Mary Kay Doody

My, how the months have flown by. It's fall and almost winter in the Methow Valley and I still think of Mary Kay everyday. I remember the times we shared on Whidbey and the walks and talks. I pulled out my old hiking boots (very old) and hoped I would find some sand from Ebby's Landing on them. Alas, no sand - just too many miles and too many hikes since Whidbey. I can never thank Mary Kay for the richness she brought to my life by teaching me so much about nature and the wonderful world...

As well as admiring her as a journalist and a person, we will always love and appreciate Mary Kay for her kindness to us when we were young and building a cabin on South Whidbey. She took us in to her home (out of the 1965 VW microbus, and with our 2 dogs) and let us live with her while we finished building. I know that she considered John to be family, but the wife and the dogs, too- !
She was very generous to us.
I'm adding a favorite photo of Mary Kay, John's mother Travis...

Mary Kay Doody was a reporter.

I mean that in the best sense of the word. An old-fashioned, hard-nosed beat reporter, the kind of bulldog who would trail a story for days, pepper everyone in sight with questions, slog through reams of paperwork and fine print and then emerge with the facts, and nothing but the facts.

Her passing this week may have closed a career, but the legend lives on.

Long before she helped launch the Whidbey Examiner, then led it for many...

Mary Kay and I worked together for close to 14 years at the Whidbey News-Times. She was one of the hardest working, ethically pure journalists I have ever known. She worked late into the night countless times to chronicle the antics of a politically fractious community, but saw real progress in the creation of Classic U Forest and Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve. When historians of the future tune in to determine how these things came about, no doubt a prime source of their...

I have such warm memories of sharing animal stories with Mary Kay. Nobody was more passionate or knowledgable about the natural world than Mary Kay. She was an incredibly thoughtful, caring person--simply a treasure of a human being.

Mary Kay supported my sobriety over 30 years and was so kind to me when I lost my stepmother. Friends and family meant everything to her. I last talked to her through a curtain/room divider at Whidbey Island Manor before Christmas a few years ago. I took her a calendar, chewing gum and a newspaper. I bet she threw her head back and gave a loud laugh to see three things she had no use for arrive by special delivery. She was feisty! I will miss her spirit.