Mary Paxton Keeley, like all good writers, felt a duty to “catch and save in a net of words” life as she found it in her time. The chronicler of “Back in Independence,” compiled more than 70 years ago, as a native of Independence, daughter of John Gallatin Paxton, influential turn of the century attorney, and Mary Gentry Paxton, a college elocution teacher. Her writings reflect her early training in the classics and history under their tutelage.

She was the first woman graduate in 1910 of the University of Missouri, world’s first, journalism school; the first woman news reporter in Kansas City; a YMCA canteen worker overseas in World War I; prolific writer, author of books and magazine articles, essays, poetry and plays and a journalism teacher at Christian College (now Columbia) a quarter of a century. And though it all she was best friend of Bess Wallace Truman from their girlhood days in Independence.

She and Bess Wallace were brides in 1919. Bess wed Harry S. Truman and she married Edmund Burke Keeley in Virginia. Her son, John Paxton Keeley, was born in 1921. Keeley died when the son was five. Mary Paxton Keeley was Margaret Truman’s godmother.

Mrs. Keeley always said her book could not be published until after her death. She died December 6, 1986, just six months after se reached her 100th birthday, June 2.