Gelya Camp

Gelya Camp, born Gelya Russakoff Anderson in Houston on August 31, 1931, was a very private and independent-minded person who strongly influenced the lives of her three children and of the man who held her heart for over 69 married years, before that heart gave out on November 20, 2022. Born into the Great Depression and losing her father at age eight, thereby becoming the only child of a working, second-generation immigrant mother distant from other family, Gelya learned to meet many of her life’s early challenges on her own. Then she met Tom in a history class at the University of Texas in Austin, and the rest was, well, history. Gelya was majoring in English and Tom was a pre-Med student who, in contrast to the usual braggadocio of the football stars and scions who had pursued her, emphasized his humble upbringing working on an uncle’s farm, ROTC college scholarship, and beloved Model A Ford named Mehitabel that had seen better days. She was a knock out—a Bluebonnet Belle beauty queen—and smart as a whip. He was smitten; she had to be convinced. Two years of courtship and love poems later, on June 26, 1953, her Tom Cat caught his Snowbird. She would hear the poems he continued to pen and dedicate to her, read and re-read on birthdays and anniversaries, for the rest of her life. During their college years, Gelya and Tom independently discovered a Unitarian Universalist way to live and, after graduation, a framework within which to raise a family. Over her long life, Gelya engaged deeply in making a home where intellect and creativity, no less than hard work and civic engagement, were valued, encouraged—even expected—in the day-to-day mix and muddle of living. She expressed her own creativity in preparing special meals on a daily basis and planning events for the international folkdance groups that she and Tom founded and taught or joined as they danced their way from Texas to Oklahoma, Virginia, Romania, New Jersey, and New Mexico. She enjoyed changing up the newest house plans drawn by Tom every few years, coinciding with many of their moves until finally they chose a place, first in Austin and later in Lubbock, to walk the long-term care path together. Gelya often pondered the divergent but fulfilling paths taken by her grown children, taking satisfaction in the guiding role she played in shaping their values if not always their choices. She was an avid reader of literature who also kept up with events in the news, and she was attracted to beauty in its many forms, whether out in nature or in the art of human invention and imagination. Although she wholeheartedly identified with the role of homemaker-wife, she never stopped being intensely interested in the world around her. She expressed her opinions on a wide range of subjects through donations and volunteer work for organizations such as Common Cause and Neighbor for Neighbor. Most recently, Gelya enjoyed playing long-distance word games with her eldest daughter on an I-pad her son bought and taught her to use late in life. It opened a brief window on ancestry and living relatives and helped her rediscover the lyrics to old songs that she would sing nightly with Tom and monthly with their younger daughter visiting from out of town. In conversation, she took comfort in her husband’s and children’s accolades and accomplishments and in reminiscing about the diverse cultures and countries, as well as places and people closer to home, that she and Tom came to know during their decades of travel for pleasure and moves for work and retirement. She was a person of canny insights who learned, even late in life, to put them to use in loving ways, as Tom, the husband she had relied upon for enduring companionship, drifted into a shadow land of dementia, reversing roles and leading her to learn a new and difficult way to love. Gelya is survived by husband Thomas Felton Camp, Jr., children Marla, Jena, and Bryan Camp, Bryan’s spouse Susan Gillette, and grandchildren Lillian Hoa Camp, Lorenzo Xocoyotzin Tomás Guel-Camp, and Kunal Alexander Camp.