Elaine Elizabeth Widner

1959 - 2023

Atlanta, GA - Elaine Elizabeth Widner, 64, who gallivanted so much of the world, worked in so much of the world, relished so much of the world, befriended so much of the world and hugged so much of the world, died Friday, Sept. 8, 2023, in Atlanta, the city that helped shape her adventurous adulthood. A thronging brigade of the bereaved includes one mensch of a husband, one dandy of an Australian cattle dog/Australian shepherd mix, six adored siblings, 13 cherished nieces and nephews, and enough friends to qualify as dizzying multitudes. She was widely, madly, almost preposterously beloved.

Person after person in time zone after time zone on continent after continent reported the identical, crucial qualities her company always provided: acceptance, grace, cheer, commiseration, perspective, support, sustenance. She mastered both the art of talking and the art of listening. She had a generous laugh capable of hurrying from resting to rollicking to riotous. She reveled in full dinner tables with emptied wine bottles. A world-class hugger and first-rate winker, her vivacity seemed to gain fitting collaboration from her second language: Italian. She managed to infuse even a six-year combat with cancer with travel, aplomb and humor, laughing even when "accused" of using chemotherapy as an "excuse" to avoid social occasions. Or playing the cancer card - "the C-card," as she called it, to board an airplane first. It ought to be good for something, she said.

Born at recently renamed Fort Moore in Georgia and raised in Janesville, WI, the first of the seven children of Hallie and Avalon Widner, Elaine emerged from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in journalism and landed in Atlanta already conveying her intention to crisscross the globe. She proceeded to crisscross the globe. She would steer a boat in Sydney Harbor on New Year's Eve, hike the hills of Maui, hear the music in Prague, dine on rooftops in Rome, walk the beaches in Cape Town. She would work in less-visited places around their ghastliest moments: Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia, El Salvador, Chechnya, the Balkans. In a 30-year marriage she and husband Jim would own a house in the village of Blera, Italy, await Thanksgivings in North Carolina and hurl variously-shaped balls through Atlanta parks for Luna, the aforementioned Australian mix.

Her first real job was at CNN in Atlanta in 1984, when Elaine was among an early crop of so-called "VJ's" (video journalists) - Ted Turner's term for the eager young TV and film-school graduates he hired - who would go on to build his legendary news operation. Making little more than $4 an hour, she joined a pool of video editors cutting taped pieces and segments for the voracious 24-hour news start-up.

She made lifelong friends with many of those fellow greenhorns at CNN, because that was basically the only kind of friends she made -real friends with whom she stayed in touch over time, knowing all their kids' names, asking after each kid and treating each kid - of any age - as her equal. The week before she entered the hospital for emergency surgery in August 2023, she and Jim had been hiking in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state - with one of her friends from first grade. A perusal of her phone would show her routine contact with a prodigious number of people.

At CNN she distinguished herself as a creative and conscientious editor, and she began traveling on field assignments as a combination video editor and sound technician. She was sought after as much for her conviviality and winning smile as for her reliable professionalism - all elements prized equally by the small CNN teams that roamed the world working insane hours covering breaking news for the network.

She endeared herself to everyone - professional peers, neighbors, people on the street, world leaders. She was part of the traveling press pool covering then-Vice President George H.W. Bush's run for president in 1988, including a visit to his home at the U.S. Naval Observatory one day when journalists joined in a friendly game of horseshoes in the backyard. Elaine coaxed Bush Sr. into recording an on-camera personal message to her father Hallie, a fellow horseshoe aficionado back in Janesville.

In 1992 she took an assignment in CNN's Rome bureau, which cracked open a whole new world of exploration and friendships. She moved there with her soon-to-be fiancé Jim Kulstad, arriving during a time of tension between Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the United Nations weapons inspection teams sent to oversee the elimination of his weapons of mass destruction. She was promptly shipped off to Baghdad to join a CNN crew already there. She celebrated her birthday that year at Baghdad's Al-Rasheed Hotel. This began an era of travel to extraordinary places, of recording history during a time of upheaval in Europe, of political shifts in the Middle East, of change in Africa. On the tamer assignments, Jim sometimes joined her on the road and shared in the experience of all these spell-binding new environments.

She landed with the U.S. Marines in Somalia during the intervention there in December 1992, documented the grisly civil war in Chechnya and the first free elections in South Africa, worked in Sarajevo during the agonizing breakup of Yugoslavia, went to the Rwandan refugee camps in 1994 after the appalling genocide, and covered the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. In 1993 she was part of a CNN team sent to Oslo to cover the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. As she and her colleague rode an elevator from breakfast back up to their rooms, the elevator opened on an intervening floor and two security guards thrust in their heads. After the guards ascertained Elaine and her colleague were non-threats, their charge stepped into the elevator. There was a beat of silence. Then Elaine introduced herself, "Mr. Mandela! We're going to see you later! We are the CNN crew that will shoot the interview with you." A giant smile spread across Nelson Mandela's face. They chatted and as the door was opening for the next floor he asked, "Are you married?" Elaine beamed, "Actually, I've just gotten engaged!" and she displayed her ring to the Nobel laureate-to-be. "Oh, that's too bad!" he said. "I wanted to introduce you to my grandson!"

While in Italy, Elaine and Jim grew charmed by the small Etruscan hill town of Blera, the home of one of their new friends and an hour's drive north of Rome. Before they moved on from Rome, the couple bought a medieval-era dwelling there, and were back and forth from Atlanta to Blera over the years, as Jim - an environmentalist, woodworker, and sculptor - lovingly refashioned it into a home that was a work of art in its own right. He used the traditional volcanic rock and made the renovation fit so seamlessly above the Etruscan tombs on which it was built that the local Blerans were in great admiration of his work.

Blera and its residents became yet another focal point of Elaine's life with Jim, and when they were in the village, it could take over an hour for Elaine to make her way down the narrow cobblestone main drag (Via Roma) from their home at one end of town to the shops at the village entrance, being stopped every 30 feet by another Bleran who wanted to catch up and share updates of the latest births and graduations. The home in Blera faces onto a tiny piazza on the edge of town, and in the afternoons the neighbor women sit together, chatting and praying with their rosaries. Elaine (the youngest of the bunch, by decades) would join them in conversation.

In 1999, she had a rare one-on-one encounter with Pope John Paul II after covering his trip to Poland and, speaking in Italian, used the opportunity to bring him greetings from the le donne della piazza, (the piazza ladies) and ask for a blessing for them.

She did still more. She earned a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship in 1997 at the University of Michigan, where her thesis of study was "The Craft of Life - The Art of Survival," based on her five years of work traveling in the world's major flashpoints. The Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where Elaine volunteered annually, also recognized her singular combination of skills, tuned in quickly to her natural friendliness and her technical expertise, and brought her on as technical operator of their Filmmaker's Lodge each year. Her voice and laugh rang up and down the sidewalks of her and Jim's east-Atlanta neighborhood.

She is preceded in death by her father and mother, Hallie Merle Widner and Avalon Louise Jacobson Widner. Survivors include husband Jim Kulstad of Atlanta; family member Luna (the Australian mix) of Atlanta; Janesville-area siblings Jeffrey Widner, Pamela (Steve) Outhouse, Todd (Dawn) Widner, Thomas (Sarah) Widner, Tina (Brett) Gurney and Melissa (Mark) Gavigan; 13 nieces and nephews; and 21 grand-nieces and nephews. Elaine is also survived by Jim's 5 siblings and 3 nephews. Sister-in-law, Susan Kulstad, also preceded Elaine.

A celebration of this Extraordinary Life will take place Sunday, Oct. 1, 2023, at Rotary Botanical Gardens, Janesville. In lieu of flowers, please plant a tree, and donate to: Committee to Protect Journalists