R.I.P. Spencer Heath MacCallum

Spencer MacCallum and Emalie Caley

Spencer Heath MacCallum (b: December 21, 1931; d: December 17, 2020) was truly an amazing and wonderful person–multi-talented, intelligent, kind, and compassionate. Spencer was an anthropologist, archeologist, editor, publisher, entrepreneur, and philosopher. The world is much poorer without him. I was privileged to count Spencer as a friend for more than 25 years. Among his significant achievements were his preservation and promulgation of the works of E. C. Riegel (b. 1878; d. 1954), a man whom I’ve described as a “master of monetary truth” whose insights have greatly inspired my own work on the “money problem” and the development of innovative and equitable means of exchanging value.

In his Editorial Preface to Flight From Inflation, Spencer tells the fascinating story of how he happened to meet Riegel, how he subsequently rescued Riegel’s literary legacy from oblivion, and then went on to preserve, reprint and republish much of his work. Among the treasures discovered in Riegel’s papers was an unpublished manuscript titled Flight From Inflation that Spencer went on to edit and publish in 1978.

Spencer was also the person who discovered the work of potter Juan Quezada, helped him to develop his craft, and made the pottery of Mata Ortiz, Mexico famous throughout the Americas. That story and more about Spencer’s remarkable life is told by Walter Parks and Richard O’Connor in this remembrance.