KAY THE JOURNALIST: THE TOUR: ~LUCY'S LECTURE~---the list of tour stops---other links---site navigation
This website focuses on the Five Stokey Siblings.  As I have said elsewhere, their offspring were all good and worthy people, but they are not the focus of this website.  But, as I have also said elsewhere, one of the offspring, Will's daughter Kay, deserves some special consideration.  It was Kay who held onto the papers - particularly letters - that are such a large part of this website.  Kay knew the value of history, and as a journalist she also surely knew that there was a good story here.  So it seems right to have a Tour about Kay's career as a journalist.

Kay loved telling stories from the very beginning - especially (as everyone who remembers her stories says) happy stories.  We have a postcard written when she was four years old (with help from her mother), telling her Aunt Ruthie to come visit them at Fernbank, and telling how to get there from Georgia - in other words, telling the story of how she herself got there from Georgia.  The following year we have her grandmother Stokey, Mama Margaret, telling Alma how five-year-old Kay's eyes sparkled when she told a story about going for a haircut.

Next we have the very first Fernbank News, with Alma helping eight-year-old Kay and her siblings to include everything that a newspaper ought to include - general news, weather, sports, society notes, the arts, science, and advertisements.  All the siblings participated, but Kay would have been the one to think (with sparkling eyes), "This is how I can tell stories to people!" 

In 1934, Will was away in Texas for long periods of time, hoping to become an oil tycoon.  (He didn't.)  The children all wrote to him.  Maggie wrote about her music, Roger wrote about how he saved the day by fixing the lawn mower handle, and Kay, the aspiring journalist, told about what was new in Atlanta.

In 1938, Kay and Roger travelled through the legendary Hurricane of 1938 to get to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Read all about it!

In 1940, Kay went to the Columbia School of Journalism, and we have a couple of letters that she wrote home about learning her craft.  I'm always hoping for more.

She got her master's degree in journalism in 1941, and went to work for a newspaper in New York, though not exactly as a reporter.  Still she was in the newspaper world when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and she wrote to Alma about it.

Then she got a job as a reporter, and I've included a 1944 Associated Press article by her, one of many available in newspapers.com.  I could flood this website with them, but I shan't.

​In 1945, Kay was on vacation in Woods Hole when the Japanese finally surrendered, ending World War II.  The Fernbank residents put together a 9-page edition of the Fernbank News, with Kay contributing her professional expertise to the enterprise.  Of course Kay was involved with other editions of the Fernbank News, and you can take a detour to look at them, but this 1945 and the original one in 1927 are the only ones that I am including in this Tour.

The following year, on Memorial Day, Kay had a nice article about how the Civil War veterans were dying out.

Kay married Ernie Lundeen in 1948, and they moved out to Oregon, where Kay found work in journalism.  In 1955, she became the first Women's Editor of the Eugene Register-Guard, and the article for that event gives a useful summary of her career up to that point.  Women's Editor sounds like a good spot for Kay: lots of happy stories to tell.

Her big moment came in 1963 when she chased down an interview with world-famous ballet Rudolf Nureyev and snagged an interview with him, which won her a press award.  I like the article because I see the similarity between Nureyev and Kay: each of them doing the work that they love.

Kay left the Register-Guard not too long after that, but she continued to tell stories.  There is an article of reminiscence about her father's embarrassing old Buick - "Are we ever more sensitive than in those years from 10 to 12 to teens?"

And of course she told stories to us.  My father - Kay's younger brother Roger - rarely talked about his childhood.  I think he was a characteristic Stokey in that way.  My mother talked quite a bit about her childhood, because her family was always happy to tell stories (usually funny) about their past.  She mentioned once that in fact she soft-pedalled this tendency when talking to us children, so as not to present too glaring a contrast with my father.  Be that as it may, the result was that I had the impression that my father's childhood must have been unhappy, since he didn't talk about it.  It wasn't until Aunt Kay started visiting periodically during my father's final illness that I started to hear stories that painted quite a different picture from what I had imagined.  I am very grateful to Aunt Kay for that.  But did she, with her storytelling ways, ever feel like the odd man out in her own family?

Back to the documents in the Tour: we have a testimony of Kay's in the Christian Science Sentinel about Christian Science in her life.  There are happy endings there - even one in the aftermath of her beloved mother's death.

Finally, we have the memorial written for her after her death by her daughters, who said: "she once said if she had nine lives she would want to live each of them as a journalist".

Kay grew up in a world where women were encouraged to simply be wives and mothers, but she also grew up in a family where it was quite ordinary for women to have jobs and careers.  Alma encouraged her.  Will sent her checks when she was in school.  I suspect that Kay would have become a journalist without the encouragement and without the checks; she went chasing after a journalism career just the way she went chasing after Rudolf Nureyev.  But it's nice that her family - the Five Stokey Siblings - supported her.
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