The spirit of Cara M. Spicer of Gary, Indiana moved on to a new dimension at the Hospice of the Calumet Area in Munster, Indiana on August 27, 2011.
Cara was born on September 22, 1953 in Fairfield, Illinois. In the course of her life Cara was a singer, an artist, millwright apprentice, hair stylist/colorist, salon manager and adjunct professor of Public Affairs at Indiana University Northwest. Over the past five years she worked tirelessly as Program Officer at the Legacy Foundation of Lake County assisting non-profit organizations to find the resources to make their dreams come true as well as involving herself in the development of new programs to benefit the people of Northwest Indiana. Many years the President of Friends of Emerson, she was also an alumnus of Leadership Northwest Indiana.
She was a daughter, wife, sister, mother and grandmother survived by her mother, Eva Marvel, wife of Bill Marvel of Fairfield, Illinois, husband Steve Spicer of Gary, Indiana, son Sam (Nicole King) Spicer of Munster, Indiana and their children Annabelle Rose and Phineas James, sister and brother-in-law Jeanne and Cedric Johnson of Superior, Wisconsin and their sons Scott and Chuck, as well as numerous aunts, uncles and cousins.
She was preceded in death by her father Charles McManis of West Bend, Wisconsin.
A celebration of her life, love and work will be held in approximately one month's time. Interment of her ashes will be at Shrewsbury Cemetery in Mill Shoals, Illinois.
Memorial donations in her name can be sent to the Legacy Foundation of Lake County, 1000 E. 80th Place, Suite 302 South, Merrillville, Indiana 46410 where a scholarship fund will be established in her name.
Published in Post-Tribune on August 30, 2011
**********************************************
Cara's Story by husband Steve Spicer
Cara's story is not just about her disease, although that will come. Cara's story is about her. Many who know her only marginally or maybe not at all have gotten only glimpses here on the CaringBridge site through the little stories that we have told. So I write this story of her incredibly full life for you, for her friends, for her grandchildren and hopefully their grandchildren.
When I first met Cara she'd completed 3 years of college. She's told me stories of both her upbringing and college years, but I wasn't with her, obviously. She was raised in Milwaukee and in West Bend, Wisconsin and had gone to both the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Viterbo College in LaCrosse. At Viterbo she was into theater and vocal music, training her voice under a vocal coach. She has relative perfect pitch. Her junior year in college was at Madison where she got involved with Broom Street Theater, then run by the brilliant Joel Gersmann. BTS, which started as street theater in the mid 60's and still is around today, was a totally iconoclastic theater poking fun at everything and everyone, especially theater itself. When I first saw her she was doing high leg kicks across the stage in the role of the Virgin Mary in Song of Bernadette. Oh, by the way, she did the art work for that as well. She has the artist's talent, a talent that she never really studied or developed. There was too much else to do! One bored night in her freshman dorm she painted a self-portrait that is striking. The colors in painting she adores. Our son's middle name is for Vincent Van Gogh.
Then, in the summer following her junior year she met me, for better or for worse. It must have been better, because she stuck with me for years. Our first date was August 8, 1974, my birthday and the day Nixon announced he was resigning. Her father, a staunch Nixon supporter, couldn't find much to like about Cara's choice of a man. He wasn't too thrilled when Cara married me and we had Sam either, but Sam softened his heart in a big hurry. Cara was mom for a few years. We moved to Gary, Indiana and after a year or so she went to work at US Steel in the coke plant as a millwright apprentice. She was fascinated with the scope and scale of the mill, but after a year and a half quit on my urging because she could not get the smell of coke out of her hair.
So she started a singing career. She got an agent; put together a band called "Cara's Last Chance Band" and played fairs in the summer and gigs in Chicago during the winter. "Country Crossover" was the style. Linda Ronstadt, Emmy Lou Harris: that sort of music. That and a trip to Nashville to do a demo tape didn't pan out so she started looking around for something else to do. I'd given her a book called How to Cut Your Hair and Everybody Else's or something like that and she told me she'd always been interested in cosmetology, so off to Merrillville Beauty College she went. By the early 1980's she'd already developed a good client base of loyal clients who were sad to see her go when she went on to management.
The rest of the decade, the nineteen eighties, she worked for John Amico's franchise chain of Hair Performers salons driving sometimes five hundred miles a week to help managers and owners set up and manage their salons. She did that until 1991 when she was offered, and took, the job as manager of the Marshall Fields salon in Chicago. Then and now one of the biggest salons in the country, it was 20,000 square feet, had a staff of 100 and serviced 1500 to 2000 clients a week, from "blue-hairs" from the North Shore to working girls getting a manicure on their lunch break.
Eleven hours a day including the train trip back and forth to Chicago put a little stress into her life. I told her she needed a hobby. One day I looked out the kitchen window and she was in the back with a dull hatchet trying to chop down a crappy old pine tree way in the back of our 200 foot deep lot. When I asked her what she was doing she said she hated that tree and was going to make a garden. Stacks of books later, grow light racks in the basement to plant things from seed, borders, mulch, plants and we had a garden. She went at it with a passion.
Cara worked for almost ten years at Marshall Fields in Chicago. She loved doing the crossword puzzles on the train and watching Millennium Park being built. She loves color and hair coloring gave her a good use for it. One time she flew to Seattle to attend a three day seminar given by Latrice Eisman, the Pantone guru of fashion and decorating color. But her job was eliminated in down-sizing by the salon before the park was finally finished. That disappointed her more than losing her job, for now she could go onto another adventure thanks to that blessing in disguise.
It was during this period that Sam began going to Emerson Visual and Performing Arts School here in Gary. The first time she heard the choir sing she was "blown away" and became instantly involved in the Friends of Emerson, vowing to do everything she could do to make this school visible on a local and national scale. She served as it's president for many years. She traveled around the country to various Performing Arts Schools, met with architects and educators to learn what she could that could be applied to Emerson. And she made some life long friends along the way.
So it was back to school. Transfer those credits from Madison to IU Northwest. Cut hair to make buck. Develop another client base of loyal customers. She finished her degree with an emphasis on anthropology, saying all along that her work at Marshall Fields was a case study in anthropology what with all the diverse ethic groups on her staff and among the clientele. She loved it, and couldn't stop. She entered the Master's program at IU in the School of Public Administration and Environmental Affairs (SPEA). She became an intern at the Field Museum and wrote an article for their journal based on her research one summer. She graduated in 2006 and was immediately teaching at IU Northwest. Not much money in that though. Those years were exciting and lovely. Sam was married and Annabelle was born in 2006.
Then in 2007 she was offered a job that she poured all her energy into: program officer at the Legacy Foundation. Her job is to work with non-profit organizations in Lake County helping them develop their organizations and their grant applications. It's a job she loves and found very hard to let go of. Well into her hospitalization she worried about her work, dreaming about it at times. When she was in the hospital in January of 2011 she had her laptop and phone and worked every day. She worked with pain until June, coming home every night, sitting down and asking only for a glass of wine and a little TV before bed. And then up and off to work the next day.
It all started really in December of 2009 when a routine physical discovered a tumor on her kidney that had to come out immediately along with the kidney. That happened on our 35th wedding anniversary, December 14, 2009. The pathology reports were clear and she went back to work in a few weeks. We traveled to Savannah in March and carried on as usual until mid-fall when a CT scan showed sarcomatoid kidney cancer cells growing on the scar tissue from her vacated kidney. Three different oncologists told us then and there that the prognosis was poor. Radiation would not work and there was only limited success with the several drugs that were used to treat kidney cancer. Unfortunately, the drugs that were tried did not work. Complications with digestion put Cara in the hospital in January and then when she was hospitalized in mid-June the chemotherapy that she was on was stopped. A scan showed that it wasn't working anyway. Surgery for the small bowel obstruction weakened her and she never really got the strength back to try any other chemotherapy which the oncologist was pretty sure wouldn't work anyway but would only bring her more pain and suffering.
So now she rests in a hospice devoted to managing her pain and giving her comfort as best they can. At the hospital she said she wanted to go to a "prettier place", and that's where she is. I know it's only a matter of time, but she never gives up to this day. Her passion for life lives on and will live on in the hearts of those of us who love her. She still has her mother's sparkle. Her granddaughter Annabelle has the same sparkle.
(Written for "My Story" in Cara's Caringbridge.org website in the last weeks of her life.)
Cara was born on September 22, 1953 in Fairfield, Illinois. In the course of her life Cara was a singer, an artist, millwright apprentice, hair stylist/colorist, salon manager and adjunct professor of Public Affairs at Indiana University Northwest. Over the past five years she worked tirelessly as Program Officer at the Legacy Foundation of Lake County assisting non-profit organizations to find the resources to make their dreams come true as well as involving herself in the development of new programs to benefit the people of Northwest Indiana. Many years the President of Friends of Emerson, she was also an alumnus of Leadership Northwest Indiana.
She was a daughter, wife, sister, mother and grandmother survived by her mother, Eva Marvel, wife of Bill Marvel of Fairfield, Illinois, husband Steve Spicer of Gary, Indiana, son Sam (Nicole King) Spicer of Munster, Indiana and their children Annabelle Rose and Phineas James, sister and brother-in-law Jeanne and Cedric Johnson of Superior, Wisconsin and their sons Scott and Chuck, as well as numerous aunts, uncles and cousins.
She was preceded in death by her father Charles McManis of West Bend, Wisconsin.
A celebration of her life, love and work will be held in approximately one month's time. Interment of her ashes will be at Shrewsbury Cemetery in Mill Shoals, Illinois.
Memorial donations in her name can be sent to the Legacy Foundation of Lake County, 1000 E. 80th Place, Suite 302 South, Merrillville, Indiana 46410 where a scholarship fund will be established in her name.
Published in Post-Tribune on August 30, 2011
**********************************************
Cara's Story by husband Steve Spicer
Cara's story is not just about her disease, although that will come. Cara's story is about her. Many who know her only marginally or maybe not at all have gotten only glimpses here on the CaringBridge site through the little stories that we have told. So I write this story of her incredibly full life for you, for her friends, for her grandchildren and hopefully their grandchildren.
When I first met Cara she'd completed 3 years of college. She's told me stories of both her upbringing and college years, but I wasn't with her, obviously. She was raised in Milwaukee and in West Bend, Wisconsin and had gone to both the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Viterbo College in LaCrosse. At Viterbo she was into theater and vocal music, training her voice under a vocal coach. She has relative perfect pitch. Her junior year in college was at Madison where she got involved with Broom Street Theater, then run by the brilliant Joel Gersmann. BTS, which started as street theater in the mid 60's and still is around today, was a totally iconoclastic theater poking fun at everything and everyone, especially theater itself. When I first saw her she was doing high leg kicks across the stage in the role of the Virgin Mary in Song of Bernadette. Oh, by the way, she did the art work for that as well. She has the artist's talent, a talent that she never really studied or developed. There was too much else to do! One bored night in her freshman dorm she painted a self-portrait that is striking. The colors in painting she adores. Our son's middle name is for Vincent Van Gogh.
Then, in the summer following her junior year she met me, for better or for worse. It must have been better, because she stuck with me for years. Our first date was August 8, 1974, my birthday and the day Nixon announced he was resigning. Her father, a staunch Nixon supporter, couldn't find much to like about Cara's choice of a man. He wasn't too thrilled when Cara married me and we had Sam either, but Sam softened his heart in a big hurry. Cara was mom for a few years. We moved to Gary, Indiana and after a year or so she went to work at US Steel in the coke plant as a millwright apprentice. She was fascinated with the scope and scale of the mill, but after a year and a half quit on my urging because she could not get the smell of coke out of her hair.
So she started a singing career. She got an agent; put together a band called "Cara's Last Chance Band" and played fairs in the summer and gigs in Chicago during the winter. "Country Crossover" was the style. Linda Ronstadt, Emmy Lou Harris: that sort of music. That and a trip to Nashville to do a demo tape didn't pan out so she started looking around for something else to do. I'd given her a book called How to Cut Your Hair and Everybody Else's or something like that and she told me she'd always been interested in cosmetology, so off to Merrillville Beauty College she went. By the early 1980's she'd already developed a good client base of loyal clients who were sad to see her go when she went on to management.
The rest of the decade, the nineteen eighties, she worked for John Amico's franchise chain of Hair Performers salons driving sometimes five hundred miles a week to help managers and owners set up and manage their salons. She did that until 1991 when she was offered, and took, the job as manager of the Marshall Fields salon in Chicago. Then and now one of the biggest salons in the country, it was 20,000 square feet, had a staff of 100 and serviced 1500 to 2000 clients a week, from "blue-hairs" from the North Shore to working girls getting a manicure on their lunch break.
Eleven hours a day including the train trip back and forth to Chicago put a little stress into her life. I told her she needed a hobby. One day I looked out the kitchen window and she was in the back with a dull hatchet trying to chop down a crappy old pine tree way in the back of our 200 foot deep lot. When I asked her what she was doing she said she hated that tree and was going to make a garden. Stacks of books later, grow light racks in the basement to plant things from seed, borders, mulch, plants and we had a garden. She went at it with a passion.
Cara worked for almost ten years at Marshall Fields in Chicago. She loved doing the crossword puzzles on the train and watching Millennium Park being built. She loves color and hair coloring gave her a good use for it. One time she flew to Seattle to attend a three day seminar given by Latrice Eisman, the Pantone guru of fashion and decorating color. But her job was eliminated in down-sizing by the salon before the park was finally finished. That disappointed her more than losing her job, for now she could go onto another adventure thanks to that blessing in disguise.
It was during this period that Sam began going to Emerson Visual and Performing Arts School here in Gary. The first time she heard the choir sing she was "blown away" and became instantly involved in the Friends of Emerson, vowing to do everything she could do to make this school visible on a local and national scale. She served as it's president for many years. She traveled around the country to various Performing Arts Schools, met with architects and educators to learn what she could that could be applied to Emerson. And she made some life long friends along the way.
So it was back to school. Transfer those credits from Madison to IU Northwest. Cut hair to make buck. Develop another client base of loyal customers. She finished her degree with an emphasis on anthropology, saying all along that her work at Marshall Fields was a case study in anthropology what with all the diverse ethic groups on her staff and among the clientele. She loved it, and couldn't stop. She entered the Master's program at IU in the School of Public Administration and Environmental Affairs (SPEA). She became an intern at the Field Museum and wrote an article for their journal based on her research one summer. She graduated in 2006 and was immediately teaching at IU Northwest. Not much money in that though. Those years were exciting and lovely. Sam was married and Annabelle was born in 2006.
Then in 2007 she was offered a job that she poured all her energy into: program officer at the Legacy Foundation. Her job is to work with non-profit organizations in Lake County helping them develop their organizations and their grant applications. It's a job she loves and found very hard to let go of. Well into her hospitalization she worried about her work, dreaming about it at times. When she was in the hospital in January of 2011 she had her laptop and phone and worked every day. She worked with pain until June, coming home every night, sitting down and asking only for a glass of wine and a little TV before bed. And then up and off to work the next day.
It all started really in December of 2009 when a routine physical discovered a tumor on her kidney that had to come out immediately along with the kidney. That happened on our 35th wedding anniversary, December 14, 2009. The pathology reports were clear and she went back to work in a few weeks. We traveled to Savannah in March and carried on as usual until mid-fall when a CT scan showed sarcomatoid kidney cancer cells growing on the scar tissue from her vacated kidney. Three different oncologists told us then and there that the prognosis was poor. Radiation would not work and there was only limited success with the several drugs that were used to treat kidney cancer. Unfortunately, the drugs that were tried did not work. Complications with digestion put Cara in the hospital in January and then when she was hospitalized in mid-June the chemotherapy that she was on was stopped. A scan showed that it wasn't working anyway. Surgery for the small bowel obstruction weakened her and she never really got the strength back to try any other chemotherapy which the oncologist was pretty sure wouldn't work anyway but would only bring her more pain and suffering.
So now she rests in a hospice devoted to managing her pain and giving her comfort as best they can. At the hospital she said she wanted to go to a "prettier place", and that's where she is. I know it's only a matter of time, but she never gives up to this day. Her passion for life lives on and will live on in the hearts of those of us who love her. She still has her mother's sparkle. Her granddaughter Annabelle has the same sparkle.
(Written for "My Story" in Cara's Caringbridge.org website in the last weeks of her life.)
The spirit of Cara M. Spicer of Gary, Indiana moved on to a new dimension at the Hospice of the Calumet Area in Munster, Indiana on August 27, 2011.
Cara was born on September 22, 1953 in Fairfield, Illinois. In the course of her life Cara was a singer, an artist, millwright apprentice, hair stylist/colorist, salon manager and adjunct professor of Public Affairs at Indiana University Northwest. Over the past five years she worked tirelessly as Program Officer at the Legacy Foundation of Lake County assisting non-profit organizations to find the resources to make their dreams come true as well as involving herself in the development of new programs to benefit the people of Northwest Indiana. Many years the President of Friends of Emerson, she was also an alumnus of Leadership Northwest Indiana.
She was a daughter, wife, sister, mother and grandmother survived by her mother, Eva Marvel, wife of Bill Marvel of Fairfield, Illinois, husband Steve Spicer of Gary, Indiana, son Sam (Nicole King) Spicer of Munster, Indiana and their children Annabelle Rose and Phineas James, sister and brother-in-law Jeanne and Cedric Johnson of Superior, Wisconsin and their sons Scott and Chuck, as well as numerous aunts, uncles and cousins.
She was preceded in death by her father Charles McManis of West Bend, Wisconsin.
A celebration of her life, love and work will be held in approximately one month's time. Interment of her ashes will be at Shrewsbury Cemetery in Mill Shoals, Illinois.
Memorial donations in her name can be sent to the Legacy Foundation of Lake County, 1000 E. 80th Place, Suite 302 South, Merrillville, Indiana 46410 where a scholarship fund will be established in her name.
Published in Post-Tribune on August 30, 2011
**********************************************
Cara's Story by husband Steve Spicer
Cara's story is not just about her disease, although that will come. Cara's story is about her. Many who know her only marginally or maybe not at all have gotten only glimpses here on the CaringBridge site through the little stories that we have told. So I write this story of her incredibly full life for you, for her friends, for her grandchildren and hopefully their grandchildren.
When I first met Cara she'd completed 3 years of college. She's told me stories of both her upbringing and college years, but I wasn't with her, obviously. She was raised in Milwaukee and in West Bend, Wisconsin and had gone to both the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Viterbo College in LaCrosse. At Viterbo she was into theater and vocal music, training her voice under a vocal coach. She has relative perfect pitch. Her junior year in college was at Madison where she got involved with Broom Street Theater, then run by the brilliant Joel Gersmann. BTS, which started as street theater in the mid 60's and still is around today, was a totally iconoclastic theater poking fun at everything and everyone, especially theater itself. When I first saw her she was doing high leg kicks across the stage in the role of the Virgin Mary in Song of Bernadette. Oh, by the way, she did the art work for that as well. She has the artist's talent, a talent that she never really studied or developed. There was too much else to do! One bored night in her freshman dorm she painted a self-portrait that is striking. The colors in painting she adores. Our son's middle name is for Vincent Van Gogh.
Then, in the summer following her junior year she met me, for better or for worse. It must have been better, because she stuck with me for years. Our first date was August 8, 1974, my birthday and the day Nixon announced he was resigning. Her father, a staunch Nixon supporter, couldn't find much to like about Cara's choice of a man. He wasn't too thrilled when Cara married me and we had Sam either, but Sam softened his heart in a big hurry. Cara was mom for a few years. We moved to Gary, Indiana and after a year or so she went to work at US Steel in the coke plant as a millwright apprentice. She was fascinated with the scope and scale of the mill, but after a year and a half quit on my urging because she could not get the smell of coke out of her hair.
So she started a singing career. She got an agent; put together a band called "Cara's Last Chance Band" and played fairs in the summer and gigs in Chicago during the winter. "Country Crossover" was the style. Linda Ronstadt, Emmy Lou Harris: that sort of music. That and a trip to Nashville to do a demo tape didn't pan out so she started looking around for something else to do. I'd given her a book called How to Cut Your Hair and Everybody Else's or something like that and she told me she'd always been interested in cosmetology, so off to Merrillville Beauty College she went. By the early 1980's she'd already developed a good client base of loyal clients who were sad to see her go when she went on to management.
The rest of the decade, the nineteen eighties, she worked for John Amico's franchise chain of Hair Performers salons driving sometimes five hundred miles a week to help managers and owners set up and manage their salons. She did that until 1991 when she was offered, and took, the job as manager of the Marshall Fields salon in Chicago. Then and now one of the biggest salons in the country, it was 20,000 square feet, had a staff of 100 and serviced 1500 to 2000 clients a week, from "blue-hairs" from the North Shore to working girls getting a manicure on their lunch break.
Eleven hours a day including the train trip back and forth to Chicago put a little stress into her life. I told her she needed a hobby. One day I looked out the kitchen window and she was in the back with a dull hatchet trying to chop down a crappy old pine tree way in the back of our 200 foot deep lot. When I asked her what she was doing she said she hated that tree and was going to make a garden. Stacks of books later, grow light racks in the basement to plant things from seed, borders, mulch, plants and we had a garden. She went at it with a passion.
Cara worked for almost ten years at Marshall Fields in Chicago. She loved doing the crossword puzzles on the train and watching Millennium Park being built. She loves color and hair coloring gave her a good use for it. One time she flew to Seattle to attend a three day seminar given by Latrice Eisman, the Pantone guru of fashion and decorating color. But her job was eliminated in down-sizing by the salon before the park was finally finished. That disappointed her more than losing her job, for now she could go onto another adventure thanks to that blessing in disguise.
It was during this period that Sam began going to Emerson Visual and Performing Arts School here in Gary. The first time she heard the choir sing she was "blown away" and became instantly involved in the Friends of Emerson, vowing to do everything she could do to make this school visible on a local and national scale. She served as it's president for many years. She traveled around the country to various Performing Arts Schools, met with architects and educators to learn what she could that could be applied to Emerson. And she made some life long friends along the way.
So it was back to school. Transfer those credits from Madison to IU Northwest. Cut hair to make buck. Develop another client base of loyal customers. She finished her degree with an emphasis on anthropology, saying all along that her work at Marshall Fields was a case study in anthropology what with all the diverse ethic groups on her staff and among the clientele. She loved it, and couldn't stop. She entered the Master's program at IU in the School of Public Administration and Environmental Affairs (SPEA). She became an intern at the Field Museum and wrote an article for their journal based on her research one summer. She graduated in 2006 and was immediately teaching at IU Northwest. Not much money in that though. Those years were exciting and lovely. Sam was married and Annabelle was born in 2006.
Then in 2007 she was offered a job that she poured all her energy into: program officer at the Legacy Foundation. Her job is to work with non-profit organizations in Lake County helping them develop their organizations and their grant applications. It's a job she loves and found very hard to let go of. Well into her hospitalization she worried about her work, dreaming about it at times. When she was in the hospital in January of 2011 she had her laptop and phone and worked every day. She worked with pain until June, coming home every night, sitting down and asking only for a glass of wine and a little TV before bed. And then up and off to work the next day.
It all started really in December of 2009 when a routine physical discovered a tumor on her kidney that had to come out immediately along with the kidney. That happened on our 35th wedding anniversary, December 14, 2009. The pathology reports were clear and she went back to work in a few weeks. We traveled to Savannah in March and carried on as usual until mid-fall when a CT scan showed sarcomatoid kidney cancer cells growing on the scar tissue from her vacated kidney. Three different oncologists told us then and there that the prognosis was poor. Radiation would not work and there was only limited success with the several drugs that were used to treat kidney cancer. Unfortunately, the drugs that were tried did not work. Complications with digestion put Cara in the hospital in January and then when she was hospitalized in mid-June the chemotherapy that she was on was stopped. A scan showed that it wasn't working anyway. Surgery for the small bowel obstruction weakened her and she never really got the strength back to try any other chemotherapy which the oncologist was pretty sure wouldn't work anyway but would only bring her more pain and suffering.
So now she rests in a hospice devoted to managing her pain and giving her comfort as best they can. At the hospital she said she wanted to go to a "prettier place", and that's where she is. I know it's only a matter of time, but she never gives up to this day. Her passion for life lives on and will live on in the hearts of those of us who love her. She still has her mother's sparkle. Her granddaughter Annabelle has the same sparkle.
(Written for "My Story" in Cara's Caringbridge.org website in the last weeks of her life.)
Cara was born on September 22, 1953 in Fairfield, Illinois. In the course of her life Cara was a singer, an artist, millwright apprentice, hair stylist/colorist, salon manager and adjunct professor of Public Affairs at Indiana University Northwest. Over the past five years she worked tirelessly as Program Officer at the Legacy Foundation of Lake County assisting non-profit organizations to find the resources to make their dreams come true as well as involving herself in the development of new programs to benefit the people of Northwest Indiana. Many years the President of Friends of Emerson, she was also an alumnus of Leadership Northwest Indiana.
She was a daughter, wife, sister, mother and grandmother survived by her mother, Eva Marvel, wife of Bill Marvel of Fairfield, Illinois, husband Steve Spicer of Gary, Indiana, son Sam (Nicole King) Spicer of Munster, Indiana and their children Annabelle Rose and Phineas James, sister and brother-in-law Jeanne and Cedric Johnson of Superior, Wisconsin and their sons Scott and Chuck, as well as numerous aunts, uncles and cousins.
She was preceded in death by her father Charles McManis of West Bend, Wisconsin.
A celebration of her life, love and work will be held in approximately one month's time. Interment of her ashes will be at Shrewsbury Cemetery in Mill Shoals, Illinois.
Memorial donations in her name can be sent to the Legacy Foundation of Lake County, 1000 E. 80th Place, Suite 302 South, Merrillville, Indiana 46410 where a scholarship fund will be established in her name.
Published in Post-Tribune on August 30, 2011
**********************************************
Cara's Story by husband Steve Spicer
Cara's story is not just about her disease, although that will come. Cara's story is about her. Many who know her only marginally or maybe not at all have gotten only glimpses here on the CaringBridge site through the little stories that we have told. So I write this story of her incredibly full life for you, for her friends, for her grandchildren and hopefully their grandchildren.
When I first met Cara she'd completed 3 years of college. She's told me stories of both her upbringing and college years, but I wasn't with her, obviously. She was raised in Milwaukee and in West Bend, Wisconsin and had gone to both the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Viterbo College in LaCrosse. At Viterbo she was into theater and vocal music, training her voice under a vocal coach. She has relative perfect pitch. Her junior year in college was at Madison where she got involved with Broom Street Theater, then run by the brilliant Joel Gersmann. BTS, which started as street theater in the mid 60's and still is around today, was a totally iconoclastic theater poking fun at everything and everyone, especially theater itself. When I first saw her she was doing high leg kicks across the stage in the role of the Virgin Mary in Song of Bernadette. Oh, by the way, she did the art work for that as well. She has the artist's talent, a talent that she never really studied or developed. There was too much else to do! One bored night in her freshman dorm she painted a self-portrait that is striking. The colors in painting she adores. Our son's middle name is for Vincent Van Gogh.
Then, in the summer following her junior year she met me, for better or for worse. It must have been better, because she stuck with me for years. Our first date was August 8, 1974, my birthday and the day Nixon announced he was resigning. Her father, a staunch Nixon supporter, couldn't find much to like about Cara's choice of a man. He wasn't too thrilled when Cara married me and we had Sam either, but Sam softened his heart in a big hurry. Cara was mom for a few years. We moved to Gary, Indiana and after a year or so she went to work at US Steel in the coke plant as a millwright apprentice. She was fascinated with the scope and scale of the mill, but after a year and a half quit on my urging because she could not get the smell of coke out of her hair.
So she started a singing career. She got an agent; put together a band called "Cara's Last Chance Band" and played fairs in the summer and gigs in Chicago during the winter. "Country Crossover" was the style. Linda Ronstadt, Emmy Lou Harris: that sort of music. That and a trip to Nashville to do a demo tape didn't pan out so she started looking around for something else to do. I'd given her a book called How to Cut Your Hair and Everybody Else's or something like that and she told me she'd always been interested in cosmetology, so off to Merrillville Beauty College she went. By the early 1980's she'd already developed a good client base of loyal clients who were sad to see her go when she went on to management.
The rest of the decade, the nineteen eighties, she worked for John Amico's franchise chain of Hair Performers salons driving sometimes five hundred miles a week to help managers and owners set up and manage their salons. She did that until 1991 when she was offered, and took, the job as manager of the Marshall Fields salon in Chicago. Then and now one of the biggest salons in the country, it was 20,000 square feet, had a staff of 100 and serviced 1500 to 2000 clients a week, from "blue-hairs" from the North Shore to working girls getting a manicure on their lunch break.
Eleven hours a day including the train trip back and forth to Chicago put a little stress into her life. I told her she needed a hobby. One day I looked out the kitchen window and she was in the back with a dull hatchet trying to chop down a crappy old pine tree way in the back of our 200 foot deep lot. When I asked her what she was doing she said she hated that tree and was going to make a garden. Stacks of books later, grow light racks in the basement to plant things from seed, borders, mulch, plants and we had a garden. She went at it with a passion.
Cara worked for almost ten years at Marshall Fields in Chicago. She loved doing the crossword puzzles on the train and watching Millennium Park being built. She loves color and hair coloring gave her a good use for it. One time she flew to Seattle to attend a three day seminar given by Latrice Eisman, the Pantone guru of fashion and decorating color. But her job was eliminated in down-sizing by the salon before the park was finally finished. That disappointed her more than losing her job, for now she could go onto another adventure thanks to that blessing in disguise.
It was during this period that Sam began going to Emerson Visual and Performing Arts School here in Gary. The first time she heard the choir sing she was "blown away" and became instantly involved in the Friends of Emerson, vowing to do everything she could do to make this school visible on a local and national scale. She served as it's president for many years. She traveled around the country to various Performing Arts Schools, met with architects and educators to learn what she could that could be applied to Emerson. And she made some life long friends along the way.
So it was back to school. Transfer those credits from Madison to IU Northwest. Cut hair to make buck. Develop another client base of loyal customers. She finished her degree with an emphasis on anthropology, saying all along that her work at Marshall Fields was a case study in anthropology what with all the diverse ethic groups on her staff and among the clientele. She loved it, and couldn't stop. She entered the Master's program at IU in the School of Public Administration and Environmental Affairs (SPEA). She became an intern at the Field Museum and wrote an article for their journal based on her research one summer. She graduated in 2006 and was immediately teaching at IU Northwest. Not much money in that though. Those years were exciting and lovely. Sam was married and Annabelle was born in 2006.
Then in 2007 she was offered a job that she poured all her energy into: program officer at the Legacy Foundation. Her job is to work with non-profit organizations in Lake County helping them develop their organizations and their grant applications. It's a job she loves and found very hard to let go of. Well into her hospitalization she worried about her work, dreaming about it at times. When she was in the hospital in January of 2011 she had her laptop and phone and worked every day. She worked with pain until June, coming home every night, sitting down and asking only for a glass of wine and a little TV before bed. And then up and off to work the next day.
It all started really in December of 2009 when a routine physical discovered a tumor on her kidney that had to come out immediately along with the kidney. That happened on our 35th wedding anniversary, December 14, 2009. The pathology reports were clear and she went back to work in a few weeks. We traveled to Savannah in March and carried on as usual until mid-fall when a CT scan showed sarcomatoid kidney cancer cells growing on the scar tissue from her vacated kidney. Three different oncologists told us then and there that the prognosis was poor. Radiation would not work and there was only limited success with the several drugs that were used to treat kidney cancer. Unfortunately, the drugs that were tried did not work. Complications with digestion put Cara in the hospital in January and then when she was hospitalized in mid-June the chemotherapy that she was on was stopped. A scan showed that it wasn't working anyway. Surgery for the small bowel obstruction weakened her and she never really got the strength back to try any other chemotherapy which the oncologist was pretty sure wouldn't work anyway but would only bring her more pain and suffering.
So now she rests in a hospice devoted to managing her pain and giving her comfort as best they can. At the hospital she said she wanted to go to a "prettier place", and that's where she is. I know it's only a matter of time, but she never gives up to this day. Her passion for life lives on and will live on in the hearts of those of us who love her. She still has her mother's sparkle. Her granddaughter Annabelle has the same sparkle.
(Written for "My Story" in Cara's Caringbridge.org website in the last weeks of her life.)
Gravesite Details
The headstone is unique, one we designed, in our heads, long before she died.
