In Parka And Pearls 

By TAD BARTIMUS

My friend was 38 years old, divorced, with three children, when she decided there had to be more to life. So she piled her kids into a Buick station wagon and headed north from Chicago to Alaska.

The year was 1965. Back then, just getting to the 6-year-old state was an arduous, even dangerous, adventure. Taking off on the strength of having just one college friend in Anchorage was downright daring.
Nothing in Kay Fanning's experience - as a debutante, adored only child, wife of a multi-millionaire - hinted at her gumption and grit. But often our best qualities are hidden until we mine them.

Kay had lived long enough to know that life offers us choices, but things don't happen until we choose. She picked the one she thought might be the most fun, thereby changing her own world and the direction of what was to become her adopted state.

"After the divorce, my life was on a downhill slide," she told a writer for Town & Country Magazine in 1986. "I needed to grab onto something solid and permanent."
In Alaska, Kay Fanning found bedrock. In just 20 years, she saved a struggling newspaper, helped preserve Alaska's beauty and environment, influenced the state's political life and grew into a self-confident, independent woman whose second act has become a primer for women struggling to find their authentic selves.

Kay Fanning died in Boston on Oct. 19. Her memorial service will be held in Anchorage this week, in the dark, arctic cold that tests the staying power of true Alaskans. She was 73, just starting to write her history of the Anchorage Daily News, which she'd rescued and guided to a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1976.  Her friends feel cheated, for no one but her immediate family knew she was ill. In our mind's eye we see Kay as she always was: physically vigorous, intellectually curious, with enough projects on her plate to last another quarter century. But she was a devout Christian Scientist; her colon cancer wasn't diagnosed until just three weeks before her death.

As Kay grew from privileged ex-wife (of department store heir and Chicago Daily News owner Marshall Field IV) to venerated newspaperwoman, she didn't waste a minute. Days after her Alaska arrival in 1965, she landed a job as a $2-an-hour librarian at the pro-development Anchorage Times. Only months later, with her new husband, Chicago newspaperman Larry Fanning, she bought the Anchorage Daily News.

Kay and Larry - and then Kay alone, after he died of a heart attack at his desk in 1971 - inspired loyalty among young, idealistic journalists investigating Alaska's sacred cows: oil companies, natural resource exploiters, Alaska's Natives. For the struggling Daily News, history collided with opportunity during construction of Alaska's oil pipeline. There were enough graft, corruption, backroom deals and environmental damage to generate constant front-page headlines, meaty stories and growing national credibility.

For all of their enthusiasm, there were barely enough reporters to fit on Kay's couch and barely enough money to pay them. Under enormous financial and political pressure, Kay criss-crossed the country, soliciting funds to keep the crusading paper's doors open. Her son, Ted Field, was her biggest angel. Actor Robert Redford was another, bringing the Watergate film "All the President's Men" to Anchorage for a benefit screening.
Kay, who once was described as "the Grace Kelly of Chicago," had star power, and she aged with style. Her gray hair was always beautifully coifed, her tailored suits impeccably cut, her grooming perfect. Even in an iridescent orange parka and rubber arctic boots in the middle of an Alaska winter, she wore her ever-present pearls.

But she was tough. Very tough. She stood up to the powerful forces trying to run her out of town and her newspaper out of business, and became a committed feminist who influenced other women to stand up for themselves by her example.

The Daily News won its Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1976 for investigating the all-powerful Teamsters Union. Three years later, Kay secured the paper's future by selling it to McClatchy newspapers; the Daily News is now Anchorage's only daily newspaper.

Kay married Amos Mathews, became a grandmother and left Alaska in 1983 to become editor of The Christian Science Monitor, making her the highest-ranking newswoman in America. She went on to become the first female president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and one of the few women to serve on The Associated Press' board of directors. 

Kay Fanning did much good -- for her family, her friends and protegees, for Alaska, for women, for her profession, for her faith. Her epitaph should be "I chose." Her legacy is her life.

© 2000 The Women Syndicate

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