathed Sarah as a baby, Sarah (with friends) washed her body and laid her in a cardboard casket decorated with a mermaid, the last one she would add to her collection, along with flowers from the garden, last letters from friends, and photos from her life. Family and friends transported the casket to the crematorium for a final goodbye. The mermaid on the top of the casket was hand-sewn with the scales made from mica gathered from the mountainside near our house. The people at the crematorium said it made her ashes sparkle.

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