IWMF Board Member Deborah Howell, a pioneering woman journalist, was memoralized Jan. 15 at the Washington National Cathedral. Howell died Jan. 2 in an accident in New Zealand.
“We in journalism have lost a guiding star,” said Jacqui Banaszynski, who worked for Howell at the St. Paul Pioneer-Post Dispatch.
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by Kathleen Currie
On what would have been her 69th birthday, International Media Foundation board Member Deborah Howell was memorialized in Washington D.C.’s National Cathedral as a parent, a journalist, a sister, a lover of challenges – including those inherent in wilderness hikes -- and a woman who had both a salty tongue and deep spiritual beliefs.
Speaking to the more than 300 people assembled to mourn Howell, Chris Coleman, her stepson, remembered her as the woman who married his father and became – “after an adjustment … my friend, my mentor, my executive coach and my biggest fan. She worked harder than anyone I know to be present in the lives of her friends and family,” said Coleman, who is the mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, where Howell lived for many years before moving to Washington, D.C.
Jacqui Banaszynski, who worked for Howell as a young journalist at the St. Paul Pioneer-Post Dispatch some 25 years ago, recalled a “toe-to-toe verbal smack-down” with Howell as her editor. “I became a better writer that day. And as an editor and teacher, I am reminded daily of the lessons seeded in every encounter we had. As surely as those spiked heels left imprints on my copy, her ferocity left imprints on what so many of us have done in the service of journalism.”
After Howell’s editing, Banaszynski’s story about the Ethiopian famine became a finalist for a 1986 Pulitzer Prize. Banaszynski won a Pulitzer two years later for a story about the life and death of a gay farm couple. In all, the Dispatch won three Pulitzers under Howell’s leadership.
“Deborah loved a good story. She sent us off in search of them, then fought for them with valiance.”
She also “said yes to the women who came behind her and held us firmly on her narrow shoulders. She told us tears didn’t cut it in the tough world of newsrooms – then showed us the last stall in the ladies’ room where she shed many of her own.”
“This loss feels immeasurable,” said Banaszynski. “We in journalism have lost a guiding star.”
Howell was remembered as a “big sister” by Pamela Howell Wagner, who recalled that though their father was a newspaper man, he was not eager for Deborah to follow in his path. He decided to expose his daughter to the grittiness of the profession by sending her out with a reporter to witness the mayhem on the streets “so that she would go scrambling into teaching elementary school.”
Instead, Howell found her life’s work. “I loved it,” she told an audience at the University of Missouri last October, when she accepted the school’s Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism. “I was suited by temperament and breeding for what I was to become.”
“Her frankness invited frankness in return,” recalled her minister, the Reverend Susan C. Burns. “She was lively and steadfast.” Burns said that regular centering prayer and meditation were bedrock in Howell’s life and that she loved to walk the labyrinth. “Her spiritual practices fed her deeply.”
After the death of her first husband, Nicholas Coleman, Sr., Howell married C. Peter Magrath, a higher education administrator who has served as provost or president at multiple American universities, who survives her.
Kathleen Currie is the deputy director of the International Women's Media Foundation.