Meet Charles Kelly

President emeritus of the Oberholtzer Foundation and QSF Board Member

When Charles Kelly was five years old, he would climb out of bed, grab his pillow and his blanket and lie on the floor in front of his parents’ third-floor guest room. Through the closed door, Charlie listened to Ernest Oberholtzer play the violin until his eyes became heavy and the young boy fell asleep on the floor. Ober, as Charlie calls him, visited the Kellys’ Evanston, Illinois home often during the late 1920s; he, Sigurd Olson and Charlie’s father were part of a group fighting efforts to dam the Rainy Lake Watershed on the United States and Canada border. Ober would become well known as an activist who preserved the watershed, but to Charlie, he was a childhood friend.

“It was sort of a game. He would act as if he was surprised every time he found me outside the door, but he wasn’t,” Charlie says now.

Ober, Charlie’s father and their fellow activists succeeded in lobbying Congress, which passed legislation that prevented the alteration of water levels in the Rainy Lake watershed, and Charlie—now 80—grew up to continue his family’s legacy. An attorney, he has been a long-time board member of the Quetico Superior Foundation, the Oberholtzer Foundation, the Wilderness Research Foundation and an honorary member of Canada’s Quetico Foundation. So long-time that most people are hard pressed to recall just how many years “long-time” means. Charlie places his start as a board member during the 1960s. But where most men point to a specific moment in the great northwoods or a tradition of family canoe trips as the origins for their activism, Charlie’s reason is different.

“It’s been my way of carrying on the work my father invested in all of his life, and I found very fascinating the people he brought home,” Charlie says. “They were very fascinating, and I got to know them well.”

Charlie grew up with Ober and Sigurd Olson as close family friends—they were, he says, a regular fixture in his life, both at his parents’ home and the family farm in Wisconsin. But it was in high school that Charlie finally got to know the land that Ober and Sig fought so hard to protect. Charlie suffered from hay fever that bordered on asthma; a doctor informed his family that if Charlie kept going to the family farm, it would kill him. So as a sophomore in high school, Charlie headed to the Boundary Waters, then known as the Superior Roadless Area, for a canoe trip with Sig, his son Bob, and an outdoor photographer.

“We went out to film a film later used in Congress to try to get the government to pass an air ban order prohibiting aircraft from flying below some number of feet over the wilderness area,” Charlie says.

In the film, he says, just as the men are about to cast their lines, a plane roars in, pulls out a bunch of fish and roars out. In 1949, President Truman issued an executive order prohibiting flights over the Superior Roadless Area below 4,000 feet mean sea level; the order eliminated fly-ins.
But Charlie’s first visit to Oberholtzer’s Mallard Island, where he would eventually help shape the direction of the Oberholtzer Foundation, came several years later after Charlie graduated from Amherst College in 1953 and Harvard Law School in 1956.

“I was getting out of law school and said, I think I ought to go up and see that island. I did stay on the island, but I walked across the ice to get there. Ober taught me that when you walk across Rainy Lake, even if it’s 56 below, you take a canoe because you might fall through,” Charlie says.

It was the first of many visits to the island. Even as Charlie returned to Chicago to practice law, first at Hubachek & Kelly, and then at Chapman and Cutler, he and his family visited the island regularly. Charlie remembers one visit in particular when Ober held a Native American ceremony to transport the spirit of Billy Magee, the Indian with whom he traveled to Hudson Bay in 1928, from a chimney on the shore of Rainy Lake to the island. Ober had sold the land where the chimney resided, and the new owners intended to tear it down.

“We had the kids up there, and the medicine man asked all children under the age of ten to come with him, and whatever they talked about for two hours he admonished them not to talk about with anybody, particularly with parents. So my daughter, who is nearly 50 now has never told me what was said,” Charlie says.

Charlie also met his third and current wife at the island, Ober’s goddaughter Jeane, when they both visited the island one summer.

“That was some 38 or 39 years ago, and we were fairly much in touch ever since. We married six years ago,” Charlie says.

Over the years, Charlie periodically helped Ober with legal matters such as helping oversee the donation of Sand Point to the Canadian government. But much of his contribution to Ober’s legacy came after Ober’s death, when his will
left some confusion as to the purpose of his Foundation.

“There developed a misunderstanding among the trustees if the purpose was to make grants or be an active Foundation,” Charlie says. “I suggested that we go ahead and do what we thought we wanted to do, which was to have Native American groups on the island and conservation group meetings there and whatnot, and then when we had a record of having done these things go to the federal court saying what we were doing was within the boundaries of the trust agreement. It was a fairly open
and shut procedure.”

Native American culture had always been important to Ober. On his trip to Hudson Bay with Billy Magee, he recorded many conversations with natives along the route. Continuing that legacy became an important part of shaping the foundation.

“After he died, the trustees came into possession of those recordings but had no way of playing them. Because of their age, they were very brittle and if we played with them they broke. So we took them to the Library of Congress, and they had the ability to make recordings of what was on those wires…” Charlie says. “We had elders of the tribe come to the island with younger members and their families to listen to those recordings. They were all very excited because they could hear the voices of their grandparents or voices of people described to them… All of their history has been passed on orally but there was quite a period of time when alcohol damaged much of that tradition, and whole generations lost that tradition. The tapes from Ober helped change that. Helped them understand that history… and as a result of that and other things, [Ober and the islands] have been known as sacred to the Indians.”

Today, the trustees give the Native Americans the islands for two weeks every summer, and over the years Charlie has invited them to participate in the board. But while Charlie downplays his role on the board, people like Jean Replinger, who has worked with the Oberholtzer Foundation since 1982, credit him with much more than an open and shut procedure in shaping the direction of the Foundation.

“Charlie included everyone, always. He simply said you’re all important and we have to speak together about our interests and remember Ober’s integrity… He listened for a long time, and then said…what can we pull out of that common interest?”

It is that fairness and objectivity, she says, that Charlie has always brought and continues to bring to the Oberholtzer Foundation and the Quetico Superior Foundation (he continues to be active with both boards).

“He honors listening,” Jean says. “That’s exceptional.”

It is a skill, perhaps, that he honed as a young boy, lying on the floor in front of Ober’s door listening to the tune of his violin.

By Alissa Johnson

This article appeared in Wilderness News Summer 2011