Marci Fitch was only 13 when she started smoking, and she was 13 and a half when she stopped, said her husband, Jerry Fitch.
She wanted to be a singer, and her voice teacher said he wouldn’t teach her if she smoked.
Fitch, who went on to be a Chicago nightclub singer, died Oct. 14, the day after her 89th birthday.
“She sang in nightclubs that sold bootleg booze,” said her husband.
One club was owned by a relative of Al Capone. Sometimes she shared the stage with the late Danny Thomas, a comedian and 1950s television star, and was on radio station WLS in Chicago with a classmate, the late comedian George Gobel.
Using the stage name Kay Marcy, “she did ballads and torch songs,” her husband said.
Fitch and her husband owned two Colorado radio stations: KGLN in Glenwood Springs and KDGO in Durango. They retired in 1985.
She was a “brilliant businesswoman,” said her daughter, Kathie Macdonald, of Scottsdale.
Even in Chicago before she was married, Marci Fitch managed two shoe stores for her father, Samuel Kostman.
“She balanced everything to the penny,” her daughter said.
Fitch also ran a bookstore in Glenwood Springs, next door to the radio station, and sang with a five-member group.
The group performed in Aspen, at the Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs and at the Costanzo Potato Cellar, in Silt, which had been converted into a nightclub and dance hall.
Even in her last months, when her memory failed her in most things, “she would break into song,” remembering the lyrics of her old favorites, her daughter said.
“She was a lively, delightful person,” said an old friend, Ann Schmidt, a former Denverite living in Washington.
Marci Kostman was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1918, and graduated from Roosevelt High and Barnes Business College in Chicago. She studied at Arizona State University.
She met Jerry Fitch, an announcer for UPI radio, after he bet a colleague $5 he could get a date with the young singer. She had turned down Fitch’s boss.
“I won the $5 and the girl,” Fitch said.
They married on March 23, 1940, and moved to Denver when he was transferred the following year.
A Republican, Marci Fitch took the chance of supporting and hosting events for an unknown running for governor: John Love.
Love, who died in 2002, was elected in 1962 and re-elected twice.
In addition to her husband and daughter, Marci Fitch is survived by her son, Michael Fitch of Redondo Beach, Calif.; two grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and her brother, Skip Kostman, of Chicago.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
Other deaths
Lim Goh Tong, 90, Malaysia’s third-richest man who turned a forested hilltop into a thriving casino resort, died Tuesday in Kuala Lumpur, said his son, Lim Kok Thay.
Lim, the founder of the Genting Group of companies, was a migrant from China. He built Genting Highlands, a casino hotel resort that opened in 1971 and flourished into a business empire worth $22 billion. It is the country’s only casino and includes five hotels and a theme park.
Forbes magazine listed Lim among the world’s top 250 billionaires in 2006 with a personal net worth of $4.3 billion.
…
Shav Glick, 87, who covered the Indianapolis 500 and a variety of other races during 37 years writing about motorsports for the Los Angeles Times, died Saturday at his Pasadena home of complications from melanoma, the Times said Sunday. He retired at 85 last year.
By the time he was assigned the auto-racing beat at the Times, Glick was 48 and had already spent 34 years covering other sports. Glick covered short tracks and super speedways, road racing, drag racing and midget cars.
…
Albert Valentine, 79, a journalist who investigated corporate farming and was a determined voice for small farmers and rural communities, died Oct. 9 in Lynnwood, Wash.
Krebs began to cover agricultural issues in the 1960s as a freelance journalist in California covering a farm workers’ strike organized by labor leader Cesar Chavez. He devoted the rest of his career to investigating agribusinesses and to projects benefiting small farmers and rural areas.
After working for the National Sharecroppers Fund in New York, Krebs came to Washington in 1971 as corporate research director and later co-director of the Agribusiness Accountability Project.
