By Jennifer Moody
Albany Democrat-Herald | Posted: Friday, July 4, 2008 12:00 am
Lunette Mulkey, a 20-year Albany resident and one of the most prominent writers of letters to the Democrat-Herald, has died. She was 96.
A longtime writer, though never professionally, Mulkey was a regular contributer to the "Editor's Mailbag" portion of the paper. She was best known for her musings, both whimsical and wistful, on mid-valley life.
Readers occasionally contacted the paper to ask for more letters, which left her puzzled but pleased.
"I can't imagine them paying much attention to my writings," she told a reporter in 2004. "I appreciate and thank them for it. It's been quite an encouragement at my age."
(The full interview can be found at http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2004/01/01/people/people05.txt)
The saved clippings were bound into a book in 2000, "The Blackberry Tree," which she gave to family and friends. She had been planning a sequel.
She was born Rennie Shawhan in 1911 in Oklahoma Territory, named for her father, Lorenzo. But her own nickname, which means "Little Moon," was the one she carried.
She graduated from high school in Kansas City, then worked for a stock brokerage until the market crashed in 1929. She moved on to keeping accounts at a distillery, then to working alongside her husband, Bill, in his upholstery shop.
She met Bill Mulkey in 1933. The two were married in 1934 and had three sons, William, Daniel and Stephen.
Aside from the poetry she wrote as a child, Mulkey was known mostly for letters to the editor, which she began sending to the Moberly Monitor-Index in Moberly, Mo., when her sons were young.
She would talk about life with her husband and their boys, or the pleasures of rural living. She'd lament the intricacies of new technology. She chronicled the quiet joys and disappointments of growing older and the lessons of a life well lived.
The letters, as she said in 2004, were simply observations on ordinary life.
"I just wake up with an idea and it expands itself, she said at the time.
Her last letter to the editor, published in August 2007, was characteristic of the hundreds of others she wrote throughout her lifetime:
"There are times when there is only one thing better than a hospital bed and a hot blanket.
"The one thing better, of course, is a good nurse. A good nurse won't throw the hot blanket across your knees and ignore your shivering shoulders. A good nurse will tuck you in so the small of your back does not feel like the shirttail of a teenager trying to be fashionable.
"I've had some recent experience, so I speak defensively and authoritatively and want to thank the good nurses that tucked me in all the way round.
"Albany is indeed fortunate to have the supply of hot blankets and nurses who know how and when to use them."