Virginia "Ginny" Nell Messec

Notes:

The Texas Birth Index shows her as a daughter of Cecil MESSEC Jr. and Peggy PRUITT.

Virginia Nell "Ginny" Messec, longtime editor and travel writer at the San Antonio Express-News, was a mentor and advocate for workplace policy reform when the city had two daily newspapers.

Messec, 64, died Nov. 27 after undergoing 20 months of treatment for leukemia.

Her husband, retired reporter David McLemore, said Messec's impact on local journalism encompassed helping newcomers to the staff, ensuring a quality product and advocating best practices in the workplace.

"She would rise above her innate shyness to help people," McLemore said. "She believed in people doing the right thing for others, and she was not afraid to stand up for it."

Born on May 26, 1955, at Downtown Baptist Hospital in San Antonio, Messec grew up on a family farm with five siblings and graduated from Devine High School in 1973. A few months later, she was hired at the Express-News as a typist.

Messec became a library researcher the following year. A self-taught journalist, she became an editor in the Sunday Department and Insight section, starting with a weekend shift, then moving to projects and editing columnists.

Maury Maverick, a Sunday columnist who became like a surrogate family member, would often call Messec about his ideas, and had her and McLemore over as guests at his riverside property in Castroville.

He gave her a copy of his book "Texas Iconoclast," in 1997, and wrote inside the cover, "For my old friend and editor, Ginny Messec, who had a hand in the making of this book." In an Express-News column that year, Maverick wrote that she had gotten him a pay raise, "like a good sergeant looking after the troops." Maverick died in 2003.

McLemore, then a San Antonio Express reporter who later would work for the Dallas Morning News, met Messec while covering the 1976 party primaries. He realized as they had a conversation on election night in a break area that she was "the one," he said.

Messec also was a travel writer, visiting and writing about Japan, Hawaii, West Africa's Ivory Coast and other far-flung places, as well as beaches and dude ranches in Texas. She ran a youth columnist contest, working with schools, students and parents, and repeatedly won in-house awards for her page designs. She also was project coordinator for an office wastepaper recycling program in the early 1990s.

While working in the library, Messec took a grievance about a columnist's unwanted advances to Publisher Charles O. Kilpatrick, who got the behavior to stop, McLemore said. She later was quoted in the Inside Scoop, the paper's in-house newsletter, saying she wished the Express-News had a more uniform, flexible policy for parents with sick children at home.

Messec, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, retired in 1992 and provided home schooling for the couple's two sons. She continued to travel, McLemore said. She loved driving and having long conversations with the radio turned off.

Messec started hospice care on Nov. 14, wanting to be at home with her husband and two dogs, and slipped into a suspended state, unable to talk early on Nov. 27. She died several hours later on the eve before Thanksgiving.

"The one thing I had to be thankful for was that I had her in my life," McLemore said.

Survivors include her mother, Peggy Messec of Rye, Colo.; sons, Gabriel McLemore of Houston and Sam McLemore of Portland, Ore.; and a brother and four sisters.

A memorial service is planned in the spring.

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