WeaverWeb: Selected Columns

That library where every book

shall lie open to one another...

A eulogy by

Howard Weaver

Kay Fanning 1927-2000

My wife Barbara spent some time one summer helping Kay Fanning plan the flower garden for her home, and she took away an insight I've remembered ever since. There was no room in that garden for anything purple or somber, Kay told her -- nothing but bright and cheerful colors. I've tried to keep that lesson in mind in shaping this bouquet of recollections to share with you today. As Kay would have requested, it's a selection from the many bright and cheerful memories that I cherish.

Kay Fanning figured in my journalistic life from earliest days, though I admit the sports editor loomed larger in my world as a high school stringer than did the publisher's wife. By the time I'd worked my way into a fulltime job in the newsroom, however, she WAS the publisher, and the editor as well, and from that moment she continued to play a central role.

I arrived at the Daily News by way of Muldoon and East Anchorage High with a vigorous but distinctly limited set of expectations. What Kay did for me, more than anything else, was to change them; simply by being who she was, she helped me become more than I would otherwise have been.

Recent arrivals may not understand how close to home the horizon was in Anchorage in those days. This was a very much smaller town, insular in many ways, often more than a little narrow-minded. It may be that Kay's greatest and most lasting gift to Alaska was the way she changed the sense of possibilities here; I was one of many beneficiaries, and by the luck of the draw was close enough for long enough to get more than my share.

Look: Kay Fanning KNEW Mike Royko, and Ann Landers. Newt Minnow was her lawyer. She'd eaten dinner at the White House and been to opening nights at the Met. I remember standing in her living room while I waited for her one day, taking down one book after another from the shelf and noticing that most were autographed, to Kay, from the authors.

I didn't know anybody else in Anchorage of whom those things were true, and neither most other people.

Kay simply couldn't see any reason why Anchorage ought to be backward; the phrases "good enough for Anchorage" or "just as nice as Seattle" didn't figure in her landscape. She knew there was something very special about the land and people of Alaska, and she was perpetually determined to make sure the rest of us lived up to that promise.

She went about that mission with a profound sense of respect that I came to appreciate only much later. In the way people often describe their parents, it would be fair to say of my relationship with Kay that the more experience I got as a journalist and editor, the better I understood her to have been. As a reporter and later editor, I sometimes chaffed at what I thought of as reluctance or timidity; it was years before I fully understood or appreciated the blend of judgment and balance she displayed.

In much the same way, it took me years to realize how very brave she had been to assign me and another reporter to the Teamsters Union investigation that brought her paper Alaska's first Pulitzer Prize in 1976. I had some romantic notions about personal danger in those days, but I had no appreciation for the size of the bet she was making when she took on that project. It is no exaggeration to say that nobody else in Alaska -- no businessman or banker or politician -- would have dared to do it.

I mentioned in the Daily News when she died that one measure of Kay's affection for Alaska was the fact that after her retirement, she spent winter months here as well as visiting in summer. That was only one small demonstration of how thoroughly Alaskan she became. From her earliest days, Kay understood truths about Alaska that some people never figure out. Far more than most, she understood the special circumstances of Alaska Natives in a land being engulfed by other cultures, and her paper championed better understanding. Three times her paper directed special reporting efforts at that goal: The Village People, The Emerging Village People, and The Village People Revisited. The fourth installment, A People In Peril, came after her departure, but likewise belongs on the list of her contributions.

Kay Fanning knew that a newspaper is a public trust and she published hers in an unrelenting quest for the public good. I don't know if she was a student of James Madison, but I know she embraced the ethic of which he spoke when he observed, "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

I have grown old enough myself now to have said farewell to more friends than I like to remember. While dealing with the passing of a colleague in Sacramento not long ago I came to the bittersweet realization that I have gotten better at it. For all that, Kay's death took me profoundly by surprise, and left me feeling somehow vacant, and diminished. I realized that she had seemed such a vital force that I never really contemplated departure.

I know she would not have appreciated us lingering on that reaction, and in honoring her memory I offer you a different thought in closing. It was written by John Donne a long time ago, in 1623, but might well have been penned last month, about Kay Fanning. This is what he said,

"... all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."

John Donne,

"Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623),

XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dic*nt,Morieris.