Irene Elizabeth Petersen Campbell

She lived a most improbable, yet typically American, life. Over nine decades she traversed the vast distance from a tiny Danish community of 300— best known for its Fourth of July celebrations since 1861–to the corridors of power in the nation’s capital. Born amid the gathering storm of fascism in Europe, this daughter of Elmer and Signe Petersen, themselves first-generation Americans, Irene grew up hearing her grandfather play the folk songs of his homeland on a fiddle. She would learn to play the flute, piccolo, recorder, piano, organ, even zither.

A 1955 honor graduate of Harlan High School, she went on to major in music at Drake University. Upon graduation, she taught music in the Grinnell, Iowa school system. She also studied court reporting, mastering, and later teaching, the system that would become her professional career.

In 1965, she married Edward L. Campbell, special assistant to Harold E. Hughes, Iowa’s three-term Democratic governor. After Hughes was elected to the United States Senate in 1968. Irene and Ed drove across country, arriving in Washington on a snowy January day. For the next seven years, she met senators, ambassadors, lobbyists, and presidential advisers, including Truman’s close adviser Clark Clifford, in whose venerable law firm Clifford and Warnecke she became a legal secretary in 1974. For the next ten years, she immersed herself in its rarified legal world. Then in 1988, she headed a team of one hundred paralegals headquartered in San Francisco for the consequential Gypsum asbestos case. After a year as executive assistant to attorney and two-time EPA administrator William D. Ruckelshaus, she joined the global antitrust and intellectual property law firm of Howrey & Simon as a lead legal administrator until the law firm’s dissolution in 2011.

Retaining her lifelong love of music, Irene regularly attended the noonday concerts of the Washington Bach Consort and held season tickets at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In 1983, she moved to her Oakleigh townhouse, living there for the next forty years. A chance meeting—at a book talk in Vienna, Virginia—led to a unique friendship with John P. Moody, Jr., jailed in Jackson, Mississippi on May 24, 1961, one of the six Howard University students who joined the Freedom Rides. Irene became his friend, archivist, caretaker, and a dear friend of the entire Moody family.

An award-winning photographer, Irene documented her wide travels around Europe, also exploring the Middle East, Far East, Asia, Russia, and Arctic nations. She was an inveterate collector of coins, stamps, African American art – and antique Victorian handbags!

In the fall of 2024, she moved to Greenspring, where she made new friends. After a diagnosis of bladder cancer in May, she moved into hospice care, where she died on August 4, fifteen days before her 89th birthday. She will be interred with her Danish forebearers in Exira, Iowa.

“So wise you have become, of such experiences, . . .

that already you’ll have understood what these Ithakas mean.”

— Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933)

May she now rest in eternal peace.