When 72-year-old Fay Kastelic showed up for the first time as a Pueblo City Council member, some viewed her as a “little grandma with white hair and round glasses,” said Pueblo City Clerk Gina Dutcher.
But members, and citizens, soon learned, “you don’t mess with Fay Kastelic,” Dutcher said.
Kastelic died of a stroke Aug. 20 at a Pueblo hospital. She was 92.
“She was dynamic, fun and brilliant and never let anyone think she felt herself above them,” said John Verna, who served with Kastelic for four of the eight years she was a council member.
“She didn’t hesitate to tell off someone, she never whimpered around and often she could change (other council members’) minds,” Verna said.
Votes were so important to Kastelic that she once “got out of her hospital bed and went to the council meeting to cast the deciding vote,” said her son Phillip Kastelic of Denver.
“We locked horns a couple of times, and I’m a little combative,” said Al Gurule, who had served on the council with her. “But she was a sweetheart. We always left the disagreements at the table,” said Gurule, who owns a private correctional facility.
Kastelic pushed hard for the convention center complex and the riverwalk, both of which were completed.
She told granddaughter Lindsay McKae of Denver that she pushed development because she believed that “places have to grow and change in order to succeed,” McKae said. “She did a phenomenal amount of public service.”
She was on the council from 1990 until 1997 and was president three times.
She was “positive, energetic, outgoing and a peacemaker,” Dutcher said. “She didn’t want Pueblo to turn into a ghost town after the steel mill closed.”
A pedestrian bridge across Santa Fe Avenue was named Fay’s Crossing.
In addition to her family, classroom teaching and community involvement, Kastelic had an unshakable relationship with her identical twin sister, Gay Wilkes of Austin, Texas. Gay Wilkes had a stroke the same day as Fay, but Wilkes survived.
Fay Barr was born in Bowie, Texas, on Feb. 28, 1918, and graduated from high school there. She was a few hours short of a degree from the University of Texas but later earned her BA at CSU-Pueblo and her master’s at the University of Colorado.
She taught, and was sometimes principal, in Pueblo schools for 25 years.
She married Frank Kastelic in 1946. He died in 1975.
Her first community involvement was with the PTA. When she realized the principal was actually running the group, she led a successful effort to put the organization into the hands of parents and teachers.
She had beaten cancer several years ago.
In addition to her son and sister, she is survived by another son, Ted Kastelic of San Jose, Calif.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her son Brien Kastelic died of MS in 2001.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
