Angela Lobo-Cobb was born in Mangalore, India, on April 2, 1950. Two days later, 8,000 miles away, James Dennis Cobb was born in Missouri. For nearly a quarter century they unwittingly made their way toward each other, finally meeting as graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They’d marry in 1975 and, 43 years later, die of influenza eight days apart.
In this 1982 photograph by Jack Greene, Angela sits among her books and the typewriter on which she wrote her poems, presumably at Ridge Side Cooperative on the 800 block of Williamson Street. That’s where James lived (and ultimately died) after becoming a co-founding member in 1982. According to their shared 2018 obituary, James was also a military historian, a freelance journalist, a reviewer of computer and board games, an Essen Haus devotee, a Ph.D. philosopher, an affordable housing advocate, an adjunct professor, an ethics board member, chair of the Madison Commission on People with Disabilities and a budget and policy analyst for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.