Betty Gallagher, wife of former Associated Press general manager, dies in Santa Barbara at 93

Wife of former AP general manager dies at 93

LOS ANGELES — Betty Gallagher, the wife of a former Associated Press general manager and president who helped him run the Berlin bureau after World War II, died Thursday. She was 93.

She died at her home in a Montecito retirement community, said her son, Brian Gallagher, the editorial page editor at USA Today. She suffered a stroke on Monday.

She was an actress who played bit parts on Broadway when she met her husband, Wes Gallagher, then an AP war correspondent recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident in North Africa in 1943.

Her daughter, Jane Gallagher, said her father was still in a full-body cast when they met in New York City. They married in 1946 and her husband was soon sent back to Europe.

“He figured she would stay behind, but she said, ‘Oh no, I’m coming with you,’” said her daughter, a biology professor who lives in Cresskill, N.J. “He was surprised and pleased.”

When her husband covered the Nuremberg trial in 1946, Betty kept a phone line open while he ran down a hallway to report that 12 Nazis had been sentenced to hang for their war crimes. The mad dash to beat the competition was immortalized in an AP photo.

During the Berlin airlift and the food shortages, Gallagher and her husband somehow got supplies to staffers and their families, Jane Gallagher said.

“When they were in the field in Wes’ younger days, she was a part of everything that he did. She was the den mother, helping him help the families of staff,” said Lou Boccardi, AP’s former president.

Betty Kelley was born in 1916 in Detroit, attended the University of Michigan at age 16 and later graduated from Carnegie Tech, which is now called Carnegie Mellon, with a degree in theater in 1938. She entertained troops in the Caribbean with the USO during the beginning of World War II.

Her husband was transferred back to AP’s New York headquarters in 1951 and became general manager in 1962. The position of AP president was created for him in 1972.

“He was working his way up in the organization and she was the morale officer of the AP,” Jane Gallagher said.

Claude Erbsen, a former Latin American correspondent and AP executive, said he remembers Betty Gallagher as a gracious hostess who earned the affection and loyalty of AP staff while her husband led the company through the cultural and technological change of the 1960s.

During a strike in 1969, many executives’ wives went to work in the New York office to help out and Betty worked the switchboard, he said.

“A call came in and she got to chatting with the other switchboard operator, who said, ‘How do you get a great job like that, working for the AP?’ And Betty said, ‘I sleep with the boss,’” Erbsen said. “She had a great sense of humor. They were extremely devoted to each other, very happy together.”

The Gallaghers retired to Santa Barbara in 1976. Wes Gallagher died in 1997 at the age of 86.

Betty Gallagher enjoyed traveling well into her 80s, exploring Russia and Afghanistan and taking a cruise around Cape Horn, Jane Gallagher said.

She is also survived by her youngest daughter, Christine Gallagher of Los Angeles.