Cathryn "Cay" Millar Karlin

Cathryn Millar Karlin

November 12, 1928 - April 3, 2025

Cay was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, to Cathryn and Dr. Robert Millar. Her grandparents had immigrated from Scotland and Ireland. The Great Depression struck within a year. Her father had applied to and been accepted at The Chicago Medical School.  He worked night hours at Bell Telephone to support his family and to pay tuition. The money was so meager that they stinted on heat, and Cay and her mother got in bed together by 4 o'clock on winter afternoons in order to stay warm through the nights.

In her early youth Cay was sickly. She was hospitalized so often that she learned to insert nasogastric tubes by herself.  Cay loathed the nurse who braided her hair nightly, so tightly that it hurt. By morning, Cay had always undone the braids.

By 1935 the nation was gaining ground. Robert's practice was in The Loop, in Marshall Field's Annex. Cay and her mother would take the train into the city to join him for lunch.  If there was a person, say, a single man, down on his luck and having only a cup of coffee, her father would discretely tell the waitress, "Bring that man whatever he wants." On Saturdays, the three of them would take in a vaudeville matinee at The Chicago Theater. In the 1930s, this would include a striptease act, and, once, it was Gypsy Rose Lee. As the bump-and-grind slowly built, her father wide-eyed and perched on the edge of his seat, the show about to climax, what Cay remembered was that her mother clapped her hand over Cay's eyes.

The family moved out to the country.  Robert became a country doctor. She went out at night with him on emergency calls. She assisted him in deliveries, in setting fractures, and in the operating room. They sang all the old songs he knew from the early 1900s as they drove the country miles. Consequent to the national hysteria after Pearl Harbor, a Japanese internment camp was built west of town, and Robert was the doctor for the internees.  The teenage Nisei attending the high school were terrific athletes, Cay recalled.

There came a new camp on the other side of town housing incarcerated German and Italian prisoners of war. Cay had a time of it sauntering to high school along the barbed wire fence at the edge of the fields where the prisoners worked. She didn't shirk from the wolf-whistles. Her father's solution: "I'm driving you to school." Soon, Cay found herself in a boarding school 50 miles away. Without boys to distract her, she studied and did well. The girls knew the Latin Mass; they had to speak the responses. She was charmed and intrigued by the elegant and erudite ladies who were Dominican sisters. She confided to one that she was considering entering the convent. The sister burst into laughter, turned about-face, and walked away laughing. Cay's feelings were hurt, but not for long.

At Cornell College she was the only student who registered for Ancient Greek. The professor taught the class anyway, solely to and for her. In biology lab, she and some lab mates performed an appendectomy on a cat. The operation was successful, but the patient died from the anesthesia. Overall, her grades weren't good. There were boys, dances, college fun, but very bad grades. The remedy: Marymount College in Salina, Kansas, far out at the edge of The Great Plains. There she met Frank Karlin, a lieutenant colonel in The Air Force.

They married in Joliet, Illinois, where Cay had been teaching English. They drove her sports coupe to Washington, DC, where Frank had been posted to The Pentagon. His interest was in ballistic missile application, and this took them to The Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, and eventually to Southern California, where Cay was disillusioned by the orange brown smoggy skies.  When the air had cleared after the first winter rain she exclaimed, "There are mountains around us!"

As we children grew, Mom instigated projects of fun: pets, sailing, skiing, concerts at The Hollywood Bowl and Broadway road shows which came to town. She played the piano and we sang songs from all the musicals. Neighbors climbed onto adjoining fences and applauded. Rounding the corner coming home from school we could hear her at the piano.  She made friends and kept them.

Cay furthered her own education studying law, travel agency, and French at Long Beach Community College. She earned a real estate license.  She searched long for a profession that suited her, and eventually found it in gemology, earning a graduate degree, becoming a certified gemologist, and fully engaging in grading, appraising, buying and selling diamonds and colored stones.

Her lifelong wanderlust led her to travel to four continents.  She hiked to Iguazu Falls and Victoria Falls, motored byways in Provence, puttered the canals of Venice in a vaporetto, walked Hadrian's Wall, looked in at The Crown Jewels in The Tower of London.  She stayed at Treetops Lodge in Kenya and at The George Cinq in Paris.  In North America she'd been from The North Woods and Quebec down to New Orleans, from Martha's Vineyard to Oahu, and far south to Taxco and Oaxaca.  She shopped at Marshall Field's, Garfinckel's, I. Magnin, Bloomingdale's, Harrod's, She had beautiful jewels. She loved her sports cars. The favorite was her 280 Z.  She drove her 428i to within two months of her death.

As age advanced, she could play the piano no longer, and, so, she furthered her reading: literature, poetry, politics and philosophy, and, of course, rereading in ancient Greek her slim volumes of The Iliad and The Odyssey. She particularly enjoyed old movies.

Incremental infirmity caused her to struggle and to endure much uncontrollable pain in the recent years. This she faced with the courage of a soldier. She made herself an example of a guiding elder and she showed us how to live, come-what-may.

It's difficult speaking of her in the past tense.

Cay was an only child. She had no cousins. She was pre-deceased by her parents and by three husbands. She is survived by her four children--Rob, Kitty, Bridget, Dana--and two further generations. We miss her already.

Her last words:  "We had fun."

Flowers:  No florist funeral displays or sprays.
Instead:  small, hand-held bouquets only; preferably from one's yard;
simple groupings of greens are especially requested

Donations in Cay's name, should persons wish those in lieu of flowers:

The Audubon Society
The Orange County Public Library
The Adrian Dominican Sisters, of Adrian, Michigan
Any women's shelters anywhere