Callister

Callister is Mac Alasdair, son of Alexander, and its Manx character sits in what happened to the first syllable. Manx speech put no weight on Mac, so the hard c at the end of the prefix came to be heard as the opening sound of the father's name instead; the prefix then fell out of island use, and the consonant it had given away did not go with it. Scotland kept the prefix whole and made MacAlister of the same root; Man made Callister. One patronymic on either side of a narrow sea, and the hard C is the whole of the difference.

William Callister (1808-1872) was a timber importer from Ramsey who became a Member of the House of Keys: a man whose living came off ships bringing building material to an island, sitting in the chamber that legislated for it.

The name was still in island public life in the century that followed. David Callister (1935-2020) was a Manx politician and broadcaster who sat in the Legislative Council of the Isle of Man; Rob Callister is a Manx politician of the present day. Between William in the Keys and David in the Council, the name has been spoken in both of the island's chambers.

Cyril Percy Callister was born on 16 February 1893 at Chute in Victoria, near Ballarat, second son among seven children of William Hugh Callister, a teacher and postmaster, and Rosetta Anne Dixon. He went to the Ballarat School of Mines and to Grenville College, then on a scholarship to the University of Melbourne, taking a science degree in 1914 and a master's in 1917. In early 1915 the food manufacturer Lewis and Whitty employed him; later that year he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force.

His time in uniform lasted 53 days. The Minister for Defence ordered him withdrawn from active service and assigned to the Munitions Branch, a man with his chemistry being worth more making explosives. He worked on munitions in England and Wales, then in Scotland at HM Factory Gretna as a shift chemist, and while there was elected an Associate of the Institute of Chemistry in 1918. He married a Scotswoman, Katherine Hope Mundell, and returned to Australia in 1919.

In the early 1920s Callister went to work for Fred Walker with a single brief: develop a yeast extract. Imports of Marmite from the United Kingdom had been disrupted in the aftermath of the war, and Australia wanted its own. He experimented on spent brewer's yeast, the leavings of the brewing trade, and arrived independently at the product called Vegemite, first sold by Fred Walker and Company in 1923.

Working from the details of a James L. Kraft patent, he then succeeded in producing processed cheese. The Walker company negotiated the manufacturing rights, the Kraft Walker Cheese Co. was established in 1926, and Callister was made its chief scientist and production superintendent. Melbourne gave him a doctorate in 1931 on a submission built largely from the Vegemite work, and that same year he helped the Royal Australian Chemical Institute win its Royal Charter.

He died in 1949. His grandson Jamie Callister published a biography, The Man Who Invented Vegemite, in 2012, and the Cyril Callister Foundation, set up in 2019, runs a museum at Beaufort in Victoria. The snowboarder Kent Callister, born 1995 and a competitor for Australia at the 2014 Winter Olympics, is his great-nephew.

Charles Warren Callister was born at Rochester, New York, on 27 February 1917 and grew up across New York, Florida, Ohio and Texas, studying art as a teenager at the Witte Museum in San Antonio. His college scholarship was restricted to Texas schools and none had a fine arts programme, so he read architecture, art and sociology at Austin instead, from 1935 until he was drafted in 1941. He served with the Army Corps of Engineers until 1955, helping build the ALCAN Highway in Alaska, and later flew as an Air Force pilot.

After the war he moved with his wife Mary Frances and their two sons to northern California, where he and his former Texas classmate Jack Hillmer set up the practice Hillmer-Callister in San Francisco. Their first job, the Hall House at Kentfield in 1947, is considered the first residential application of post-tensioned concrete slab technology in the United States. In 1950 he founded Callister, Payne and Rosse at Tiburon.

The buildings are the Christian Science churches at Belvedere and Mill Valley, the field house at UC Santa Cruz, the Mills College Chapel of 1968, and Rossmoor, the retirement community at Walnut Creek that brought the firm national attention. Reckoned a leader of the Second Bay Area Tradition, he said he was trying to reflect the region he was in, and his method began with walking a site and listening, learned from the photographer Minor White. He held no architect's licence until 1988.

Marion Jones Callister was born at Moreland, Idaho, on 6 June 1921, finished at Blackfoot High School in 1939 and served in the United States Army from 1944 to 1946. He took a law degree at the University of Utah in 1950 and a Juris Doctor from its S.J. Quinney College of Law the year after, then worked his way up the state: assistant Bingham County attorney at Blackfoot, Assistant United States Attorney from 1953 to 1957, private practice in Boise, state district judge from 1970 to 1975, and United States Attorney for Idaho.

President Gerald Ford nominated him in July 1976 to the seat on the United States District Court for the District of Idaho left by Judge J. Blaine Anderson, and the Senate confirmed him that August. He was Chief Judge of the district from 1981 to 1988 and took senior status on his sixty-eighth birthday in 1989, sitting on for a further eight years until his death at Boise in 1997. Beside the law ran a second life in his church: missionary, bishop of the Boise 3rd Ward, president of the Boise West Stake.

Valerie Joy Callister was born at Leongatha on 16 June 1950, daughter of Herbert Charles Callister, a farmer, and Alma Joyce. She took a Bachelor of Arts at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education and a Graduate Diploma in Health Administration at La Trobe University, taught at Traralgon from 1975 to 1981, and joined the Labor Party in 1976.

A by-election in 1981 sent her to the Victorian Legislative Assembly as the member for Morwell. She was briefly unseated on a technicality in 1984 and sat until her retirement in 1988. Everything after that stayed in the same corner of Victoria and turned to health: regional Gippsland coordinator for Alcohol and Drug Services, state director of Greening Australia, manager of the Moe/Narracan and Traralgon community health centres, and chief executive of the Latrobe Community Health Centre from 1997 to 2003.

Tad Richards Callister was born at Glendale, California, on 17 December 1945 to Reed Eddington Callister and Effie Norine Richards, both natives of Salt Lake City. He served as a missionary in the mid-1960s, took an accounting degree at Brigham Young University, a Juris Doctor at UCLA and a master of laws in tax law at New York University, and spent his career as a lawyer in southern California.

From 2005 to 2008 he was president of his church's Canada Toronto East Mission, and it was in Canada that he was called as a general authority. He served as counselor and then president of the Pacific Area, living in Auckland and overseeing the work in New Zealand, Australia and the islands of the Pacific; in 2011 he joined the seven-man Presidency of the Seventy, and in 2014 was called as the 21st Sunday School General President, holding that office until 2019. His older brother Douglas L. Callister sat in the Second Quorum of the Seventy from 2000 to 2009.

The surname travels as a middle name too, which is how a Manx patronymic ends up in the byline of an American mathematician: Thomas Callister Hales, born 1958, works in representation theory, discrete geometry and formal verification. For a name that began as one island's way of saying son of Alexander, that is a long road from Ramsey.