Kay Keating was one of the first women to be a captain in the Navy.
But she also raised her niece and nephew, got a degree in pharmacy, collected antique carriages and ran a bed-and- breakfast.
Keating died May 23 in Pueblo, where she was born. She was 87.
Keating, who was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame, served in the Navy for three decades, seeing duty in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
She earned her pharmacy degree after World War II at the University of Colorado, re-enlisted and was a pharmacist during the rest of her service time.
While stationed in California, she assumed the rearing of her niece, Pat Smith, and nephew, Jim Hart, who were young teens.
But women in the military weren’t allowed to have dependents in those days.
She went to her commanding office to ask for permission. He looked around the room and said, “If I don’t know anything about it . . .” and then added, “I bet there are doctors on base who would take care of the medical needs of the kids for a free Sunday dinner.”
Smith said it worked. She and her brother, Keating’s grandmother, Cecil Keating, and another woman, Flo Bovinglo, lived in a house near the base that Keating provided for them. Keating was there on the weekends, playing a bugle serenade on the record player Saturday mornings and yelling, “All hands up,” so the kids could get to the house cleaning.
She was a disciplinarian “but fun. And she was our savior,” Smith said.
Kay Keating was born Feb. 8, 1922, and graduated from Central High School and Pueblo Junior College. She joined the WAVES and was shipped to Hawaii, where she was a radio operator. She sometimes worked in an underground station in a pineapple field.
The area was infested with flies, so she brought in a frog “and trained it to eat the flies,” said Duane Tackitt of Washington, D.C., who worked with Keating as a pharmacist.
While chief of pharmacy services at the Navy Regional Medical Center in Great Lakes, Ill., she instituted a drug-abuse program, Tackitt said.
She was the first woman to rise from seaman recruit to the level of captain and the first woman to be a captain in the Navy Medical Service Corps. She served on the USS Haven hospital ship during the Korean War.
Keating loved the Navy, even though she always got seasick, her niece said.
“She had such a history of the Navy and had unending stories about it,” Tackitt said.
After leaving the military in 1972, Keating returned to Beulah, about 30 miles southwest of Pueblo, where she ran a bed-and-breakfast.
“She never cooked a thing in her life,” said Smith, who lives in Beulah. Guests slept in rooms furnished with antiques, but they were served cold cereal for breakfast. Keating usually ate TV dinners.
Over the years, Keating collected and refurbished old horse-drawn carriages that she drove in the Colorado State Fair and other parades. A black, shiny two-seat carriage, pulled by two white horses, was used by more than 100 couples after their wedding ceremonies.
Although she was entitled to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Keating declined, telling relatives she wanted to be buried in Beulah.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
