Audrey Jane Malkan

Audrey Jane Malkan died August 29, 2004 after a brief illness at her home of 40 years in Fort Worth, Texas. Born Audrey Jane Meyer to parents Howard Meyer and Lois Thompson in Dubuque on August 26, 1929, she spent her childhood with her grandparents Frank and Anna Thompson in Decorah where Frank was the station agent for the Central Missouri and St. Paul Railroad. Audrey obtained her undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley and a law degree from Hastings in San Francisco. Declining a prestigious offer to serve as Deputy District Attorney of Marin County, Audrey instead practiced law in New York, where she met and married fellow attorney Arnold Malkan. They moved from Manhattan to Fort Worth Texas in 1965. She is survived by their two children Hope and Matthew, and two grandchildren. Audrey worked as Arnold's business partner on a wide variety of ventures, from Wall Street underwriting, the manufacture of some of the first commercial transistors (used in NASA's manned space program), to the computer service business. Yet her biggest professional achievement was the purchase, founding and operation of over a dozen radio stations in Texas, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and Alabama, and the Texas State Network. After Arnold's death in 1994, Audrey acted as General Manager of radio stations KZFM, KKBA and KEYS in Corpus Christi, Texas up until the last year of her life. Over four decades she earned a reputation as a dynamic and principled businesswoman and a well-respected broadcaster. Audrey also had a lifelong love of reading, especially in history, literature and the arts, and of piano music, particularly Chopin's. In July of this year Audrey returned to visit her hometown, and was deeply gratified to discover that Decorah has retained both its period architecture and its intimate charm. Inspired by the community pride and involvement which has sustained the town's character, Audrey donated seed money to a campaign by the Winneshiek County Preservation Society to convert the abandoned public high school into a county museum and historical archive. She will be buried Saturday, September 4, 2004 in Phelps Cemetery in Decorah in a private ceremony.