Betty Peach – San Diego fashion editor
Betty Peach was the longtime fashion editor at the San Diego newspaper – she also covered the city’s zoo.
From Peach’s obituary:
Longtime San Diego reporter, world traveler and private pilot, Betty Peach-Tschirgi, 99, died peacefully at her home in Pacific Beach on April Fool’s evening, 2016. As an inveterate prankster, she would have applauded the date.
Betty Peach was on the staff of the Evening Tribune from 1948 to 1982, covering the San Diego Zoo, New York fashion shows and national presidential conventions, beginning with Eisenhower in 1952. She was the first to sign on for adventurous assignments — flying with the Blue Angels over Miramar; going to sea on Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s research vessel FLIP a floating instrument platform that flipped from horizontal to vertical position once at a research site.
The intrepid, willowy reporter/photographer was born Aug. 7, 1916, in Sulphur, OK and graduated from the University of Oklahoma. She worked for the Oklahoma City Times (covering Al Capone’s daughter’s wedding in Palm Beach in the 1930s) and the Daily Oklahoman, before marrying her city editor, Gene Peach, and moving to San Diego, where he had been hired as an editor and film critic.
In World War II, she served with the American Red Cross in New Guinea, meeting Charles Lindbergh, whom she later interviewed at the Air and Space Museum in Balboa Park. At age 51, after the death of her husband, she began flying lessons at Gibbs Flying Service at Montgomery Field and went on to earn a commercial pilot’s license. In the 1980s, she married Robert D. Tschirgi, a vice chancellor of UC San Diego, who predeceased her.
In 1969, Betty became the first woman admitted to the all-male journalism fraternity, Sigma Delta Chi. She was active in the Society of American Travel Writers. Among her passions were opera, classical music and poetry, which she committed to memory. She enjoyed sharing her centennial year with the National Park Service and the San Diego Zoo, proudly wearing a Zoo visor that said 1916-2016. She credited her longevity to five scoops of coffee ice cream a day, and kept six half-gallons in her freezer at all times.
A month before her death, a heart doctor suggested she have minor surgery to replace her Pacemaker with a smaller model guaranteed to last 10-12 years. “I’m not sure I want to live to be 110 or 112,” she snapped. The doctor blanched. “How long DO you want to live?” he asked.Without hesitation, she said: “I want to live long enough to see that Donald Trump does not get in the White House.”
