This happened over the weekend (from Kentucky Lantern):

Martha Layne Collins, who as the only woman to serve as governor of Kentucky revolutionized the state’s economy by landing Toyota Motor Manufacturing, died at 3 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 1, in Lexington. She was 88.

Her husband, Dr. Bill Collins, said his wife died in her sleep at Richmond Place, a retirement community in Lexington where they had been living.

The usual tributes will come, and people will point out the significance of her victory in what is now a MAGA dominated state. It was a major accomplishment for women in the latter part of the 20th century.

But I started my editing career in Louisville at the Courier Journal in the summer of 1984, and one day in November, this story came across my desk (I can’t find the CJ’s version, but it made national news. This is from the New York Times on Nov. 24, 1984):

Gov. Martha Layne Collins’s husband said today that a 1.3-inch piece of glass his wife swallowed ”most probably” came from a carrot-and-bean dish she ate on a Pan American World Airways jet, but an airline spokesman said that was ”highly improbable.”

Mrs. Collins underwent emergency surgery in London Wednesday in which a four-inch section of her small intestine was removed. Mr. Collins told reporters here that the surgeons found, among carrots and beans in her intestinal tract, a piece of glass that had punctured her small intestine.

A Pan Am spokesman, Jeff Kreindler, said he doubted the glass had been in the vegetables served on the flight. ”We do not use glass in any step of the storage, preparation or provisioning of vegetables,” he said.”No one can say it’s impossible, but it’s highly, highly improbable.”

Mrs. Collins had gone to London to study the effects of acid rain in Europe. Her delegation, sponsored by the National Governors Association, included three other Governors.

The general reaction on the CJ news desk at the time was, “How do you not know you’re swallowing a piece of glass? Especially, a sliver that size?!”

But thinking back on it, Pan Am doesn’t exist anymore, so since it must have failed for a reason, I’m pretty sure it was responsible for the glass in her food.

I recommend the Kentucky Lantern version of the obituary, which was pretty comprehensive on her legacy.

But, sad to say, the first thing I thought when I heard she died was, “Didn’t she eat glass?”