Homo sapiens! Greedy, pathetic fools with a genetic mania to destroy all the sanctuaries that feed their souls. Well, hell, I don’t give a damn if we’re blotted out. I don’t want to be a part of the human race when I see the pimps in government and the whores who do their bidding. I’d rather be a coyote.
— Katie Lee, ardent conservationist
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Last November, when I heard about the death of the indomitable Katie Lee, the news hit me harder than I expected. I rarely respond so emotionally when someone famous dies.
Katie Lee (1919-2017) was an actress, folksinger, writer, photographer, river runner, and environmental activist. She was a nature lover and a glorious free spirit. To anyone with a heart and a shred of concern for the planet, she was an inspiration.
She certainly inspired me. I admired her passion, her dedication, and her willingness to live life her way. This is a woman who, at age 80, bicycled nude in downtown Jerome, Arizona, in tribute to a deceased friend. The license plate on her Toyota Prius read DAM DAM.
Consider what she did in her 98 years…
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Kathryn Louise Lee was born in Illinois, the daughter of architect Zanna Lee and Ruth Detwiler Lee, an interior decorator. When Katie was three months old, the Lees moved to Tucson, Arizona. Katie grew up there and learned to understand the importance of the natural environment.
When cast in a play in high school, she discovered that she not only had acting skills, but relished the limelight. She had the added advantages of being likable, attractive, and uninhibited.
After earning a degree in drama from the University of Arizona, Katie moved to Hollywood, the mecca of the young and hopeful. She never attained major stardom, but she acted regularly in small stage and screen parts, as well as in dramas and musicals on radio.
In the 1950s, Katie also began writing and singing folk and country music. Due in part to her engaging personality and irreverent sense of humor, she became friends with many of the music stars of the time. Burl Ives reportedly said, “The best cowboy singer I know is a girl: Katie Lee.”
In 1953, after a performance in Tucson, Katie watched a home movie of a high school friend running rapids on the Colorado River. Katie was smitten, and she pleaded with her friend to take her on his next trip. He did.
Over the next several years, Katie rowed, paddled, and motored the Colorado and San Juan Rivers regularly. She became just the third woman to run every rapid in Grand Canyon.
She also became enchanted with Glen Canyon, upstream of Grand Canyon. “That’s when the 186 miles of pure Eden that is Glen Canyon captivated me and made me its slave,” she wrote.
Katie adored Glen Canyon’s majestic cliffs and intricate side canyons. She explored them all, bathing nude under the waterfalls. The breezes, she said, were like voices speaking to her. She wrote books and songs celebrating Glen Canyon and the crucial role of rivers everywhere.
Then, in the early 1960s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began constructing Glen Canyon Dam, which would generate power at the expense of submerging Glen Canyon beneath Lake Powell. Katie joined Edward Abbey, David Brower, and other conservationists who opposed the dam.
“I had a cause!” she said later. “A cause that didn’t center on me-me-me. One that asked nothing of me, really, yet was far from mute. I’d never had a cause before, but now there was a place, almost a person, that needed my help.”
Attempts to block construction of the dam failed, but Katie Lee remained a constant voice in opposition to the dam’s presence for the rest of her life.
“There are good dams that are built for the right reasons and in the right place, but this dam was built in the wrong place for the wrong reasons,” she later said. “When you kill a river, you kill everything around it for many, many miles.”
The only reason she didn’t blow up the dam herself, she often said, was that she didn’t know how.
After the dam was built, Katie used music, books, and film to disparage government bureaucrats for destroying Glen Canyon. Her protests were constant, fierce, and creatively profane. She became one of the national symbols of the movement to protect natural places from being destroyed in the name of progress.
“When they drowned that place, they drowned my whole guts,” she said. “And I will never forgive the bastards. May they rot in hell.”
She refused to visit Lake Powell, calling it an abomination, and she never again rafted the Colorado River below the dam.
Katie was married twice. Her first husband was race car driver Brandy Brandelius. After his death, she married and later divorced businessman Eugene Busch, Jr.
For a time, Katie lived in Aspen and other Colorado mountain towns. She performed locally, singing and playing guitar, and was often seen driving her vintage Thunderbird.
When Aspen became too rich and haughty for her taste, she left. In 1978, at age 59, she set out on a trip around the world.
In Australia, she met Joey van Leeuwen, a Dutch immigrant 12 years her junior who worked at a furniture factory in Perth. The attraction was powerful and immediate.
By 1980, Joey and Katie were living in Jerome, Arizona, population 444, a quaint old mining town favored by retirees, artists, and hippies.
The names of Katie’s record albums through the years are revealing…
– Spicy Songs for Cool Knights, 1956
– Songs of Couch and Consultation, 1957
– Life is Just a Bed of Neuroses, 1960
– The Best of Katie Lee Live, 1962
– Folk Songs & Poems of the Colorado River, 1964
– Love’s Little Sisters, 1975
– Colorado River Songs, 1976
– Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle, 1977
– Fenced!, 1978
– His Knibbs and the Badger, 1992
– Glen Canyon River Journeys, 1998
– Colorado River Songs (Again!), 1998
– Folk Songs from the Fifties, 2009
So are the titles of her books…
– Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle — A History of the American Cowboy in Song, Story & Verse, 1976
– All My Rivers are Gone: A Journey of Discovery through Glen Canyon, 1998
– Sandstone Seduction — Rivers and Lovers, Canyons and Friends, 2004
– Glen Canyon Betrayed — A Sensuous Elegy, 2006
– The Ballad of Gutless Ditch, 2010
– The Ghosts of Dandy Crossing, 2014
Katie usually is remembered for her folk and protest songs, but many were humorous and satirical. Consider these lyrics from “Stay as Sick as You Are.”
I love your streak of cruelty,
Your psychopathic lies,
The homicidal tendencies
Shining in your eyes.
Stories about her abound, but nothing showcases the real Katie Lee, or is more revealing of her character, than “Kickass Katie Lee,” a 10-minute documentary made in 2016.
Katie’s partner Joey was a skilled woodworker, and he continued his carpentry work when he moved to Jerome to be with Katie. Over the four decades they were together, he made repairs, helped care for the city parks, planted trees around town, and served on several city boards and commissions.
Quiet and polite by nature, he had a special love of birds. He made paintings and wood carvings of them and even wrote and illustrated a book, The Birds of Jerome.
Joey was widely admired and respected, and he was seen as Katie’s anchor as she continued her activism into her 90s.
On November 1, 2017, Katie Lee died peacefully in her sleep. The next day, Joey van Leeuwen committed suicide. He was 85.
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