Mentor, farm wife leaves legacy of service

PALMER — A world traveler who gave up a life in foreign service to settle down to raise a family on a Palmer farm and inspire a generation of girls died Tuesday morning in California.

Kathryn Anna Maughan Pyrah, 73, was visiting her sister when she died of an apparent heart attack or stroke, according to family.

Services are pending.

Pyrah, the matriarch of the 2010 Alaska Farm Family of the Year, was also known for her work in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the 1990s she mentored 12- to 18-year-old girls, first in her local ward then for about eight years in the far-reaching church stake, which included the Valley, Glennallen and Valdez.

Jolene Grover, a secretary at Palmer High, worked with Pyrah reaching out to teen girls.

“She was such a role model for young women and how a woman should be,” Grover said. “She was practically perfect.”

Pyrah earned a degree in political science, then embarked on a career of foreign service, working at embassies in Cairo, Egypt and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

When the urge to settle down superseded her love of travel, Pyrah moved to Anchorage, where her father had been stationed in 1949, though she had no real connections there beyond the church. It was enough.

She met and married Ted Pyrah, started a family and small farm in 1977 and what is Pyrah’s Pioneer Peak Farm in 1979 when church elders told the Pyrahs they were called to run a charity farm.

Service was a recurring theme for Katie Pyrah’s life, Grover said.

“She was totally about service to others — not one to want the limelight at all,” Grover said. “She just quietly goes around doing good.”

Although Pyrah downplayed her role on the farm in the August interview for Alaska Farm Family of the Year, those who knew her said she was a guiding force both in the home and on the farm.

“She did a lot of the farm work,” said Carol Kenley, longtime friend and secretary of the Mat-Su Chapter of the Alaska Farm Bureau. “She was very lively and always cheerful. She was an extremely hard worker.

“She was very much a force — not just a background person,” Kenley added.

While Pyrah was content to serve quietly, there was no denying her influence, Grover said. From about 1989 to 1997, Grover and Pyrah were part of girls’ camps, sleeping in cabins and tents. Grover said that while Pyrah was 20 years her senior, there were no complaints about accommodations and the girls never realized their mentor was old enough to be their grandmother. Instead, the girls felt as if she cared about each of them as individuals.

“She was a leader among women, devoted to her family and true to her faith,” Grover said. “She was a great example to a lot of people.”

One of those is Shanna Omer, PHS teacher and 1997 graduate. Omer said she knew Pyrah most of her life and never saw her out of sorts.

“She always exemplified what type of person you should be at all times,” Omer said. “She always had a kind word. She lived her example.”

Omer, reached as she traveled with the PHS swim team to Kodiak, said Pyrah’s influence was both quiet and powerful.

“It wasn’t until years later I realized, ‘Wait, it did influence me,’” she said. “It will be with me forever. Hopefully I can pass that on to someone else.”

Pyrah is survived by her husband, five children and 21 grandchildren.