Ethel Ann Quinn was born in Ogden, Utah, on March 27, 1947—the same year that a titan of rock ‘n’ roll was born in Brixton, London, England. Though Ann sometimes balked at her younger relatives’ choices in hair color and fluorescents (it was the ‘80s), Ann herself had been a rebel in her youth, going to UCLA to study English (instead of BYU to “get an MRS”), leaving the religion of her family and the state of Utah to become a court reporter in Las Vegas in the late ‘70s, smoking cigarettes with a glamor and savoir vivre associated with earlier eras, and finally coming to love Las Vegas—and sometimes live as a hermit there—as Howard Hughes (about whom she loved to speculate, and for whom her father had worked as an aeronautics engineer) had done decades before…

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Annie Quinn lost her older brother Michael to complications from cancer in 1974 and her father to a heart attack in 1976, but became a constant presence in the life of her brother’s daughter, traveling with her to Zion’s and other national parks across the West, and teaching her to swim (and how to keep her long, pale hair from turning green after spending hours in the pool). When her niece went to college and made life choices that her immediate family found controversial (and subsequently found herself without support), Ann stepped in and saved her niece’s ass and GPA, ensuring that she would not have to drop out of school or do anything untoward to pay her rent or buy groceries…

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Ms. Ethel Ann Quinn was the mother cat goddess Bastet of all cat ladies, even testifying before the U.S. Congress after three of her cats suffered kidney failure—and one died—after eating contaminated food from China…

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Ann Quinn was a court reporter for 30 years in Las Vegas. She witnessed many of the city’s most prominent trials, from the litigation associated with the MGM Grand Fire to those of several notorious underworld figures, one of whom would have a film made about him and end up buried with his brother in a cornfield in the Midwest. Ann gradually retired from court-reporting during the first decade of the twenty-first century, as carpal tunnel syndrome began to affect her ability to work…

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Ann sometimes wrestled with a profound sense of alienation, and often alternated between living a very private life in east Las Vegas—even becoming estranged from her family for a few years—and going out on the town with friends or her niece, taking in (among other Las Vegas shows and sights) high-wire acts (over the casino floor at Circus Circus), Siegfried and Roy, the musical Chicago, the Mob Museum, Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles’ Love Show, the Ethel M Chocolate Factory holiday lights display, various events at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, the National Atomic Testing Museum, and Thunder from Down Under…

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Ann Quinn was a breast cancer survivor who had her first bout with the disease in 1984 and her second in 2019, when the biopsy tool used to study the malignancy very fortunately removed the tiny mass in its entirety, and she quickly discovered—even to her doctor’s surprise—that she was once again cancer-free…

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Ethel Ann Quinn (though she rarely used her first name, she was her mother’s namesake) was born in 1947—within a year of a the birth of a certain president of the United States in New York City. Though Ann called herself an “Eisenhower Republican,” she was possibly the most progressive Republican of the first two decades of the twenty-first century (including that other illustrious member of the Class of ’47 who spent part of his life as a cyborg and another as the governor of California). Anni did not at all mind her niece calling her “Auntie Fa,” but deplored the demagoguery of recent American politics (and its sources), and longed for a time when our politics didn’t divide us so profoundly. Though she was vulnerable to Covid-19, she hoped to work on voter registration (especially among underprivileged and less-enfranchised populations) until the last possible day to register in Nevada, then planned to get out the vote up until, and through, November 3, 2020.

“No one gets out of here alive,” she used to say.

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(Why do I imagine her in this cohort of people born within a year of her own birth? Is it easier to imagine her as young–with bottle-red hair, in stacked boots, on the scene in L.A.–around the time that Ziggy Stardust appeared at the Santa Monica Auditorium? Do I imagine her establishing her own court reporting business and making her first $10,000 around the time Mitt Romney, another of her cohort, made his first million? Or do the contrasts make her loss more poignant—she should have had great loves, she should have run for office, she should have been a tycoon, she should have had a final year of peace and happiness, at least—and remind me that time is finite, though it seems otherwise, and that there is no guarantee that anything will come to you unless you leave the safety of your own weariness, solitude, and dreaming and move toward that other life that you desire?)

(And being a girl when and where she was: how much did those circumstances affect the trajectory of her life?)

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Anni Q was diagnosed with late-stage COPD ten years before her death, which occurred between August 28, and August 31, 2020. When Covid-19 came to the U.S., Anni isolated herself again, engaging in activism online or over the phone, and refusing to even open the door for friends who knocked, telling them to text or call instead. At some point in the last month of Anni’s life, a delivery man did not wear a mask while bringing a heavy box into her house (even though she had taped a handwritten note to her door requesting that all visitors be cautious because of her increased Covid risk). Even when she later developed a fever and thought she felt symptoms of pyelonephritis, she didn’t go to the hospital for fear of catching Covid and thought she would be fine at home taking the Azithromycin that a doctor had prescribed for her in case of a sudden infection. As of the publication of this note, her cause of death is still “pending.” She is survived by her brother Jim, his wife Hope, her brother Mike’s widow Beverly, her nephew Michael, and her nieces Christine Quinn, Carol Quinn, Stephanie Pulley Burton, and Samantha Pulley Hurst.