As judged by the weather standards of coastal Massachusetts … this one was a not-quite Nor’easter.
Still, everyone who grew up there was quite certain the rain storm that lashed in from the sea that afternoon was going to be just wicked enough – ayuh – to make for one king-hell nuisance of a gully washer (they were right) once it got out of the bay and onto the land.
Besides, this was Katie’s first-ever, not-quite Nor-easter, and either way, she just knew she was going to make her meteorological acquaintance.
By getting as close to it as she possibly could.
You know: Weather Channel close.
Are-you-nuts-you-don’t-even-have-a-railing close.
Maybe it’s because her dad Harry is a chemistry professor emeritus at West Virginia University, thus making her enthralled, in a pre-ordained way, by all that science driving all that wind and rain.
Or, maybe it was because there was a primordial pull of place, woven even deeper.
After all, as a young lass in Scotland, her mom Liz traversed her craggy homeland in all kinds of North Atlantic weather, as she helped farmers and small business owners square cost ledgers and other matters of their day-to-day operations.
With his Down East drollery and stand-up comic’s timing, Katie’s father-in-law John Toland got appreciative, knowing laughter when he told the story at her memorial service.
“Katie went right out on the deck,” he said.
“She faced the ocean and she said, ‘Bring it on.’ Those three words told me all I needed to know about Katie Finklea.”
Citizen of the world
It was her enthusiasm – that zest and zeal of simply being in the moment – which made it so, he said of this townie kid from Morgantown, newly situated in Scituate, Mass., right after her still-fresh betrothment to his son, who is also named John Toland.
Scituate, if you aren’t familiar, is right on the water. Boston Bay. You can regard the whitecaps while eating your cornflakes every morning.
Mr. Toland, without saying, was quite charmed by his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, who went from ballet to political science to community service – and back again.
Liz Finklea can see why all the New Englanders were so taken.
“Well, that was Katie,” the mom said in her distinct voice, which has never lost its Scottish moorings, despite all her years in West Virginia.
“She wanted to experience it all. She was a citizen of the world, most surely.”
No dancing around it
Later, much later, when the unsmiling doctor came in with the cancer diagnosis, and when Katie gathered in close her husband and their daughters, Cleo and Imogene, to stare into this sudden storm – she emerged and said, “Bring it on,” in a wholly different way.
She battled the disease for six years.
Chemotherapy. Surgery. Clinical trials.
Katie never gave up. She gave out.
“She tried every treatment and exhausted every medical avenue,” Liz said, “right up to the end.”
On May 24, 2024, at her house in Plymouth, Mass., and just three months after her 42nd birthday, she quietly slipped away, surrounded by those she loved.
“My daughter was no longer suffering,” Liz said. “So in that regard, it was a relief.”
Journeys and destinations
After Liz and Harry weathered their grief, they set about structuring a legacy.
“We had to do something that made sense,” Liz said. “We started thinking about Katie’s love of dance.”
Ballet, specifically.
Liz got Katie and her other daughter Sarah, too, into ballet right after the family’s arrival in the University City in 1986.
Morgantown Dance was the studio and every recital, Liz remembers, was an endearing joy – what with all that wobbling en pointe and the one kid (always that one kid) who invariably ceased the Arabesque to mug and say hi to her nana in the audience.
Katie especially took to it.
And she was lucky. Her family had the resources so she could fully explore the discipline.
She graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts High School Ballet Program and that was her ticket to Massachusetts.
Two years in at the Boston Ballet School, though, and she was no longer quite as enamored, her mom recalled.
“The dance world is pretty small,” Liz said.
“She had decided that ballet was no longer for her – at least at that level.”
Katie came back home to earn a degree in political science at WVU.
“She just had that kind of a brain,” Liz said. “She could do anything, really.”
Bring it on (again)
Further sojourning eventually took her back to New England, where she worked for a variety of nonprofits and other social media marketing concerns.
By the time she married John and after Cleo and Imogene came along, she rekindled ballet and became a dance instructor.
While she taught mainly little ones and teens, one of her pupils for a time, was her mother, amazingly.
And she talked to her like she was a child.
“We had a couple of lessons together,” the mom recalled, chuckling.
“Katie would gently correct me. I went through ballet classes when I was a kid in Scotland, but I got too tall and too tired. She was a great teacher. She’s had students who have gone on to dance professionally with ballet companies across the world.”
Setting up the endowment through Your Community Foundation of North Central West Virginia was a natural, Liz and Harry reasoned.
YCF is the Morgantown-based nonprofit, charitable concern that serves Monongalia, Preston, Marion, Harrison and Taylor counties.
The “Katie Finklea Fund for Young Dancers” is open to students from the ages of 12-18 wishing to pursue the art as its namesake did.
The endowment will pay tuition, housing and travel expenses for students attending out-of-state workshops and other training programs.
“You hear of these stories of dance students talented enough to get into programs only to not be able to go because their families can’t afford to actually get them there,” Liz said.
“That’s such a missed chance. Unfair, really.”
Patty Showers Ryan, YCF’s executive director, agrees.
“We appreciate the opportunity to support a fund in memory of this remarkable young woman,” she said. “Katie’s legacy will continue through this fund each time a young dancer receives financial support to follow their dreams.”
Visit www.ycfwv.org to learn more about the endowment and how you can donate.
Meanwhile, John Toland, the elder, said he’ll do his part to keep his daughter-in-law’s legacy alive through five banjo strings and a whole bunch of vocal cords.
He previewed it at her memorial service.
Of country roads and Katie’s song
While accompanying himself, in the mountain way, on that gently frailing banjo of his, he rendered his version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the John Denver song of place and winding, Whitmanesque lanes that put West Virginia on the map more than 50 years ago.
A tune, coincidentally, that was written by Bill Danoff, a Massachusetts native who was initially thinking of the Bay State rather than the Mountain State early on in its composition.
Everybody at the John Alden Club on 16 Minuteman Lane in Plymouth sang along (of course), because they all knew the words (of course).
Katie’s father-in-law, who loves performing it in the folk music singalong circles he organizes around town, even decreed a new designation that day.
“‘County Roads,’ now and forever, will be introduced as, ‘Katie’s Song.’”
