Star-Bulletin job started
wide-ranging career

Gay Ruth Burk's writing career spanned several decades, including a job as a features writer for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in the 1950s.

That job gave her the opportunity to interview and have her picture taken with all the celebrities who came to town, including Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Loretta Young, John Wayne, Ann Baxter and James Arness.

In a short autobiography that gave to a friend, Burk wrote that she enjoyed her job so much she often wondered why the newspaper paid her salary.

Burk died Jan. 30. She was 97.

She also interviewed President Harry Truman, but her nephew Donald Sorenson of Oregon said his aunt did not think too highly of him.

"She thought he was brusque," Sorenson said.

Burk later worked in the press office of the Hawaii Visitors Bureau, was publicity director of the Honolulu Symphony and editor of a faculty newsletter at the University of Hawaii.

During her freelance writing career that followed, she wrote for Honolulu and Beacon magazines, and her fiction and nonfiction work appeared in many national children's and adult magazines including Jack and Jill, Children's Digest and Unity.

While in her 80s, she joked that the editors would have flipped if they saw who wrote a first-person romance piece called "Hideaway Lovers, That's All We Can Ever Be."

Burk was also a travel writer. Sorenson said his aunt would go to places she wanted to write about and would live there awhile. Her adventures took her to Europe, South America, the Caribbean islands, Lebanon and Iran.

"She was one of the most independent women I have ever known," Sorenson said.

Burk was born in Minneapolis, Minn., and, prior to her arrival in Hawaii, had a stint as a big-band singer in San Francisco. Sorenson said he watched his aunt sing with the Horace Heidt band at the Golden Gate Theater.

She served as president and Writers Conference chairwoman of the National League of American Pen Women and was voted Honorary Life Member of NLAPW by Honolulu branch members.