“She wandered off in death as she often had in life, without much consultation, staking out new territory with a theme clear only to her wrapped in a mantle of mystery.” There was indeed a kind of mystery about Joy Darrow, as her husband remembered in his tribute at her memorial. (It’s quoted above.) Not the mystery of the usual kind—of secrecy and withdrawal. Rather, it was the mystery of her extraordinary openness and hospitality, her almost preternatural availability.
Consider her interests: the environment, world peace, public housing, race relations, education, photography, journalism, the creative arts. She hurled herself into projects, traveled all over the world (she visited Cuba three times in less than three years in the 70s), and always came home with new plans and a suitcase full of knickknacks. “She was into a hundred little things all my life,” said her oldest child, Marcy Pulford, 35. “I never knew what drove her. Was she looking for peace or was she someone who just was at peace everywhere? I never knew.”
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Whatever drove her, it wasn’t money. She financed most of her travels through fellowships and by the photographs she took and the reports she wrote afterward. The projects usually depended on small grants and sweat equity. It wasn’t religious conviction either. Joy was absolutely areligious—not hostile, said Tracy, just not personally involved (even though a few years ago she cofounded something called the Organization for Universal Communal Harmony, intended to bring together Eastern and Western spiritualities).
Melissa Anderson, then a hard-pressed art consultant going through a divorce, was living in the Prairie Avenue area in 1987. Seeing lights on in the mansion one night, she rang the bell. Joy welcomed her (and her dog), they became instant friends, and Anderson eventually moved in and lived on the third floor for five years. Anderson, who now manages a nightclub, called Joy “a sister, a mother, and a friend.
In 1959, when she was 24, she finagled a trip to Cuba and interviewed Fidel Castro in his mountain hideaway as he planned to overthrow the Batista government. This coup hurled her into a career in journalism, first at a string of suburban newspapers, then as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. With her first husband, photographer Hal Baim, she had three children in rather rapid succession: Marcy, Tracy, and Clark.
The trips became more frequent over the years. Were they an escape, a recharging of her batteries, or another way of reaching out to new people? Maybe all that, said her friend Melissa Anderson. “You can get lost on a trip, and I think Joy needed that at times.”
In 1978 the family was brutalized when a would-be rapist broke into the house on Fremont and attacked Tracy, then 14, in her bedroom. Steve and Joy, responding to her screams, were seriously injured in the battle with Tracy’s assailant. Stabbed 27 times, Steve nearly bled to death and was in the hospital for months. Joy suffered numerous cuts and several broken ribs. Tracy, who sustained lesser physical injuries, said Joy came as close then as she ever would to giving her overt advice. Her mother was referring to her own rape, Tracy speculated, and her message was, “Look, I dealt with this. Don’t ever allow him to win by letting him creep back into your life!”
