Obituary: Kay Harvey, 76, longtime Pioneer Press reporter wrote on aging, psychology and dying
In 1999, several new books about dying with peace and dignity landed on Kay Harvey’s desk. Fascinated, the Pioneer Press reporter reached out to a HealthEast Hospice Care nurse for sources and embarked on a writing odyssey of her own, shadowing an outgoing Woodbury woman in her 30s during the final nine months of her chronic struggle with breast cancer.
Together with photographer Richard Marshall’s intimate photos, Harvey’s four-part feature series on Gwen Frazier — “Dying Well” — so captivated her co-workers that several looked to her as the newspaper’s in-house expert on mortality and the emotional intricacies of preparing for one’s own final departure.
“She understood how to work with statistics and put a human face on complex topics,” recalled Sue Campbell, who oversaw the series and edited Harvey for more than a decade. “It wasn’t really being discussed before then, just the idea that you could plan and have meaningful conversations before dying.”
Harvey, who worked for the Pioneer Press for 26 years, served as a copy editor in the newspaper’s features department for several years beginning in 1980 before becoming a beat reporter focused on aging. She died Wednesday at Stonecrest Memory Care in Woodbury at age 76.
She met her husband, Gary Harvey, a longtime Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, while working at the Omaha World-Herald in the 1970s.
On Friday, former co-workers recalled Harvey’s elegance and poise, as well as her passion for personal growth.
“She was one of the kindest women I’ve ever known,” said former Pioneer Press copy editor Cheryl Burch-Schoff. “Her smile lit up any room.”
Harvey graduated from the University of Nebraska with degrees in English and journalism in 1976, and returned to school from 1998 to 2003 to obtain a master’s degree in human development from St. Mary’s University of Minnesota.
“It was a major passion of hers to understand how people tick, and how they develop into better people,” said former Pioneer Press colleague Nancy Conner. “She did some life-coaching, too, after she got her degree. You’d talk to Kay and it wasn’t enough for her to know how you were doing on any given day, but she would want to know the who, the what, the where and the why.”
Conner edited her written copy more than once and “it was hard to find anything to change,” she said. “Her words just flowed.”
Harvey, who grew up in Superior, a small town in southern Nebraska, left the Pioneer Press in 2006 and became an occasional contributor to the MinnPost news website, focusing on aging, demographics, gender and psychology. She also kept busy as a freelance features writer, a teacher of memoir writing and a student adviser at St. Mary’s Minneapolis campus.
On Friday, longtime Pioneer Press reporter Molly Guthrey penned her own remembrance of Harvey, calling her “the most glamorous-looking reporter I’ve ever worked with: I could imagine her playing tennis while balancing a stack of books on her head, with not a strand of her blonde hair out of place, and maintaining her perfect posture. I don’t know if she actually played tennis, though!”
“Her writing was as elegant as her comportment. … When I heard she was not doing well, I (revisited) one of her archived award-winning story packages,” added Guthrey, recalling the “Dying Well” series. “It’s a beautiful series — both visually and the writing.”
Harvey’s survivors include her husband, son Jon Placke and grandchildren. Her son Mark Placke died in 2010.
Services will be held at 2 p.m. Aug. 27 at Wulff Woodbury Funeral Home, 2195 Woodlane Drive. Visitation will begin at 1 p.m.
