MEMBER SPOTLIGHT | APRIL 2002

Charlotte McKenzie:
VOLUMES OF AWC HISTORY ARE HOUSED IN HER HEAD

By Kim Broers

I'd have enjoyed my time with Charlotte McKenzie more if I hadn't enjoyed it so much. Tick-tock, went the clock, reminding me that I had long since exhausted my work-day lunch hour. Charlotte seemed perfectly unconcerned as time slipped happily away, which struck me as mightily enlightened given her decades working as a journalist at corporate publications and newspapers, where surely deadlines were a daily concern. Now, she's "retired," if that's the right word for some-one who has activities scheduled every day. Retirement looks quite appealing when it has such an eloquent representative.

Retirement may not be that much of a change for Charlotte. Community service has always been part of her life, and she's received awards and recognition for her volunteer work from everybody from the Junior League and Camp Fire Girls to the Ladies Auxiliary VFW and the YMCA. She squeezed our interview in between the Leawood Women's Club meeting and something else ... the garden club? More work on the chapter history?

Charlotte, a long-time member and former chapter president, has been compiling Kansas City's Theta Sigma Phi/WICI/AWC history since last summer; she and Marilyn Ebersole went on an archaeological dig at the Jackson County Archives, sifting through 17 boxes hauled down from the attic one at a time. "We were there all day," says Charlotte, who believes there were 32 boxes of relevant materials in all - leaving one to conclude that the chapter president and historian are slackers. Or perhaps women who know how to say, "Enough already!"

As Charlotte tells it, each president of the Kansas City chapter used to have her own historian, who would prepare a "scrapbook" of the president's year. These compilations proved essential to the job of constructing a chapter history.

"Greater Kansas City Chapter teas were held in members' homes and were a very popular social event in this area." - from the chapter history compiled by Charlotte McKenzie. Really, the history of the chapter is housed more within Charlotte's brain than in any musty, dusty archives. She's an integral part of that history, having been a member since 1948, the year she and her husband returned from Italy: He was serving with the Army of Occupation after World War II ended, and she lived with him in Italy and Trieste.

When the couple returned to the States, they settled in Fairway. There, a strange thing happened - or didn't happen. None of Charlotte's neighbors spoke with her, not for the longest time. Then, one day, a neighbor showed up with a vacuum; her idea of hospitality, apparently, was to come on over and clean Charlotte's house. This is when Charlotte discovered that her neighbors, having seen all the boxes of household goods arrive from Italy; having seen the dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman moving in - had drawn the forgivable, very wrong conclusion that Charlotte was an Italian war bride, unable to comprehend English. Scusi? Non capisca ...

I love that story. Charlotte's full of them.

I also like the one about the inaugural issue of Veterans' Voices, a magazine written by veterans in U.S. veterans' hospitals under the auspices of the Hospitalized Veterans Writing Project. Theta Sigma Phi had adopted HVWP as a national project in 1951; the following year, Charlotte, Gladys Helzberg, Doris Quinn, Lucille Doores, Sally Keach and other members worked frantically to collate the first issue in the newsroom of The Kansan. The covers were still wet on the mimeographed issue, and they had until midnight to get it to their contact at the post office. They were running a few minutes behind when they arrived to find the post office closed. Lights were on, and they could see people working inside, but no one seemed to see them knocking and waving. They went around to the back, but a fence blocked them from the rear entrance.

No problem. They hoisted Lucille over the fence; she went to the back door; someone noticed her; and voila! History was made with the first-ever mailing of Veterans' Voices.

Where has all the ritual gone?

Charlotte was a junior at MU-Columbia when she was asked to join what was then known as Theta Sigma Phi. "It was an honor to be asked to join," she explained, an honor that required a high GPA. As Charlotte recalls, new members were inducted into the organization during an elaborate, candlelight initiation. And every year, to celebrate the founding of the organization, chapters would host a recognition event known as the Matrix Table; the annual celebration honored outstanding women in communications.

Here's a strange thing: In all the chapter history that Charlotte wrote, she somehow forgot to mention that she was herself a Matrix honoree in 1977, her photo and bio appearing next to that of another well-known Kansas Citian: Kay Cronkite Waldo, a.k.a. Mayor Barnes.

Charlotte, the first woman to work in the news room of the St. Louis Globe Democrat, also worked many years for the Kansas City Kansan, serving as family living editor and covering the KCK school system. She was a continuing education instructor at Johnson County Community College and a worldwide traveler and photographer.

While the lifelong journalist managed to research and complete the local AWC history, Charlotte has yet to dig deep into another project: the story of her own life. That history is stuffed into boxes at her home, a potential project for another day. When she finds the time ... Eh, Charlotte, quando sarà pronto?