Cathy Eaton's biography from 1950 to 2018, revised in January 2018
Catherine Lee Eaton (b. July 23, 1950)
Catherine (Cathy) Lee Eaton was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 23, 1950. She lived her first 18 years at Arrow Cottage at 626 Houghton Road, Northfield, Ohio with her parents, Cy and Mary Eaton. With her older brothers, Cyrus Stephen (born March 20, 1946) and John Stephens (born August 16, 1948), and her younger Elizabeth Farlee (born December 20, 1953), Cathy had a marvelous childhood, playing outside, swimming, riding at Acadia and participating in horse shows in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the east coast, including Madison Square Garden and the Washington National Show. She went to Lee Eaton kindergarten in Northfield, Ohio. She attended Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, Ohio from first grade through twelfth grade, was very studious, having to work hard at math, spelling, and writing. She loved school, especially gym and sports. One highlight was winning the Raymond Short Story Prize her senior year. The family took ski vacations at Lac Beau Port, Ellicottville, New York, Aspen and Vail. She spent parts of her summers in Deep Cove, Nova Scotia, (the place of her heart) with her grandfather and various cousins. She worked at Alford Lake Camp in Union, Maine, the summers after graduating from high school and from college. Her best friends were Adele Wick, Ann Worthington, and Missy Marshall. With her parents and Elizabeth, she traveled to Athens, Greece, (taking a cruise around Greek islands), Rome, Italy, and Cairo, Egypt where they saw the pyramids and rode camels.
At Smith College after her plans fell through to major in African Anthropology and spend part of her junior year at Dartmouth and part in Gambia, West Africa, she decided to major in English so she could her improve her writing, speaking, thinking, and reading skills. She spent the summer after freshman year in Leeton, New South Wales, Australia with The Experiment in International Living and traveled around eastern Australia, New Zealand, and Figi with fellow participants. She lived with Frank and Hazel Collins. In 1971, she and Elizabeth accompanied their grandfather to Santiago, Chile, where her grandfather was meeting with Salvador Allende in his quest to bring peaceful understanding between communist and democratic countries. Many colleges went on strike protesting the war with Vietnam, and Cathy went door to door and attended protests. During her sophomore year, with Elizabeth and her parents, she visited Bucharest, Rumania; Budapest, Hungary; Istanbul, Turkey; and Bathurst, Gambia, West Africa, where her brother Cyrus was a Peace Corp volunteer. For four years at Smith, she lived in Northrop House, studied hard, and played intramural tennis, field hockey, soccer, squash, volleyball, and basketball. Her good friends were Gail Bongiovani, Betsy Dice, Michel Johns, Karen O’Neil, and Sue Higgins. She often visited her brother John at Dartmouth on weekends. She dated Rick Greenberg from 1972 to 1975. In 1971, with Cyrus, Elizabeth, Margo McCreary, Ben Hatch, and Rob Lord, she camped across the United States from Northfield, Ohio to San Luis Obispo, California.
After college, Cathy spent a year studying education at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, student teaching at Cleveland Heights High School, and living at home on 626 Houghton Road in Northfield, Ohio, with her parents and John. The following year she accepted an internship at St. Paul’s Boarding School in Concord, New Hampshire, where she taught fiction writing, an interdisciplinary English/history/religion course, and coached soccer and tennis. In 1974, she moved to a triple-decker apartment on (1058) Capitol Ave in Hartford, Connecticut, and lived with Barrie Silver the first year and on the third floor by herself the second year. Her housemates were Maureen and Pat Hearn. She taught high school for two years at Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Connecticut and coached soccer, basketball, and assisted with a cycling and rock-climbing group. After two years of struggling with an unsupportive department head, her contract was not renewed, and her teaching career seemed to be finished.
During her first summer of graduate school in 1975 at Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont, she met Michael Murphy at Texas Falls. They both studied American Literature their first year, and in later years studied Shakespeare in Vermont and at Lincoln College at Oxford University with John Wilders. Cathy played tons of tennis, and Michael played softball. They moved in together in a small cabin on Lake Garda on a lake in Burlington, Connecticut in 1976. Ironically, Michael was hired to replace Cathy at Kingswood-Oxford, and unemployed, Cathy wrote a family history.
After a summer at Bread Loaf, Michael and Cathy married on August 27, 1977, at Arrow Cottage in Northfield, Ohio, with sixty witnesses at their outdoors ceremony. Next, she taught a year at the experimental school Westledge in Simsbury, Connecticut, where she taught seventh grade and high school English and coached field hockey and softball. The following year, she taught high school English and coached softball at Loomis-Chaffee School, a boarding/day school in Winsor, Connecticut. Good friends were Suzanne Nolan, Wally and Daryl Wilson, Ben Duke, and Lud Baldwin. Cathy learned to cross country ski.
Once Michael was let go from Kingswood-Oxford by the same man who terminated Cathy, they moved to Cleveland Heights to 3975 Randolph Road, and Cathy taught seventh grade at the girls’ school, Laurel School in Shaker Heights. Cathy and Michael spent many happy weekends with her parents in Gates Mills, Ohio. Cathy joined a co-ed soccer team. With Michael, she played indoor volleyball. They bought a brick classic side entry American Colonial 4- bedroom house on 3605 Washington Blvd. in Cleveland Heights. They took vacations to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico with Gail Bongiovani, and took road trips to Tampa, Florida, to visit Ann Worthington. Good friends were Rob and Judy Herbert, Nancy and Jim Smekal, Chuck and Jan Miller, and Doug Ripkin. Cathy stopped teaching in November when Colin Eaton Murphy was born on November 26, 1982. She worked part time for her father as a secretary at Terminal Tower and taught a summer short story course at Hathaway Brown School. Devon Eaton Murphy was born on September 3, 1982.
In March, 1986, the family moved to a classic contemporary home built into a side lot on 105 Kimberly Knoll in Asheville, North Carolina with living room/kitchen/dining room on the first floor and bedrooms downstairs. Cathy took courses at University of North Carolina - Asheville to keep her teaching certificate current and also taught two courses a semester. She played racquetball regularly and was very involved with Children’s Grammar School, Rainbow Mountain, and Jones Elementary School where Colin and Devon attended: wonderful experiential learning schools. Cathy began writing Curse of the Pirate’s Treasure. She and Michael traveled to England for a business trip, and the family drove to Florida to visit Aunt Helen in Naples and Ann Worthington in Treasure Island. The family often visited Cathy’s parents (Annie and Papa) first in Gates Mills, Ohio, and then at Moreland Courts in Shaker Heights.
In 1992, they moved to 626 Wintersweet Court in Annapolis, Maryland, where Cathy taught at Anne Arundel Community College. Special family friends were the Todds. The family always spent a week or two at Conway Lake. Cathy and the boys did long road trips in the summer from North Carolina to Maryland to Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Ohio and back to North Carolina.
After moving to a four-bedroom center hall colonial on 3605 Joppa Hill Road, Bedford, New Hampshire, Cathy taught Fiction Writing, Literature, Mindful Communications, and Freshman Composition as well as running the Writing Center for twenty-three years at NHTI-Concord’s Community College. In 2009, she received a sabbatical for fiction writing and spent the summer at Bread Loaf School of English. Typically, Cathy visited Ann Worthington in Treasure Island every spring and her siblings in Ashland, Oregon, or Santa Rosa, California every summer. Additionally, she traveled frequently to Moreland Courts and then Kendal in Oberlin, Ohio, to visit and assist her parents. She spent a week with Colin at Montana State University in Bozeman, a week doing a writer’s retreat with Karen and Herald Jenson near Seattle, Washington. Cathy wrote four original short stories a year. She revised and self-published Curse of the Pirate’s Treasure in 2003 and a short story collection, Snags and Spills, in 2013. Thirteen of her stories appeared in magazines, and her story “Raggedy Slippers” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Particular school friends were Dawn Higgins, Paula Delbonis-Platt, Kris Lucas, Dan Huston, and Dave Edwards. Cathy took yoga, pilates, core and more at NHTI, played tennis, cross-country skied, and kayaked often.
In 2010, she and her best friend, Adele Wick, traveled to Nova Scotia, and Cathy began a history project interviewing people behind the scenes at Thinkers Lodge in Pugwash. As the project expanded, she published documents, interviews, and photographs on Thinkerslodgehistories.com. She began spending two to five weeks in Pugwash and also returned to Deep Cove several times. The beloved cabin at Deep Cove burned down in November 2015.
In 2016, Cathy retired from teaching and began working on learning DSL photography as well as Iphone photography and editing through tutorials and online courses. She traveled with her sister Elizabeth, Dawn Higgins, and Elizabeth Cleveland to Oahu, Hawaii. In spring 2017, she and Michael did 5 ½ week road trip south. In autumn of 2017, they went to Pugwash for Climate Change Conference. Then in January 2018 they celebrated 40th anniversary in Oahu, Hawaii with Al and Teresa Todd. For over 25 years she has been an active member of the Cyrus Eaton Foundation and after Ray Szabo retired, she became president. On her trips to Cleveland Heights, she continues to do research on the Pugwash Conferences and Cyrus Eaton at the Western Reserve Historical Society.
Their particular friends are Liz Duck, Jeremy Foy and Betsy Rocha, Jeff and Jan Brown, Al and Teresa Todd, Scott and Robyn Pollock, Dawn Higgins and Shawn Haskell, Wally and Daryl Wilson, Gail Bongiovanni and Everett Nissley, Cathy and Jon Leer, and Ann Worthington. Cathy loves visiting Colin, Nicole, and Devon and sharing their adventures and work. (Updated January 28, 2019).
Catherine (Cathy) Lee Eaton was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 23, 1950. She lived her first 18 years at Arrow Cottage at 626 Houghton Road, Northfield, Ohio with her parents, Cy and Mary Eaton. With her older brothers, Cyrus Stephen (born March 20, 1946) and John Stephens (born August 16, 1948), and her younger Elizabeth Farlee (born December 20, 1953), Cathy had a marvelous childhood, playing outside, swimming, riding at Acadia and participating in horse shows in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the east coast, including Madison Square Garden and the Washington National Show. She went to Lee Eaton kindergarten in Northfield, Ohio. She attended Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, Ohio from first grade through twelfth grade, was very studious, having to work hard at math, spelling, and writing. She loved school, especially gym and sports. One highlight was winning the Raymond Short Story Prize her senior year. The family took ski vacations at Lac Beau Port, Ellicottville, New York, Aspen and Vail. She spent parts of her summers in Deep Cove, Nova Scotia, (the place of her heart) with her grandfather and various cousins. She worked at Alford Lake Camp in Union, Maine, the summers after graduating from high school and from college. Her best friends were Adele Wick, Ann Worthington, and Missy Marshall. With her parents and Elizabeth, she traveled to Athens, Greece, (taking a cruise around Greek islands), Rome, Italy, and Cairo, Egypt where they saw the pyramids and rode camels.
At Smith College after her plans fell through to major in African Anthropology and spend part of her junior year at Dartmouth and part in Gambia, West Africa, she decided to major in English so she could her improve her writing, speaking, thinking, and reading skills. She spent the summer after freshman year in Leeton, New South Wales, Australia with The Experiment in International Living and traveled around eastern Australia, New Zealand, and Figi with fellow participants. She lived with Frank and Hazel Collins. In 1971, she and Elizabeth accompanied their grandfather to Santiago, Chile, where her grandfather was meeting with Salvador Allende in his quest to bring peaceful understanding between communist and democratic countries. Many colleges went on strike protesting the war with Vietnam, and Cathy went door to door and attended protests. During her sophomore year, with Elizabeth and her parents, she visited Bucharest, Rumania; Budapest, Hungary; Istanbul, Turkey; and Bathurst, Gambia, West Africa, where her brother Cyrus was a Peace Corp volunteer. For four years at Smith, she lived in Northrop House, studied hard, and played intramural tennis, field hockey, soccer, squash, volleyball, and basketball. Her good friends were Gail Bongiovani, Betsy Dice, Michel Johns, Karen O’Neil, and Sue Higgins. She often visited her brother John at Dartmouth on weekends. She dated Rick Greenberg from 1972 to 1975. In 1971, with Cyrus, Elizabeth, Margo McCreary, Ben Hatch, and Rob Lord, she camped across the United States from Northfield, Ohio to San Luis Obispo, California.
After college, Cathy spent a year studying education at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, student teaching at Cleveland Heights High School, and living at home on 626 Houghton Road in Northfield, Ohio, with her parents and John. The following year she accepted an internship at St. Paul’s Boarding School in Concord, New Hampshire, where she taught fiction writing, an interdisciplinary English/history/religion course, and coached soccer and tennis. In 1974, she moved to a triple-decker apartment on (1058) Capitol Ave in Hartford, Connecticut, and lived with Barrie Silver the first year and on the third floor by herself the second year. Her housemates were Maureen and Pat Hearn. She taught high school for two years at Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Connecticut and coached soccer, basketball, and assisted with a cycling and rock-climbing group. After two years of struggling with an unsupportive department head, her contract was not renewed, and her teaching career seemed to be finished.
During her first summer of graduate school in 1975 at Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vermont, she met Michael Murphy at Texas Falls. They both studied American Literature their first year, and in later years studied Shakespeare in Vermont and at Lincoln College at Oxford University with John Wilders. Cathy played tons of tennis, and Michael played softball. They moved in together in a small cabin on Lake Garda on a lake in Burlington, Connecticut in 1976. Ironically, Michael was hired to replace Cathy at Kingswood-Oxford, and unemployed, Cathy wrote a family history.
After a summer at Bread Loaf, Michael and Cathy married on August 27, 1977, at Arrow Cottage in Northfield, Ohio, with sixty witnesses at their outdoors ceremony. Next, she taught a year at the experimental school Westledge in Simsbury, Connecticut, where she taught seventh grade and high school English and coached field hockey and softball. The following year, she taught high school English and coached softball at Loomis-Chaffee School, a boarding/day school in Winsor, Connecticut. Good friends were Suzanne Nolan, Wally and Daryl Wilson, Ben Duke, and Lud Baldwin. Cathy learned to cross country ski.
Once Michael was let go from Kingswood-Oxford by the same man who terminated Cathy, they moved to Cleveland Heights to 3975 Randolph Road, and Cathy taught seventh grade at the girls’ school, Laurel School in Shaker Heights. Cathy and Michael spent many happy weekends with her parents in Gates Mills, Ohio. Cathy joined a co-ed soccer team. With Michael, she played indoor volleyball. They bought a brick classic side entry American Colonial 4- bedroom house on 3605 Washington Blvd. in Cleveland Heights. They took vacations to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico with Gail Bongiovani, and took road trips to Tampa, Florida, to visit Ann Worthington. Good friends were Rob and Judy Herbert, Nancy and Jim Smekal, Chuck and Jan Miller, and Doug Ripkin. Cathy stopped teaching in November when Colin Eaton Murphy was born on November 26, 1982. She worked part time for her father as a secretary at Terminal Tower and taught a summer short story course at Hathaway Brown School. Devon Eaton Murphy was born on September 3, 1982.
In March, 1986, the family moved to a classic contemporary home built into a side lot on 105 Kimberly Knoll in Asheville, North Carolina with living room/kitchen/dining room on the first floor and bedrooms downstairs. Cathy took courses at University of North Carolina - Asheville to keep her teaching certificate current and also taught two courses a semester. She played racquetball regularly and was very involved with Children’s Grammar School, Rainbow Mountain, and Jones Elementary School where Colin and Devon attended: wonderful experiential learning schools. Cathy began writing Curse of the Pirate’s Treasure. She and Michael traveled to England for a business trip, and the family drove to Florida to visit Aunt Helen in Naples and Ann Worthington in Treasure Island. The family often visited Cathy’s parents (Annie and Papa) first in Gates Mills, Ohio, and then at Moreland Courts in Shaker Heights.
In 1992, they moved to 626 Wintersweet Court in Annapolis, Maryland, where Cathy taught at Anne Arundel Community College. Special family friends were the Todds. The family always spent a week or two at Conway Lake. Cathy and the boys did long road trips in the summer from North Carolina to Maryland to Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Ohio and back to North Carolina.
After moving to a four-bedroom center hall colonial on 3605 Joppa Hill Road, Bedford, New Hampshire, Cathy taught Fiction Writing, Literature, Mindful Communications, and Freshman Composition as well as running the Writing Center for twenty-three years at NHTI-Concord’s Community College. In 2009, she received a sabbatical for fiction writing and spent the summer at Bread Loaf School of English. Typically, Cathy visited Ann Worthington in Treasure Island every spring and her siblings in Ashland, Oregon, or Santa Rosa, California every summer. Additionally, she traveled frequently to Moreland Courts and then Kendal in Oberlin, Ohio, to visit and assist her parents. She spent a week with Colin at Montana State University in Bozeman, a week doing a writer’s retreat with Karen and Herald Jenson near Seattle, Washington. Cathy wrote four original short stories a year. She revised and self-published Curse of the Pirate’s Treasure in 2003 and a short story collection, Snags and Spills, in 2013. Thirteen of her stories appeared in magazines, and her story “Raggedy Slippers” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Particular school friends were Dawn Higgins, Paula Delbonis-Platt, Kris Lucas, Dan Huston, and Dave Edwards. Cathy took yoga, pilates, core and more at NHTI, played tennis, cross-country skied, and kayaked often.
In 2010, she and her best friend, Adele Wick, traveled to Nova Scotia, and Cathy began a history project interviewing people behind the scenes at Thinkers Lodge in Pugwash. As the project expanded, she published documents, interviews, and photographs on Thinkerslodgehistories.com. She began spending two to five weeks in Pugwash and also returned to Deep Cove several times. The beloved cabin at Deep Cove burned down in November 2015.
In 2016, Cathy retired from teaching and began working on learning DSL photography as well as Iphone photography and editing through tutorials and online courses. She traveled with her sister Elizabeth, Dawn Higgins, and Elizabeth Cleveland to Oahu, Hawaii. In spring 2017, she and Michael did 5 ½ week road trip south. In autumn of 2017, they went to Pugwash for Climate Change Conference. Then in January 2018 they celebrated 40th anniversary in Oahu, Hawaii with Al and Teresa Todd. For over 25 years she has been an active member of the Cyrus Eaton Foundation and after Ray Szabo retired, she became president. On her trips to Cleveland Heights, she continues to do research on the Pugwash Conferences and Cyrus Eaton at the Western Reserve Historical Society.
Their particular friends are Liz Duck, Jeremy Foy and Betsy Rocha, Jeff and Jan Brown, Al and Teresa Todd, Scott and Robyn Pollock, Dawn Higgins and Shawn Haskell, Wally and Daryl Wilson, Gail Bongiovanni and Everett Nissley, Cathy and Jon Leer, and Ann Worthington. Cathy loves visiting Colin, Nicole, and Devon and sharing their adventures and work. (Updated January 28, 2019).