Rev. Dr. Laura Cameron Fraser became the Northwest's first female Episcopal priest in 1977, a year after the national denomination first allowed women in the pulpit. The day she was ordained at a packed Epiphany Church in Olympia, some 26 traditionalist church members and officials opposed to the idea of female clergy held a protest prayer service at another church. As it turned out, it wasn't just her gender that differentiated her from church tradition. In the mid-'80s, Fraser again stirred up old-timers' opposition when, as rector at a church in Issaquah, she introduced the teachings of someone who claimed to channel the voice of an angel named Jonah. Fraser resigned from the Episcopal Church due to this controversy and in 1988 co-founded the Foundation for Inner Enlightenment and Spiritual Freedom, a New Age-oriented spiritual, educational, and social group devoted to "spiritual healing and religious freedom." In recent years she had retired to East Wenatchee to live with family and write a book. Fraser died there on March 2 of a stroke, at the age of 70.

Kmart Corp., the onetime discount-retail colossus that became the largest U.S. company ever to declare bankruptcy, announced it would turn off the blue lights and throw in the Martha Stewart towel at 284 stores (more than 10 percent of its total branches) over the next three to six months. Among the doomed are the chain's outlets in Renton, Bellevue, and Edmonds. All those stores were built in 1967 or soon thereafter, during the first big national explosion of the Detroit-founded chain (an outgrowth of the old S. S. Kresge variety chain). The soon-to-be-closed stores were in suburban areas where Kmart was swamped by the newer, bigger, and slicker outlets of Fred Meyer, Target, and/or Wal-Mart. Both of Kmart's Seattle stores, on Aurora Avenue and S.W. Delridge Way, will remain open for now, so you can keep getting your cheap underwear, good-for-four-wearings pastel dresses, off-brand VCRs, Carpenters greatest-hits CDs, and strawberry Icees.

Mildred Cook, 86, was one of the Seattle classical-music scene's most venerable behind-the-scenes organizers. The organizations and programs she co-founded include the Seattle Opera (and its predecessor, Proscenium Opera), Bumbershoot, Fort Worden Chamber Music Workshops, and Meany Hall Associates. At various times, she was also president of the Seattle Opera Guild and the Women's Symphony League, ran the University of Washington's community arts program, and served on the King County Arts Commission and the Seattle Parks Arts Advisory Board. She received a Governor's Arts and Heritage Award in 1973 for her organizing and fundraising work. Her husband Peter, who died in 1991, was the longtime head of Garfield High School's music program (alma mater of Jimi Hendrix, Quincy Jones, Ernestine Anderson, and bandleader Bumps Blackwell). Mildred Cook died February 26 of complications from Alzheimer's disease.

obits@thestranger.com