She worked on the corporate side of the aerospace industry for 30 years. She intersected and dialogued and facilitated. She drove a Realtor's champagne Cadillac CTS. She raised three sons. She kept her family together as her husband drank himself to death.
Karen McCarthy mulled over her accomplishments as she drove home from her mother's nursing home in Hemet one night last spring. Her mom's mind was evaporating in the final stages of Alzheimer's. Seeing her lose title to her life's narrative brought McCarthy to consider her own.
She pulled onto the 91 Freeway and headed west into the orange city glow. In the hermetic silence of the Cadillac, her mind hurtled through old memories and dreams ahead. She wanted to make an impact beyond work and family.
She had coasted out of her youth, swirling in the eddies past so many opportunities she would jump at now. By the time she took a hard course as an adult she was already hemmed in by the rugged circumstances she had drifted into.
Now she was retired at 57. Her sons were grown. Her greatest love and torment was dead.
The terrain was wide open. She needed to set out beyond comfort and protection.
She just needed a path. Corporate organizational development managers -- retired or otherwise -- do not wander aimlessly. For years she strode into conference rooms at Raytheon Corp., flip chart in hand, urging teams to set "identifiable goals."
Now one kept running through her mind -- not so much the ultimate destination but the first step.
By the time she pulled up to her little home in Torrance, her mind was set. She would join the Peace Corps.
--
Karen Pettyjohn was eating a burrito on the floor when John McCarthy and his dog walked into her friend's beach shack in Hermosa that day in 1970. He was strong and rollicking, wearing long hair and a torn Army fatigue shirt with a pack of Camels in the pocket. He pulled the tab off a can of Coors and the party began.
She was spellbound. He was the one.
Karen was an insecure 20-year-old emerging awkwardly from a sheltered youth in Thousand Oaks.
Her mother was a fastidious archetype of the 1950s, so fanatical about having the perfect household that she did Karen's homework to ensure it was just right. Karen came out of high school with a phobia of classrooms and uncertainty about her intelligence. She didn't dare have any opinions. Her father, an executive in Howard Hughes' upper-middle ranks, got her a job in accounts payable at Hughes Tool Co.
