Nuclear victim Myers dies

Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2001 | 9:25 a.m.

When Kathren Myers was growing up in Mesquite and Las Vegas, she and her family would go to the courthouse steps or other strategic but apparently safe sites to watch the mushroom clouds bloom from above-ground nuclear tests.

Though above-ground nuclear testing later was banned, the foreboding cloud followed Myers her entire life. She was a breast cancer survivor for nine years and became one of more than 3,100 claimants approved for government compensation from radioactive fallout.

Myers died Saturday of cancer at her Mesquite home. She was 53.

Services for the Southern Nevada resident of 50 years will be 1 p.m. Friday at the Mesquite Chapel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"My daughter was open, pleasant, outgoing and otherwise healthy," said her father, Lee Walker, an attorney who served in the state Senate in the 1970s as a Democrat from North Las Vegas.

"Kathy was part of that big government settlement, but unfortunately she did not live to see any money from it."

Walker was referring to the 1994 Congress-approved compensation for so-called "down-winders," those who could prove they were exposed to radioactive fallout and later got cancer.

Myers is one of 3,135 claimants who have been approved by the State Department for $232 million in compensation. She had not yet received her check. No other member of Myers' immediate family has been diagnosed with cancer, Walker said.

Born Kathren Walker on Nov. 30, 1947, in St. George, Utah, she came to Southern Nevada with her family in 1951 when she was 4.

She graduated from Western High School and later attended what is now the Community College of Southern Nevada.

Myers ran a credit union in Mesquite before taking a job at the Oasis hotel in the rural community 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

In addition to her father and stepmother, Kate Walker, Myers is survived by her husband, Richard Myers; two daughters, Tracy Myers and Courtney Myers; and two sons, Christopher Myers and Gregory Myers, all of Mesquite; three sisters, Merrilee Horrt and Lizbeth Hefner, both of Henderson, and Michele Heron of Claremore, Okla.; and three brothers, Marc Walker of Henderson, Brooke Walker of San Francisco and Darrel Walker of Las Vegas.