part0023

Many people have played a role in the creation of this book. Happily, almost all of them are still alive. They are listed by name in the acknowledgement section at the end of this appendix. Sadly, a few have passed.

Tributes are given here for four who have passed, including Mabel Croughan and the Reverend Claire Malloy “Pete” Croughan, my mother and father. They are pictured above, including Mabel preparing for Halloween in a gorilla suit.

Mabel was a tenacious warrior in the battle against infectious disease. She was the Director of the Public Health Laboratory in Marin County, California, USA. While tracking down the source of a gastroenteritis (~diarrhea) outbreak at a local nursing home, she co-discovered a new virus (Oshiro, 1981).

She had many other passions too. She helped people who were on hard times. She cooked delicious meals for dozens to hundreds of people. She roped in her six kids and their spouses to help with whatever insane challenge she might take on.

She wrote entertaining Christmas letters exposing all the dirty secrets of our family. Last but not least, she loved terrifying little children when they came to her home on Halloween.

No matter what, all the children got a candy treat; some just also got so scared they wet their pants. One notable terrifying costume of hers was the gorilla suit you see above. Maybe that has something to do with me envisioning my COVID-19 symptoms as a gorilla attacking me. I will not look too far into that though.

This past 2020 Mother’s Day, when there was lots of discussion about the shortage of COVID-19 testing and poor early response to COVID-19, I sent the following e-mail out to my relatives. Those relatives include many nieces and nephews who did not have much chance as adults to get to know Mabel or my dad, Pete.

From the actions of my mother, I think you can see why Jess and I co-edited this book. The fiery spirit maybe even comes through in our proposals in Appendices 3 and 4. Being warriors in the battle against disease is in our genes.

As some of you know, Mabel finished her career as Director of the Public Health Lab for Marin County, CA. She won an award as the top public health lab director in California for at least one year, maybe more. She was highly respected by her colleagues and staff. She was the last of her kind, as a Director with just a B.A. in Bacteriology from Cal and no graduate degree.

There are at least two types of Marin County employees. The best, like Mabel, are true public servants. The others are bureaucrats who build ever expanding piles of rules, regulations, and paperwork. Mabel fell very clearly in the first group and chaffed daily against the second group. As many of us remember, Mabel did not shy away from conflict. She would of course ignore all the "official testing hours" and just test anyone who walked into the lab and requested it, anytime. This included some of my wilder friends who tested positive for certain diseases, but we will not go into those details. I never heard the names from Mabel.

If Mabel were still the head of the lab, she would have jumped all over the COVID-19 testing situation back in January, maybe even December. She would have ordered swabs by the pallet and, of course, pulled out the ten or more boxes of swabs she would have already stored in her garage. At least two boxes would have already been sitting on the hood of Pete's Thunderbird.

Through various means, she would have made sure she got the biggest, high throughput, most accurate testing machine possible. Now that would likely be one from Roche, with 100% accuracy on the antibody test and, of course, an equivalent one for PCR (or maybe it is all-in-one). She would have gotten palettes of testing supplies from the Roche vendor who would, of course, had previously stayed at Mabel and Pete’s home for a year or so when her husband left her and their 8 children. Mabel would have done all the laundry, shopping, and cooking while the woman worked full time. She would have done this while serving as President of the Novato School Board. To Pete's delight, her filing system was to pile papers on every available horizontal surface in the house, except in Pete's study. Over the year with 8 extra kids in the house, the piles would have all reached at least 5 or 6 feet.

If Mabel did run out of swabs, she would of course had enlisted me, my siblings, and all of our friends to make homemade swabs out of cut up cotton, vertically-sliced and sanded popsicle sticks, and Elmer’s glue. She would have made fried chicken and homemade ice cream for the hundreds of swab makers in her back yard. She would have autoclaved the swabs herself down at her lab. Rather than make swabs, Pete would have likely watched football, pruned the roses, and tuned up his Thunderbird now that he could open the hood.

Mabel would have set up a high throughput sample collection area in the parking lot near her lab and inspired all her lab members to amazing levels of output. She would also have rapidly lined up people to do contact tracing. Again, probably me and my sister Mary, plus others. Just an afterschool activity for us, meeting with hundreds of total strangers at their homes. No risk there, of course.

Through these means, Mabel would have tested everyone in Marin by early March, with all contact testing complete and everyone properly quarantined. No need to shut anything down, especially the JC Penney’s because of course I might need yet another package of oversized tighty whities. Marin County would have had the lowest death rate of any place in the US. Mary and I would have been traumatized a bit. A small price to pay for being the kid of a true public servant.