Phyllis Henry

Phyllis Henry died June 29 in Gig Harbor. She was 93 years old.

Born Feb 10, 1931, in Gladbrook, Iowa, Phyllis married out of high school to Bill Glass and gave birth to three children (Domoni and twins Amber and Vayne) within two years.

The family moved to Ames, Iowa, in 1956 where Phyllis put herself through college and later took a job teaching English at Iowa State.

After a divorce, Phyllis moved to Washington D.C. where she worked as a court reporter. A couple of years later she started Commonwealth Reporting Company in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She married Bill Henry in 1981.

She and Bill eventually moved back to Iowa where they raised llamas on the family homestead. While there, she started a shelter for abused women in Grundy County. She also took religious studies and, later, became a lay pastor serving at the Green Mountain Church in Green Mountain, Iowa. Shortly after her husband died, she moved to Gig Harbor to live with her daughter.

Phyllis volunteered for the Angel Guild in Key Center and The Mustard Seed Project. She served on the Key Peninsula Community Council, became a supporter of the KP Community Services food bank, and was a regular attendee at KP Business Association meetings. As a testament to her love of words, she was a long-term member of a KP book club and a local writers’ group. In recent years, Phyllis contributed columns to the Key Peninsula News and received several awards for her work.

A memorial will be held Thursday, July 25, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Key Peninsula Civic Center.

She is survived by her three children, Domoni, Amber and Vayne Glass; three grandchildren, Justin Andrews, Alyssa Hendrix and Kevin Glass; one great-grandson, Jace Andrews; a brother, Cecil Wrage; and numerous nieces and nephews.

Phyllis would have preferred that any remembrances be sent to one of her favorite charities (KP Community Services food bank, The Mustard Seed Project, the Key Center library, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, UNICEF), or your favorite charity.

For more on Phyllis’s life, see: “The Extraordinary Life of Phyllis Henry,” KP News, August 2023.

To read Phyllis’s award-winning KP News columns, go to: Phyllis Henry columns.