Charles Malcolm McAlister, 88 years old, passed into the Great Mystery on Saturday, August 3, 2024 at about 11:30 AM. "Mac" is survived by two daughters, Kelly and Erin, and one grand-daughter, Catherine, all living in Florida. He leaves behind many friends which he made over the course of his life.
Mac grew up in Greenville, Illinois, and always thought of himself as a transplanted "Illinois Man," like one of his role models, Abraham Lincoln. His mother passed away when he was a child. He was primarily raised by his father, a World War I veteran. When Mac graduated from high school, he wanted to join the military but his father advised against it. Mac ignored the advice and ended up in the special forces unit that became known as the "Green Beret." He was involved in early covert actions in Vietnam, being parachuted into that country in 1956, where he was wounded badly enough to end his tour of duty.
Now eligible for the GI Bill, Mac attended college at Southern Illinois University, studying philosophy. Through a rather serendipitous series of events, he ended up in the social work program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned a Master of Social Work degree. Thus began his career as a social worker and counselor, for which he seemed a natural.
Around this time he met and married Trish, and they had two daughters together. This period of his life was passed mostly in St. Louis and the marriage ended in divorce. It was around this time that Mac began to seriously consider moving to the woods and building a cabin. He found gainful employment with the Veteran's Administration and went to Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Here, he discovered the rugged beauty of the Arkansas Ozarks in the northwest corner of that state with its low taxes and cheap land. He bought forty acres near the Buffalo National River in Newton County between the small towns of Hasty and Western Grove.
Having little construction experience, he enrolled in a log-cabin-building school in Canada. There, he learned how to build with logs in the Scandinavian style of log building. This involved coping the upper logs to fit perfectly on the log below, making chinking of the logs unnecessary. He spent the next several years carefully crafting his cabin at a location the locals refer to as Schoolhouse Spring in Pinhook Hollow, where there is today a marker at the entrance to the property. Eventually, he had electricity brought in and modernized his work of art.
He was assisted in this construction by a couple of friends, most notably Greg Weymann, who passed in 2012. Greg and Mac were great friends who would spend Sundays and holidays together playing Scrabble, working on the cabin or other projects, or just traipsing through Mac's beloved woods. At one point, Greg advised Mac to take advantage of a free colonoscopy screening at the hospital in Harrison, which Mac did. They found cancerous growth throughout his colon and he subsequently had to have about ten feet of colon removed. He gave up his treasured cigars at this point, and made a full recovery.
Mac was always something of a lady's man, but around this time he got hooked up with what turned out to be the love of his life, Geri Salyer, a retired schoolteacher from California. Geri had moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and the relationship lived between Mac's place in the Ozarks and Geri's place in Raleigh. They traveled extensively and thoroughly enjoyed each other's company in retirement. Geri brought a woman's touch to Pinhook Hollow, and Mac's cabin was transformed into a show place.
Geri died suddenly of a heart attack in Raleigh in 2015, a devastating blow to Mac. Between that and his declining health and energy levels, he determined to "move to town," in this case Eureka Springs, AR. He sold his beloved cabin to a buyer that he was convinced would give it proper respect and care, and moved to Holiday Island in late 2019, a community on upper Table Rock Lake near the Missouri border just north of Eureka Springs. He bought a comfortable house on a half acre and resumed his creative puttering in the woods, building little sculptures and acquiring curious objects that became works of art unto themselves. He also decided to write an autobiography. Edited by a local English teacher and self-published, Pinhook Hollow -- Schoolhouse Spring is Mac's own take on his journey, including his intellectual influences and political views, which are nuanced, often erudite, and fair-minded.
Mac passed his final years at this location. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer in the summer of 2023. This time he was not so fortunate; the cancer could not be contained and a year-long decline began.
Mac lived life on his own terms and, as daughter Kelly stated, "He wasn't through with life, but life was through with him." Besides his amazing cabin in the woods and his daughters, Mac's legacy is the legion of souls he helped out of their dark places; assistance that they likely passed on to others, like ripples in a pond. It seems fitting to close with one of his favorite quotes from George Eliot: "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric events; and the things that are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
