Lifelong Vermonter Kathleen Laura Campbell, nee Little, was born May 14th, 1923, at her grandparents' home in Chelsea, VT, and died November 20th at her home in Strafford. Taken in by her Uncle Ned and Aunt Vera after her mother's death in 1939, Kay graduated from Chelsea High School in 1940 and earned her Bachelor's in Education from the University of Vermont in 1944. At UVM she became reacquainted with Floyd Campbell, whom she had first met as a 4-year old at her mother's one-room schoolhouse. (An experienced 7 year-old, he had regularly helped her get her boots on.) Following a first date to a Grange Meeting, several subsequent ones to local fishing holes, and Floyd's return from World War II, they married in 1946. Moving frequently as Floyd's career required, Kay made homes for her growing family in Montpelier, Lunenburg, St. Albans, Wolcott, and Jericho VT before moving to Maine, Virginia, and finally back home to Vermont to retire.

Free from work and young children, Kay and Floyd traveled extensively: to England for their 50th anniversary; to Kenya for one of their many Elder Hostel experiences; to Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago to bird. But Kay loved Vermont best. As a little girl she prowled the hills of Chelsea with a BB gun; as a teenager, she hiked the Long Trail with her best friend Judith; as a woman, she was fully engaged in Floyd's career as a Soil Conservationist. She was a camper extraordinaire, frequenting state then national parks with a station-wagon, a tent, and all six of her children. She trout-fished with her menfolk, berried with her girls, and bird-watched with everyone. She greased farm equipment, counted hay bales, and usually had maple syrup on her ice cream. Nightly for decades she recorded the day's events in that year's Vermont Life engagement book.

Fiercely protective of Vermont's rural culture and Strafford's local community, Kay served as a justice of the peace, a lister, and a selectman. Together she and Floyd helped initiate the Friends of the Morrill Homestead group, and her most recent energies have been dedicated to sustaining Morrill's restored apple orchard. But the public service of which she was most proud was her work as the librarian at the Morrill Memorial and Harris Library. Kay welcomed all readers into that warm space, but her keenest attention was always to the youngest of them. She was a long-serving member and chairperson of the Dorothy Canfield Book Award Committee, each year reading hundreds of children's books before book-talking the top 30 to every school classroom she could get into. Kay's own life was sustained by her passion for literature: from The Bible (she read her New Testament in French) to contemporary Vermont writers, Kay read widely and rapidly. There were few situations for which she could not recite appropriate lines of poetry.

Kay is predeceased by her husband Floyd, her daughter Gail, and her daughter-in-law Jane. She leaves behind five children (Steven, Judith, Colin, Robert and Jennifer); thirteen grandchildren; ten great grandchildren; four half- brothers; a cherished circle of friends and neighbors; and her cat Emily. There will be a memorial service at the United Church of Strafford at 1:30 pm on Sunday, December 2. Donations may be made to the Morrill Memorial and Harris Library.