Pat Wunnicke: one of a kind editor and friend.

• Position: TRIBUTE - Obituary

Pat Wunnicke never would have allowed a cliche like "one of a kind" on the pages of the magazine she edited for two decades. But Pat, an assistant editor of State Legislatures magazine, was exactly that. A banker's daughter from Kansas who lived much of her life in Wyoming, worked for the governor and hunted antelope, Pat was a person of strong political convictions. She was a friend of Alan Simpson, a supporter of Dick Lamm--and an avid baseball fan. Pat's style was apparent in the clothes she wore, the books she read, the food she cooked, the places she traveled, the ideas she held. For us, her colleagues, that all mattered, because Pat was also a friend. But what mattered most for State Legislatures magazine was her deft and elegant touch with words. What words went where best, what words were pretentious, what words were obfuscations, what words were muddy, vague, bureaucratic, cliched. And to all those words she applied her editor's marks in green pencil, lightly. What? in the margin meant the thought was unintelligible. And the writer had better clarify this muddled construction because the reader certainly couldn't.

For years, Pat wrote the Stateline section of the magazine and endowed it with its distinctive, amusing, often quirky, voice. Always searching for the interesting oddity, that department scored highest on reader surveys year after year. Pat had a following among readers and a fan club at the magazine. Young staffers 30 years her junior would meet at lunch to play Big Boggle with Pat. She would mentor young writers, applying the green pencil unmercifully, and they would become better. Her sophistication suited her Plains practicality to a "t". At office parties, Pat would bring her exquisite Venetian candelabra to give the table some style. She had friends with names like Adeline...