Orlando’s suicide
Anderson also aided victims of domestic violence
prevention “pioneer” Kathy Anderson, who laid the roots that led to facilities such as Harbor House and the Victim Services Center, has died at 98.
Before there was Harbor House, long before there was a Victim Services Center, there was a British-born woman with a fierce sense of justice who answered calls from Orlando’s desperate, venturing out at all hours to bring them food, clothing and comfort.
Her name was Kathy Anderson, and friends and admirers say few people touched more lives in Central Florida than she did in her 98 years — teaching school, staffing hotlines, launching a domestic violence agency, tutoring disadvantaged kids and founding a church.
Anderson died March 12 after a long illness, fighting, as her family says, to the end.
“My mother always had a very firm conviction of right and wrong,” says her son, Brian Anderson of Orlando. “And she was unshakable in her belief that she was right.”
Though in later years she was mostly known for her opposition to the increasingly dense development of College Park — where she had once lived among orange groves — her longest tenure was running what was called We Care, a suicide-prevention agency, where she began as a volunteer.
“People would call in and say, ‘I’m going to kill myself,’ and she’d talk to them and sometimes she’d take off and try to help them [in person],” her son says. “She would go all kinds of places, day and night, by herself, to intervene in some crisis. I don’t know how she did it.”
She pushed for roundthe-clock staffing and a hotline for teens. And after a growing number of calls from women battered by their husbands and boyfriends, she and a few friends began sheltering victims in their own homes. Eventually, they formed a separate nonprofit, Spouse Abuse Inc.
“It was a horrible name we started with, but it was a very good program — and it was just the beginning,” says Dick Batchelor, a prominent Orlando business consultant and former state legislator who became a supporter. “She was out in front on these issues way before anyone else was. She was a trailblazer.”
Carol Wick, who later became CEO of Harbor House — the organization that morphed out of Spouse Abuse — echoes those sentiments.
“She was an early feminist,” she says. “There weren’t even domestic-violence laws back then. Police just looked the other way. I can’t tell you how many people she impacted over the years. Without her, there wouldn’t be a Harbor House.”
Born Kathleen Downey in Halifax, Yorkshire, England, Anderson grew up in a working-class family and had the intelligence to earn a spot at Leeds University, where she received an English degree. She studied briefly at Cambridge University, but at the end of World War II she left England with her husband, John “Ian” Anderson, and sailed for what was then the small British colony of Singapore.
The couple both learned to fly and wound up piloting payroll missions to rubber plantations in the Malaysian Peninsula.
They moved to Ontario, New York and Ghana before arriving in Orlando in 1957, unprepared for the racial segregation they would witness.
“It was a big cultural shock. Big cultural shock,” she told an interviewer in 2015. “Well, I had lived in Ghana as a guest in a black country and when I came here, I mean … it was pretty horrifying.”
But Brian Anderson said his mother was strongest when she was pushing against something.
“I think she was appalled — and perhaps stayed that way a lot — by the culture here,” he says. “It was, in those times, a very backwards place.”
After becoming a U.S. citizen in 1962, she joined We Care as a hot line volunteer in 1968. Three years later and by then divorced, she was named agency director and spent the next 18 years on the job.
In 1989, Anderon was awarded Woman of the Year by the Central Florida Women’s Resource Center, but she didn’t retire. After We Care, she served as an educator with CITE, Inc., an Orlando service for the blind, and taught English at what was then Lake Highland Academy.
Somewhere in between, she also managed to raise two children, serve on the PTA, lead a Girl Scout troop and head a local tutoring program, “Wider Horizons,” for disadvantaged youths.
She also founded the British-American Club in Orlando in the late 1950s, helped to form the Cosmopolitan Club of Central Florida, an organization of foreign-born women, and founded the University Unitarian Universalist Church here in 1993.
“My mom was a doer,” her son said. “She thrived on it.”
But four years ago, when her daughter, Judy, died of an illness, it took a piece of Kathy Anderson’s soul, her family and friends say.
“Judy was at her house and had been sick, and Kathy went out on the porch to take a phone call, and when she came back in Judy was dead,” says daughter-in-law Daphne Hammond. “That’s very hard on a parent — to survive a child. I don’t think she ever got over that.”