Newspaper Editor Brewer Dies at 55

By: (AP) Ann H. Kellett Brewer, a former newspaper editor in Australia, Florida, New Jersey, New York, and California, is dead at 55.

Brewer, who also founded a literacy group and received a lifesaving award, died Sunday of complications from cancer. At her bedside were her husband, John Brewer, editor and publisher of the Peninsula Daily News, and mother, Dorothy Hagen Kellett of Half Moon Bay, Calif.

She was reared in St. Louis, majored in journalism and French at the University of Missouri at Columbia, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and worked in Sydney, Australia, as a writer and editor for The Daily Telegraph and Cleo magazine from 1972-74.

Brewer joined the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., News and Sun-Sentinel in 1976, rose to lifestyle editor and was managing editor of The Register in Shrewsbury, N.J., in 1986-87.

The next year she became managing editor of Lesher Communications in Contra Costa County, Calif., responsible for news operations of four suburban San Francisco Bay newspapers.

In 1991-92, she was founding editor of The New York Times News in Review, the first foreign-language edition of The New York Times, a biweekly Russian-language publication and joint venture with the Moscow News for readers in the former Soviet Union.

From 1993 to 1999 Brewer owned Dream Baskets, a basket and gift wrapping business in New York City and Westchester County, N.Y., then moved to Port Angeles to join her husband.

In July 2000 Brewer and another woman were given a Fire Department lifesaving award for performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on a woman who had a heart attack at the Port Angeles Senior Center.

Brewer taught communications career classes at Peninsula College, had a business, A Kellett Brewer Design, and was a career counselor for the state Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.

She founded and headed the Clallam County Literacy Council and in 2003 received the Port Angeles Rotary Club's Community Service Award and a Clallam County Historical Society volunteer award.

Other survivors include brother Dennis Kellett of Half Moon Bay and her husband's sons, Andrew J. Brewer of Columbus, Ohio, and Jeffrey J. Brewer of Bronx, N.Y. A memorial service was being planned.