PLANNED GIVING
Storyteller Meryl Lin McKean Shares Her Own Story Ever since Meryl Lin McKean, ’80, was a young girl, she wanted to tell stories. Growing up in Warrensburg, she wrote and printed her own newspaper on a toy Mattel Linoprinter, distributing it “hot off the press” to her family and friends. Meryl Lin made her broadcast debut in radio speaking at high school speech festivals and began working for KOKO radio. After graduating from Warrensburg High School, she enrolled in broadcast journalism at the University of Oklahoma and got a job as a newscaster at the campus radio station. But she soon decided to transfer to the University of Central Missouri and become assistant news and sports director for KOKO. The part-time job at the radio station gave Meryl Lin valuable real-world experience while earning her degree in Broadcasting and Film. She also credits mentors like Richard Whitaker, a seasoned journalist, professor and public affairs officer for the Naval Reserve, with teaching her the ropes and preparing her for a career in what was then a male-dominated field. Meryl Lin graduated magna cum laude in 1980 and landed her first television gig at WOC-TV in Davenport, Iowa. She then spent four years as a weekend news co-anchor and health reporter at KTUL-TV in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before moving back to Missouri to become the health and medical reporter for Kansas City’s WDAF-TV, now Fox 4. “You get to get out every day, meet different people, see different things and then write
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about them,” she says of her 31-year career producing and anchoring the nightly health news segment for Channel 4. “Having viewers contact me after a story aired and saying, in some cases, you saved my life — literally. That’s about as rewarding as it gets.” One example of this life-saving work was a special report titled “Healing Honduras,” where Meryl Lin accompanied 30 medical professionals on a fourday mission to perform corrective operations for children with deformities and provide general medical care for those without access to a doctor. The five-part series earned Meryl Lin an Emmy in 1997, the same year she won first place for general reporting at the Kansas City Press Club’s Heart of America Awards. She went on to earn another Emmy in 2010 for “Heavy Burden,” examining the soft-tissue injuries that soldiers in Afghanistan suffered from carrying heavy combat gear. That same year, she received the national Delta Zeta Achoth Award for service to her sorority. In 2014 Meryl Lin’s sorority sisters, along with other lifelong friends, watched her accept the UCM Distinguished Alumni Award. Meryl Lin was overjoyed that her mother, Willa Mae (Fellhauer) McKean, ’39, ’67, was able to see her awarded this honor from their shared alma mater. During her time at what was then Central Missouri State Teachers College, Willa Mae was voted the first modern-day Homecoming queen. Other women in Meryl Lin’s legacy family include her
Spring 2023 | ucmfoundation.org/magazine
sister, Mary Kate Alkire, ’76, ’84, and paternal grandmother, Lena McKean, who earned a teaching certificate from Normal School No. 2 in the early 1900s. When Willa Mae passed away at the age of 97 in 2016, Meryl Lin and Mary Kate set up the McKean Family Scholarship in her honor. The scholarship is awarded annually to a student pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Education in either English or Speech Communication and Theatre. In addition to this scholarship and regular contributions to the immediate needs on campus — including the Campus Cupboard, the Student Hardship Fund, the renovation of Hendricks Hall and the Central Annual Fund — Meryl Lin established an estate gift with the UCM Alumni Foundation. The gift will
continue to fund her family scholarship and help advance broadcast journalism through the Digital Media Production program and KMOS-TV, the campus PBS station. Although she retired from her career in 2016, Meryl Lin continues to provide valuable professional perspective and guidance as a member of the advisory boards for both DMP and KMOS and on the board of directors of the UCM Alumni Foundation. “I feel strongly that because I don’t have children I need to pay it forward to future generations,” she says of her philanthropy to UCM and countless medical and community associations. “It’s my way of giving to the next generation.”