By Will Wright

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Pat Gish, who, with her husband Tom, challenged the powerful institutions of rural southeastern Kentucky through a crusading weekly newspaper in Letcher County, died Sunday at the age of 87.

Their newspaper, The Mountain Eagle, exposed corruption of local officials and challenged their coal industry.

Pat and Tom met while they were students at UK and working at the Kentucky Kernel.

“She and Tom were both real bulldogs of journalism,” said David Thompson, the executive director of the Kentucky Press Association. “They knew right from wrong and they always sought the truth.”

The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at UK established an award in 2005 to honor “courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism,” named the Gish Award. Tom and Pat Gish were the first recipients.

The Gish family and their paper were subject to backlash from corporations, local businesses and even law enforcement.

In 1974, after the paper published articles about local law enforcement mistreating young people, a police officer paid people to throw a firebomb through the window of their office.

The building burned down, but the paper survived through Tom and Pat.

“They were not going to be intimidated by anybody,” Thompson said. They lost many advertisers because of their reporting, but continued to push on.

Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, and a UK professor, said Pat played a crucial role in maintaining the newspaper, often doing the jobs that Tom did not want to do, like maintaining the books and writing certain stories.

“I don’t think The Eagle would have survived without Pat,” Cross said. “It was really a partnership between the two of them.”

The couple made for an intimidating team of reporters for Tom’s hometown, he said.

“Both of them were good reporters. They could have moved up in the world of metropolitan … journalism, but they decided to move back to his hometown and challenge the powers at be,” Cross said.

Tom Gish died in November 2008 at the age of 82.

“You didn’t really hear people talk about just one of them because they were in it together,” Thompson said. “They were inseparable.”