Ride For Life: Politician Betty Ann Krahnke Dies at 60 from ALS

Betty Ann Krahnke, 60, the former three-term Republican member of the Montgomery County Council who used the closing years of her life to raise awareness of the anguish of Lou Gehrig's disease, died of the illness yesterday in her Chevy Chase home.

(PHOTO: Betty Ann Krahnke, who died Sunday of Lou Gehrig's disease, is shown in this October 2000 file photo with close friends and colleagues Joy Nurmi and Marilyn Praisner.)

Krahnke, who stepped down from her District 1 seat representing Bethesda and Chevy Chase on April 17, 2000, had remained active despite near paralysis, and had attended church yesterday morning. She served in office for nine years. She was first elected in 1990 and last reelected in 1998, three months after revealing her illness. In the spring of 1998, She began to experience symptoms of the incurable ailment, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, and nicknamed for the baseball great who died of it.

The disease, which gradually paralyzes most of the body but spares the senses and intellect, first affected her speech -- she thought she had come down with laryngitis -- and her tennis game.

Her ALS was diagnosed that July, and she went public with the news the next month.

She vowed at the time to run for reelection, which she did, and then to serve out her four-year term.

But the illness, which destroys the motor neurons that carry messages from the brain to the muscles, progressed rapidly, and she was forced to step down after serving a little over a year of her third term.

Among other duties, she had chaired the council's public safety committee, which handles police and fire department matters, and served on the council's management and fiscal policy committee.

Well before resigning, though, she had decided to share her struggle with her constituents and the public -- granting interviews and communicating her thoughts and emotions up to and beyond the point when she could no longer speak and could barely move.

A distinguished figure, she suffered the pain, frustration and indignity of the disease with grace and humor, allowing her struggle to be intimately chronicled at times, in the hope it might help someone else.

But she was also determined to perform her job as best she could, as long as she could, and to live what remained of her life the same way.

"I was brought up with the view that you owe back to yourself and everybody around you and to God to do your best with what you're given," she said in an interview after her diagnosis.

As her physical capabilities failed, she first turned to a motorized scooter to get around in the County Council building in Rockville, then later to an electric wheelchair.

To help her failing speech, she used a small, portable public-address system, then a computerized voice synthesizer that recited commentary she typed into its memory, and finally an alphabet card, whose letters she pointed to with a pencil.

She and her husband, Wilson, had an elevator installed in their living room so she could get upstairs more easily, and a wheelchair ramp built at their front door.

They acquired a wheelchair van, hired nurse's aides to assist them, and were helped by an informal group of friends called "Betty Ann's bunch."

As the disease progressed, Krahnke lost the ability to drive, type, sing, play the piano, walk, speak and stand. She later required a feeding tube, a neck brace to hold her head up and oxygen to help her breathe.

Through it all, she sought to maintain her spirit, saying at one point that despite her affliction, she had been blessed with the honor of public service and "the chance to shape" her community.

"I really have had things that other people have been unable to do," she said. "I feel very lucky."

Krahnke was a native of Northwest Washington, the daughter of an FBI agent.
When she was 5, her father was transferred to San Francisco. She moved there with her family, and grew up and attended college in California. She returned to the Washington area to attend graduate school at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and to marry.

In 1969, she and her husband moved into a brick house on a corner in Chevy Chase and proceeded to raise a family.

But Krahnke had energy to burn. One day she was out in her yard when a cab struck a bicyclist at their corner, which had only two stop signs.

"All the stop signs were on the side streets, and the long streets had none, and they're all downhill," she recalled in 1998. "So I tried to find out if we could get four-way signs."

One thing led to another, and she soon found herself wading through the choppy waters of civic affairs and county politics. She was eager, opinionated and loquacious. She was also a lifelong Republican in a heavily Democratic county.

"I've been asked to switch parties by many very prominent Democrats," she once said. "But I've always been a Republican. It would be sort of a sham to switch parties in order to win an election."

In 1979, after years of civic activism, she was named to the county planning board and served until 1987.

She first ran for council, unsuccessfully, in 1986. She ran again and was elected in 1990, when the body was expanded from seven to nine seats and divided into five district seats and four at-large seats.

Krahnke and colleague Nancy H. Dacek, who was elected at the same time, were the first Republicans on the council in 20 years.

"One-party government doesn't work in East Germany," Krahnke said during the campaign, "and it won't work in Montgomery County."

On the council, she became known as an advocate for crime victims, especially victims of domestic abuse.

In 1996, she launched a program to give emergency cell phones to women at risk from abusive partners. And on her last day in office, she was present as the county dedicated its new shelter for abused women and their children, the Betty Ann Krahnke Center.

Krahnke was also a proponent of slower, better-managed growth in the county, and a champion of aircraft noise abatement for communities in the Reagan National Airport flight path.

After she became ill, she and her husband became advocates of ALS awareness -- Krahnke wore her tiny ALS lapel pin almost everywhere she went.

The disease, whose cause is unknown, strikes about 5,000 people in the United States each year, and about 30,000 Americans suffer from it at any given time. Lou Gehrig's widow called it "the tyrant."

But when Krahnke told the public she had it, she vowed: "I will not let this disease conquer me."

Besides her husband, she is survived by three daughters, Carolyn Schugar of Kensington, Catherine Anderson of Tarrytown, N.Y., and Margaret Ann Enright of Kensington; and three grandchildren.