Longtime Times editor dies

"I remember the first time I saw her. She had a hat on the size of a beach umbrella. She was just a wonderful, wonderful sight."

Anyone who knew her wouldn't be surprised that almost 50 years after the fact, Jim King, who doubtless met thousands of people during his news leadership of The Seattle Times, would remember the summer day he met new reporter June Anderson Almquist.

Everyone remembered her, if not for her hats and even her wigs - for a time she had many of both - then for her forceful personality.

It was her booming voice that everyone noticed first, said her longtime friend, Times Food Editor Sharon Lane. "She filled up the room, and you couldn't ignore her."

Officially 5 feet 9 and a solidly built size 18, Mrs. Almquist was, in the words of those who knew her, a presence, an original, a trailblazer.

And when the book on Seattle's 20th-century female pioneers is written, Mrs. Almquist doubtless will be much more than a footnote.

The former Times reporter, columnist and editor, who won numerous awards in all three jobs, died yesterday after a yearlong battle with cancer. She was 75. Her husband, Bill Almquist, to whom she was married 48 years, died Feb. 28, also of cancer. They had no children.

The daughter of Swedish immigrants, June Helen Anderson Almquist grew up on her family's fruit orchard in Selah, Yakima County. She earned a bachelor's in journalism at the University of Washington and a master's of journalism at Stanford University before being hired by The Times in 1951.

The job was in the society department. Strong-willed and determined, that wasn't what she had in mind. She wanted "to be Ace Reporter chasing news scoops," she recalled in 1980.

But when a general-news job opened, Mrs. Almquist had the smarts to realize she was better off where she was. Cops-and-robbers stories didn't change much, but women's news?

"I had realized that I was part of the section of the paper that was changing the most. There were exciting times ahead."

Today it seems beyond quaint that news would be covered according to gender. But in the late 1960s, when Mrs. Almquist became women's-news editor, that was the case.

And Mrs. Almquist made it clear what she considered women's news.

As King, the paper's former executive editor, recounted, she began marching to the wire-service desk to see what stories would be appropriate for her section.

"The first thing I recall she had in her section was a story about a woman in a Southern prison who accused a guard of assaulting her," King said. "June wanted that story, and she got it. That told the (wire) desk that this was where she was going."

"The tea party was over," Mrs. Almquist explained years later, "and as the women put down their cups and entered the worlds of business, professions, industry and government, our section followed them. We didn't forget the home, but now home meant the whole family - Pop and the kids joined Mom on our pages."

And thanks to her, The Times' readership got a front-row seat on one of the 20th century's most far-reaching social revolutions.

Onto her pages were writ the chapters of women's changing lives. There were articles about women's rights, birth control, abortion, unwed mothers, unwed couples.

Seattle Times President Mason Sizemore said, "So much of what we see today in modern feature sections in newspapers had their origins in June. She was one of those people whose feet were in the old ways of doing things but who could bridge the new ways."

For years Mrs. Almquist wrote a regular column, June's Journal, that often reported on society events. For a farm girl from Selah it allowed her to hobnob beyond her wildest dreams.

Then putting society aside, she'd personally jump on the bandwagon of firsts - first woman this, first woman that - that punctuated 1960s and '70s civil-rights cover age. In college she had been one of the first female editors of the University of Washington Daily.

During her career, Mrs. Almquist became one of the first two women on the West Coast to hitch a jet ride with the Navy's Blue Angels. She also talked Bernie Little, owner of Miss Budweiser, into allowing her to become the first newswoman to ride in his hydroplane. After a turn or two around the race course, she gave driver Dean Chenoweth the thumbs up. They shot down the backstretch at 120 mph.

Mrs. Almquist was the first female president of the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), and after years of service she received the society's highest national honor two years ago in Los Angeles.

In 1989, after having been the first woman to be an assistant managing editor on any Seattle newspaper, Mrs. Almquist retired from work but certainly not from life.

She stayed very active in the SPJ, both here and nationally. She helped friends - taking one friend to the airport, another to multiple doctor's appointments, and remembering them with a card if they celebrated a new baby.

She stayed in close touch with her old Seattle Times friends, organizing, in her ever-efficient manner, the monthly Times retiree luncheon.

Recently, as she simultaneously battled her own cancer and supported her husband's battle with his disease, Mrs. Almquist was unable to meet her friends for lunch.

"We were all talking at lunch about how we were sad that June wasn't there," recalled former sports editor Georg Meyers. "Then the waiter brought us cobblers with ice cream on top and said June had ordered them for us."

Mrs. Almquist is survived by her niece, Ann Victoria Boone of Healdsburg, Calif.; a nephew, Charles Anderson Boone of La Cresenta, Calif.; her brother-in-law, Frank A. Almquist of Anchorage; and an extensive family in Sweden.

A combined memorial service for Mr. and Mrs. Almquist will be held at a later date.