Felicia Campbell, Professor Who Studied Gambling and Pop Culture, Dies at 89

Ms. Campbell left after six months with an honorable discharge, not because she wasn’t up to the task but because she was irritated by her unit’s inefficiencies, as she told her daughter. After she boarded the train on her way home, she threw her Marine’s duffel bag out of the window.

Ms. Campbell was the founder and executive director of the Far West Popular and American Culture Association, and the organizer of its conference, held every year in Las Vegas, with programs that might include a symposium on Frank Zappa or the armadillo cult of Texas (featuring live armadillos); a night devoted to Tarzan (featuring an appearance by Johnny Weissmuller); or a session on the semiotics of bumper stickers.

Her marriage to Ritzman Campbell, a craps and poker dealer who had been a student, and to whom she was married for about a decade, Ms. Tuttle said, ended in divorce when Ms. Tuttle was 5 and her brothers 8 and 10.

Fiercely independent, she taught her only daughter to say, when asked her name, “I am Tracy and I am my own little person.”

In addition to Ms. Tuttle, Ms. Campbell is survived by six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Her son Jedediah Campbell died in 2017; her son Adam Whitney Campbell, died on Sept. 5.

Ms. Campbell was a risk taker herself, though not at the gaming tables. When she discovered she and her female colleagues at the university were paid less than the men, she sued for back pay. When the case was settled nearly 10 years later, she used some of the money to finance a 300-mile trek through the Himalayas, even though she’d never camped before and at 52, wasn’t sure she would survive.

By the end she had a life-affirming and life-altering experience, just like her elderly gamblers. Ms. Campbell had risked her own neck, as she told a local newspaper after the trip, to test her theories.