This posting has been delayed because I have found it to be very difficult to work on the blog.
This piece is from Joanna Hitchcock, a Brit, who recently retired as Director of the University of Texas Press. Joanna was a close friend. She gave the talk at an Open Forum meeting. Michele really enjoyed Open Forum. It was a ladies luncheon group with intellectual programs and a high power membership. After one meeting, Michele said that everyone else at her table had a building at the University named after them.
MICHELE KAY
December 2, 1944 – February 16, 2011
Michele Kay joined Open Forum in Fall 2007 and was diagnosed with cancer in March 2009. But in the short time she was with us she relished her membership and was already sufficiently engaged to chair the program committee in only her second year.
Many people have written and spoken aptly and movingly about Michele since she died in February after surviving an amazing two years with brain cancer. Some of you will have read obituaries and articles about her life, and I can’t do better than to pull snippets together from them and from her own writing, including the memoir she was dictating to her friend and former Statesman colleague Mary Ann Roser during her last year.
Micheline Trigachi was born in Cairo on December 2, 1944, to a French-speaking Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father, who was British by virtue of being Maltese. Her early life appears to have been a happy one. But her world came apart when her family was deported to London after the Suez Crisis in 1956. Speaking only French and Arabic, Michele set about learning English with characteristic determination. A year later her father got a job in Hong Kong, and by the end of that year her English was fluent. I don’t think you’re going to agree with me if I say she and I spoke alike, but someone observed that she had “a vaguely British accent,” and she certainly knew how to pronounce water.
Michele has variously been described as “a five-foot-tall fireball,” “a tower of energy,” “diminutive only in size…with a no-nonsense intensity that couldn’t hide a soft heart underneath.” She “thought fast, wrote fast, and spoke very fast. She disliked distractions, could be brusque and refused to suffer fools.” Eternally curious, she was a high-energy workaholic, but also a loving wife, mother, and grandmother. “She had an infectious smile, an impish laugh, and piercing eyes.” She was a sympathetic listener, who cut to the core of a problem or issue immediately. And “she reinvented herself time and time again—her professional life, while grounded in journalism, included stints in politics, business and community involvement,” and finally academia.
Her 40-year career as a journalist began right out of school covering weddings for The Hong Kong Standard, a job which she described as a disaster since she wasn’t interested in the women’s page and couldn’t tell one piece of clothing fabric from another. She moved on to cover news for the South China Morning Post, to Saigon during the Vietnam War, to the Dallas/Fort Worth Business Journal and Texas Business Magazine, and then to the Austin American-Statesman, where she served successively in various capacities. Of Michele as journalist, the late congressman Jake Pickle wrote in a letter to her about her coverage of his time in Washington: “In all my terms as a congressman of the 10th District, you were the best… You gave me no quarter…. And it was fun reporting to you because you told it honestly and forthrightly….you were great to work with. I always felt comfortable in talking to you. I always knew you got your facts straight and reported to our constituents a view point of honesty and fairness…you were the best newspaper writer anyone could hope for.”
After leaving the Statesman in 2002, Michele fulfilled her lifelong ambition of going to college by getting two degrees from St. Ed’s, before going on to teach journalism there. “I wasn’t really a teacher,” she wrote. “I was somebody with a passion for something who wanted to share it.” She stirred things up, creating a journalism minor and transforming the “really pretty bad” student newspaper into a professional publication. Father Brusatti, the Dean of the School of Humanities, described “her regular camping in my office with a list of demands—she never really called them demands, just very urgent requests and needs if we are going to succeed.” The students “loved the hustle and bustle of working with Michele Kay…. On hectic production days, we could often find Michele sprinting between each room yelling orders, answering multiple phones, and keeping us on task.”
Michele made friends easily. The same curiosity that made her a good journalist made her a great friend. She wanted to know everything about your life, but she was curious without being nosy. Her husband Robert Schultz described their first date in July 1997 as “the longest, most intense press interview I ever experienced…. I barely knew Michele before our first date, but as I was driving home afterwards, I asked myself ‘Is there any significant fact about me that this woman does not now know?’"
Michele and I first met at a dinner party at B.J. and Bob Fernea’s in the early nineties and followed up by getting together for lunch just before she moved to D.C. as Washington correspondent for the Statesman. When we reconnected, over 10 years later (I can’t remember how this came about, but I think she just picked up the phone one day) she’d been through several reincarnations. She’d met and married Robert Schultz and begun the happiest period of her life; she’d been involved in a political campaign, returned to the Statesman for 3 years, then gone to St. Ed’s, as I mentioned.
Michele and I soon discovered we were at roughly the same stages in our lives. Many of our vital concerns were similar, but there was also enough difference in our experiences to add spice and variety to our conversations. One of the many subjects on which we agreed was work: we enjoyed it far too much to want to “retire and not do anything.” “What would I do after I’d got everything in the house organized by 10 a.m.?” asked the super efficient Michele. When she did finally decide to retire in 2008, we talked about how much she was enjoying her leisure, spending time at home with Robert. She wanted to give herself some space before taking up any new projects. And always hospitable, she used this time to give parties, always for other people and causes, and invariably—in Tracy Curtis’s phrase—“self-catered.” At our final lunch before her diagnosis, she talked about how she was beginning to think about re-engaging in community projects and what she might like to do. Sadly, she never had the chance to go further, as fighting cancer took almost all her energy over the next two years.
One of the subjects Michele and I agreed on was the value we placed on becoming U.S. citizens. We were naturalized two years apart in the late nineties, and having at last gotten the vote, neither of us ever missed a chance to use it. But whereas I was simply a two-timer and felt as though I belonged, partially at least, both here and in England, Michele felt she did not belong anywhere for most of her life, having lived all over the world--in Egypt, London, Hong Kong, Saigon, San Francisco, Paris, Tel Aviv, New York, and Dallas--and it wasn’t until she made her last move to Austin that she finally felt settled.
And we also shared grief. Michele’s mother died in March 2005, mine two years later. Her mother was smart and fashionable, like mine; but unlike mine, she did not believe in education for women. Our mothers were both difficult in their different ways, but as Michele put it so well—and she could have spoken for both of us: “in the end, I could only think…how much I loved her and how much I would miss her.”
Whatever one asked of Michele, she was quick to say yes, almost before one had finished the request, whether it was to accompany me to an obligatory UT dinner, to co-host a party, or, ironically, to act as executor for my will.
The Open Forum meeting in November was the last time I had a real conversation with Michele. She was feeling a little better that day and she enjoyed it. On the way home in the car, she mentioned that she was meeting that afternoon with her minister friend to arrange her funeral. She said she hoped we’d have some time together after I retired; that was not to be. But she also expressed the hope that she would not be forgotten, and that’s one wish of hers that those of us who were fortunate enough to have known her can be sure to fulfill.
