 By AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn Joy Benedict, longtime wife of the late aerospace writer Howard Benedict, died this week in Florida. She was 81 and had survived Howard by five years. Joy _ who was by Howard's side throughout his illustrious career _ had been hospitalized in a semi-coma for a week. She died Monday, July 26, at Wuesthoff Medical Center in Rockledge, Fla., just a few miles from the riverfront condo that she and Howard shared for many years. Anyone who knew Howard knew Joy. She was with him when he joined the AP in 1953 in Salt Lake City and when he moved to Cape Canaveral in 1959 to head the newly emerging space beat. Joy helped every way she could. Even though she was not on the AP payroll, she offered Howard considerable assistance, especially in the early days of the space program, when the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights were unfolding one after the other. Joy was right alongside Howard when he retired from the AP in 1990 and became executive director of the Mercury 7 Foundation, now the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, with none other than Alan Shepard, America's first spaceman, as his boss. She seldom if ever missed the numerous ceremonies that Howard was either coordinating or attending. And after Howard died at age 77 in 2005, Joy made sure the AP got all the notes and drafts of the chapter he was writing for a book about the history of the news cooperative. Every time I would see or talk to Joy, she always went out of her way to ask about me and about others in the AP. She was a caring, lovely woman who fully supported Howard's career, which in the space-reporting business often meant long and exhausting days and weeks in the office, as well as missed birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. She backed him 100 percent. As it happens, I called Joy at the beginning of July to see how she was doing. "Good enough," she told me. It was so typical of Joy not to complain about her failing health. She said she dearly missed Howard. And she made sure to ask about me. Unlike Iowa-born-and-bred Howard, Joy was a native Floridian. Elena Joyce Marie Carlson was born on Sept. 22, 1928, in Jacksonville and raised in St. Petersburg, the younger of two daughters of a Swedish-born father and Norwegian-born mother. She attended the University of South Dakota, where she became fast friends with two sorority sisters who were real-life sisters, Connie and Ginnie Benedict. Their older brother was Howard, and he and Joy were married on May 12, 1953. They were married just two weeks short of 52 years. They had no children. Joy leaves her older sister, Evelyn Kent of Sarasota, Fla., and five nephews and three nieces. Nephew Stephen Kent is the editor and publisher of the Bay Beacon and Beacon Express in Niceville, Fla. I learned of Joy's death this week from her brother-in-law, Wendel Kent, who is handling the estate. I met Wendel and his family five years ago at Howard's memorial service. We gathered that morning in April 2005 to scatter Howard's ashes at the Kennedy Space Center press site, where Howard had worked so hard for so long, reporting on all the Apollo moon shots, the first space shuttle flight in 1981 and the Challenger launch disaster in 1986.
We'll gather again later this summer or early fall to do the same
with Joy's ashes. |
