The story was always supreme.
Former Salt Lake Tribune news editor and columnist Peg McEntee, who died Thursday at Intermountain Health Center from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was the consummate journalist, a lover of language and its power to deliver knowledge.
Over a 35-year career, McEntee reported on or helped with coverage of most major Utah events — first while writing for The Associated Press and later as a mentor of reporters and as metro columnist for The Tribune. A Western woman who owned guns and shared stories of fishing on Strawberry Reservoir from the time she was a teenager, McEntee could manage both tough and tender stories.
“She often ‘tarted up’ my leads, as she would say, or would find just the right word to make a sentence smoother, richer, more graceful. We never argued about her changes — she was always right,” Tribune Senior Religion Reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack, who was edited by McEntee for more than a decade, wrote in a Facebook post. “Though not a religious person herself, Peg treated my beat and my stories with utmost respect. She brought deep empathy and sharp observations to every assignment.”
Former Tribune Reporter Mike Gorrell remembers competing, and commiserating, with McEntee during the 1984 Wilberg Mine disaster, when 27 miners died in a fire in an Emery County coal mine. “Peg had a toughness that coal miners respected, but a soft heart, too. We shed tears together over drinks … one night after we both came to understand the horrible consequences of mass death on the people left behind.”
“My most vivid memory of Peg is when I was a news editor, and she was still at The Associated Press, just before joining The Tribune,” said former Tribune Editor and Publisher Terry Orme. “I filed a story to the AP wire that I thought was quite strong and important. She read it, called me, and pointed out the many holes and dubious assumptions. She saved me, and my reporter.”
As an editor, McEntee was holistic. She didn’t just edit her reporters’ copy. She helped them manage their lives.
“We had children the same age, so exchanged notes on child-rearing and parental mishaps,” said Stack. “She was enormously proud of her daughter Kate, who was — and is — remarkable.”
“She changed the course of my life at least twice, but I remember her almost daily as a mother/sister/editor/no-BS life coach and friend,” said Hilary Groutage Weible in a post on Stack’s Facebook page. Weible worked with McEntee at AP and The Tribune and is now an adjunct professor at Marshall University in West Virginia.
“She once kept my teen daughter on the phone, instructing her to keep pressure on a slice the length of her finger while I sped from Salt Lake City to Davis County to deliver Emily to the hospital in a pre-cell phone world,” Weible wrote. “Years later, she found me at a school board meeting to relay the news that my son had skated off the roof of my house and broken his leg. The kids were OK and stories filed on time thanks to Peg’s cool head.”
As a Tribune columnist from 2009 to 2013, McEntee challenged bigotry, as she did in a 2012 column about the banning of a gay-friendly book in a Davis County school library:
“Where to start? Nothing in ‘In Our Mothers’ House’ advocates anything but love of family, friends and community. Nor is a school library book considered curriculum; the only criterion is that it’s age appropriate for the child who’s borrowing it. As for a library itself, it’s a place of wonder where kids and their parents find books and other materials that might open dazzling doors to new worlds. Plus, it’s free.”
When she wasn’t taking on the establishment, she was championing underdogs. In her last column, she discussed wandering the state to find the stories that need telling.
“That’s one reason I loved to hit the open road as a columnist, talking to people I otherwise wouldn’t have even met. Such as the shopkeepers in Panguitch, worried sick about the Alton strip coal mine, or the guy in Castle Dale who breeds zebras and Watusi cattle. I’ve talked with a heartbroken merchant whose Gunnison dress shop went bankrupt due to an underground gas plume and who got only a pittance in a settlement.
“And it was in Gunnison, years later, that I talked to prison inmates who work with wild horses brought in to big pastures by the Bureau of Land Management. When I asked the guys what that taught them, they invariably said ‘patience’ — a good thing for someone who someday is going to be an ex-con.”
Her husband of 41 years, Bill Throneburg, remembers a writer who was a voracious reader. “She was devoted to The New Yorker magazine when it would come out weekly, and she was devoted to The New York Times Sunday edition. And she was a proud patron of the King’s English bookstore.”
Margaret Marie McEntee was born in 1952 in Salt Lake City to Bernard and Elizabeth McEntee. She attended Skyline High School and the University of Utah. She married Throneburg in 1982, and they have one daughter, Kate Throneburg. She is also survived by five siblings: David McEntee, Merry Worrel, Patricia Snow, Marni McEntee and Bill McEntee.
Funeral services are pending. Donations may be made in McEntee’s name to the Alzheimer’s Association.
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