2024 In Memoriam

In Memoriam
Remembering NFPW and affiliate members who’ve died or whose death notices were received since the June 2023 NFPW conference.

Alabama Media Professionals
Sandra Bearden, 88, died Sept. 25. Bearden earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees with honors from the University of Alabama. Bearden enjoyed a varied communications career, working in Memphis for the Cotton Council, reporting for the Birmingham Post-Herald, working for the federal government, teaching at Samford University and working for BellSouth. After she retired, she discovered Alabama Media Professionals/NFPW. AMP member tips led to assignments for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Business Alabama, Birmingham Magazine and other clients. She credited competing in the annual communications contest for several years in helping hone her writing skills. 

Alaska Professional Communicators
Caroline Rinehart, 81, died Feb. 19 due to complications of bladder cancer. She served in various leadership and other roles with Alaska Professional Communicators during her 45-year membership, including serving on the host committees for the 2000 and 2015 NFPW national conferences. Rinehart got an early start with her journalism career: In the summer after third grade, she started a neighborhood newspaper in Austin, Texas, which grew to 300 subscribers by the time she finished eighth grade. Then she ran her high school paper and the University of Texas at Austin’s newspaper. She and her husband, Robert, shared a commitment to social justice and civil rights. When her family moved to Alaska in 1977, she worked as a reporter for the Anchorage Times and later was a technical writer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

Colorado Press Women
CPW co-president Sandy Graham, 72, died Jan. 7 after battling lung cancer. Graham turned her affinity for grammar, spelling and punctuation into a 40-year writing career. Her obituary noted, “She led a lifelong crusade against the misuse of apostrophes, particularly in ‘its’ vs. ‘it's’ and possessives.” While college calculus derailed her goals to work for NASA, she ended up writing about science, along with health and medicine, during her journalism career with various newspapers, including the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal. She later wrote for Gannett’s Sunday magazine and USA Weekend, before becoming the managing editor of the Colorado Health Foundation’s quarterly journal. Her final job before retiring was as a part-time grant writer for the Children’s Museum of Denver, helping raise $1.6 million. 

Nebraska Press Women
Ruth Hermance, 95, died Oct. 14 at her home in Portland, Oregon. She was a life member of NPW and NFPW. She had formerly lived and worked in Ogallala, Nebraska. Hermance had been an administrative assistant and para educator at Ogallala High School where her husband, Cliff, taught and coached. She later joined the Keith County News staff in Ogallala. She wrote the award-winning “Reflections by Ruth” column and also took photos. Hermance loved her newspaper work and advocated for women's rights in the workforce at a time when the women's rights movement was in its infancy. 

New Mexico Press Women
Colleen Keane, 74, died Oct. 26. Based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Keane spent most of her career working with the Native communities in the southwestern United States as a radio and television producer, grant writer, social worker, teacher and journalist. Throughout the 1970s, Keane directed educational programs to implement the Indian Child Welfare Act to reunite Native American children with their families and tribes and taught broadcast journalism at the Alamo Navajo and Rock Point community schools in Arizona and New Mexico. She wrote, produced and directed the award-winning film “The River That Harms,” an investigative study of the largest radioactive wastewater spill in U.S. history that took place on Navajo land. In the decade before her death, she was a journalist for the Navajo Times. She was the author of “Crashing an American Wake” (2021).

Valorie “Vicky” Ramakka, 74, died July 22 after treatment for an aggressive brain tumor. Ramakka had a long career in the field of education. Before moving to New Mexico, she had worked at Western Nevada Community College in Carson City, the University of Nevada Reno and the Nevada Department of Education. In New Mexico, she served in various capacities at San Juan College in Farmington. She also had a successful writing career, producing award-winning articles, short stories and two mystery novels, “The Cactus Plot” and “The Pearl Plot.” She was a volunteer for the Suan Juan Animal League, the Aztec Museum Board and the Northern New Mexico Site Stewards Program, where she monitored important rock sites.

Virginia Professional Communicators
Alberta Lindsey, 82, a longtime member of VPC, died Dec. 8. She worked for more than 40 years as a reporter for the Richmond Times Dispatch and The Richmond News Leader, covering religion, as well as health and social services. As her obituary noted, “She overcame adversity from the moment of her birth on Sept. 9, 1941, when her parents were told she might never walk because of a stunted leg. She grew up to walk all over the world, from the Great Wall of China to the dusty paths of South Sudan.” She was a frequent attendee of NFPW conferences and won numerous awards during her career. 

Woman’s Press Club of Indiana
Helen Corey, 100, died Jan. 28. In the mid-1940s, Cory became an active participant in civic, church and political activities. In the early 1960s, she became the first Arab American elected to a state-level office in Indiana. An NFPW member since 1962 and WPCI’s 2017 Communicator of Achievement, Corey published one of the most influential cookbooks on Syrian food, “The Art of Syrian Cooking,” which provided descriptions of Middle Eastern customs, celebrations and holidays along with recipes and menus for different occasions, including feasts celebrated within the Eastern Orthodox Church. Once her political career ended, she started Corey Advertising Specialties. She went on to publish two other cookbooks, “Healthy Syrian and Lebanese Cooking” in 2004 and “Helen Corey’s Food from Biblical Lands” in 2016.