Obituary: Kathleen Walker (1946-2024) the ‘Duchess’ of the Ottawa Citizen newsroom

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For seven years, Kathleen Walker tried to hide her identity and activities behind what she admitted was the worst-kept secret in Ottawa.

She was the Ottawa Citizen’s food editor, as everyone knew, and also an exuberant, huge-hearted, unmissable presence in every room she graced.

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But, from the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, she was also the Citizen’s restaurant critic, writing under the pen name Elizabeth Elmsley in an effort to be more anonymous when she made her rounds.

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Walker took her role that seriously. She even described her work as “acerbic” when she stepped down in 1993.

In her farewell column, in addition to telling readers that dining at one restaurant led her to contract Hepatitis A, Walker wrote that, despite the joys of Café Henry Burger’s crème brûlée, butter chicken at Mukut and deep-fried oysters at the Won Ton House, great meals in Ottawa were “as elusive as a real truffle.

“Too often, we settle for a standard of mediocrity that wouldn’t be tolerated in any country that cared about what it put in its stomach.”

That said, anecdotes like the following are those that friends and colleagues recall best.

Dining with other Citizen employees at a now-defunct Glebe restaurant, Walker suggested a round of flaming sambucas would perfectly finish the evening. But, when the server arrived with the tray of blazing liqueurs, she wound up igniting the hair of one of Walker’s dining companions. The victim was singed, but intact after being doused with water and patted down with napkins.

While the accident didn’t make its way into Walker’s review, she recounted the next day at the lunch table in the Citizen cafeteria that dinner had finished with “Tonda flambée!”

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Walker died March 27, at the age of 77, after living since 2020 with liver cancer. She is survived by two siblings, her daughter Erica, granddaughter Elsa and many friends who treasured her joie de vivre, not only when Walker was a journalist, but also when she later worked in Ottawa’s tourism industry and later as a gardener.

Walker worked at the Citizen for 22 years during a heyday when the newsroom was bursting with characters. Then Walker’s swagger earned her many affectionate nicknames.

“The Duchess” was what the late Citizen section editor David Evans called Walker “because of the way she just swept through the newsroom — tall and elegant and almost imperious,” recalls Janice Kennedy, a former Citizen columnist and theatre critic.

“She seemed aristocratic, if such a thing were even possible amid a gaggle of ink-stained wretches out on Baxter Road,” Kennedy says.

In a 2021 column, the Citizen’s Kelly Egan described Walker as “six feet tall, every inch stylish … a blaze of colour, wit and energy in our drab, uber-Nepean surroundings.”

Rose Simpson, an Ottawa author, says she always thought lovingly of her friend Walker as “BossyPants because she was a natural leader who took on every challenge, event or idea with gusto.”

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On Facebook, an ex-colleague recalled that Walker was once dubbed “the world’s tallest freestanding bitch.”

“It captured her height, her lack of pretension and her sense of humour,” wrote former Citizen writer Louisa Taylor, who says she was “both terrified and inspired” by Walker.

Deeper down, Walker was compassionate and generous, and at times she wore her heart on her sleeve.

Margo Roston, a former Citizen reporter and fashion writer, recalls that Walker stayed up every night during a Liberal leadership campaign in the 1980s to help Roston file her stories. “I couldn’t have done it without her, and we managed to laugh every night.

“She was amazing. A force, fun, a fantastic cook and gardener, and I was proud to call her my friend.”

One former co-worker recalled in an email thread that, when Walker proofread a collection of letters from readers sharing their favourite Christmas memories, the reminiscences prompted Walker first to tear up and ultimately to sob.

Walker held different positions in the Citizen’s arts and lifestyles departments, including visual arts editor and homes editor. During her last dozen years at the newspaper, she was its food editor, and she tested and shared countless recipes with readers.

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“It is only a slight exaggeration to say she told thousands of people what to eat and how to make it,” Egan wrote.

Walker’s crowning achievement was her book Ottawa’s Repast: 150 Years of Food and Drink, which documented the culinary history of Canada’s capital and was published in 1995 to coincide with the Citizen’s 150th anniversary.

Walker retired from journalism in 1996, when she was 50, in part because of the toll that repetitive strain injury had taken on her.

With art historian Angela Marcus, Walker launched the tour company Quintessential Ottawa, which was in business until the early 2000s.

Later, she started a gardening company with friend Nancy Murphy. The two were also housemates, having bought a house in the Glebe together in the late 1990s after Murphy suffered a burst aneurysm.

Walker had “practically nursed me back to health,” says Murphy, herself a retired Anglican priest and master gardener.

She calls Walker “the very best friend I’ve ever had.”

Walker was born at Holy Cross Hospital in Calgary on April 25, 1946. She lived in Calgary, Washington, London, Ottawa and Aylmer and had “several claims to fame,” says the death notice that Murphy wrote for her, “including going to school with Liza Minelli in England, (and) marching with Vanessa Redgrave in an epic ban-the-bomb event.”

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After Walker was diagnosed with liver cancer, she was stoic. “You don’t fight cancer, you live with it. She was very adamant about that,” Murphy says.

Walker moved to the Élisabeth Bruyère Hospital for palliative care and was expected to die in the spring of 2021. She wound up leaving the hospital and living for three more years. She and Murphy even redid the hospital’s garden.

Egan, who wrote of Walker defying death in the summer of 2021, says she made “a grand effort” to reconnect with newspaper colleagues in her final years.

He recalls two meals that Walker hosted at her home with a table impeccably filled with beautiful plates and cutlery and even place seating cards.

“She was dressed very elegantly and had every detail planned out, from the pre-drinks to the wine to the food to her quite abundant jewelry,” Egan says.

“When she didn’t leave us straight away after leaving palliative care, I thought she would go on forever, like she’d been gifted a new life. Instead of having an assisted death, she chose an assisted life, leaning heavily on Nancy, gathering her various clans, hearing the old stories, being tall, strong and beautiful to the end.”

Whenever you asked Walker how she was doing, it was always “just fine,” Egan adds.

“The laughter is what I’m missing around here right now,” Murphy says. “We did a lot of laughing.”

phum@postmedia.com

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