There's a rumor in the historic copper mining boomtown of Jerome, Arizona that river runner, rabble rouser, and eco-activist Katie Lee celebrated her 80th birthday by riding naked on her mountain bike through town. "But that's not true," smiles Katie as we sit barefoot on her back porch. "I was only 78."
Now
Ms. Katie is 89 and Special Collections at the Cline Library at Northern
Arizona University in Flagstaff is celebrating her life with "Naked Truth: the
Katie Lee Exhibit," which will run through summer 2009. So I made the
pilgrimage to Jerome to interview this 5' 4" petite blond who crafted a unique
life bouncing between Tucson, Hollywood,
Utah's Canyon Country, and coffee shops and nightclubs
across America.
I'd come to talk with a living legend who beginning in 1954 rafted and floated
the Colorado and San Juan Rivers two dozen times before flood waters rose
behind Glen Canyon Dam creating Lake Powell and inundating one of the loveliest
canyon systems on the continent.
Lee was one
of the early women to run the Grand Canyon in
wooden boats, and she reveled naked in
the warm waters of the Glen exploring nameless sandstone canyons. NAU intern
Bonnie Roos explains, "She's a gun-toting, guitar-strumming canyoneer and a
lace-and high-heels wearing Hollywood starlet" who grew up in Tucson
hiking Sabino Canyon
and hunting buckskin on Mt.
Lemon. In the 1940s from Tucson's
Little Theatre she gravitated towards film and radio roles in Hollywood
and wild all night excursions into cantinas in Nogales, Mexico
to add to her folksong repertoire.
Katie
worked for NBC both on radio and daytime television and performed in USO shows
across the nation with Bob Hope, but by 1953 she realized Hollywood was not for her and she took Burl
Ives' advice to become a fulltime folksinger. During the McCarthy communist
witchhunt she refused to be an FBI informer against other actors and
singer/songwriters and assumes the FBI started a file on her. Lee comments, "By
now it would contain several protest songs . . . many appearances at rallies
and marches against nuke tests, mines, dams, air pollution, gravel companies,
uranium dumps, wilderness depletion, logging, paving, fencing . . . Hellsfire, you name it. Now the whole earth needs
our help, not just my poor old rivers."
Between
her Hollywood days and her folksinging success,
she discovered river running and it changed her life. Though she's been married
three times, she's a Scorpio on the cusp of Libra and freely admits that her
first love is Navajo sandstone and the seductive, sinuous way that water shapes
rock. For three consecutive years beginning in 1955 she went down the Glen on
"We Three Trips" with photographer Tad Nichols and boatman Frank Wright.
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