Dr. Judy Gay, former Cuttington Professor Who Produced Four Liberian Authors is Dead

Dr. (Mrs.) Judy Gay, a great Cuttington English Teacher of the late 1960s through the early 80s, died recently in Atlanta, Georgia.  She was 93. 

Dr. Judy Gay taught   English at Cuttington College and Divinity School (now Cuttington University) beginning in 1958 when she and her husband, Dr. John Gay, arrived from the United States as missionaries at Cuttington.      

As a Cuttington professor, she produced several who made their mark as writers and scholars.  Among them were Professor Ruth Lymas Reeves and Professor Wilton Sankawulo, both of whom wrote and published several literature books taught in Liberian schools. 

Another eminent Liberian scholar taught by Mrs. Gay at Cuttington was Dr. D. Elwood Dunn, co-author (along with along with Amos J. Beyan and Dr. C. Patrick Burrowes) of the Historical Dictionary of Liberia.  Dr. Dunn is also the author of another great work, a triology (the three-volume) The Annual Messages of the Presidents of Liberia 1848-2010.  

Kenneth and Mae Gene Best, founders and publishers of the Daily Observer newspapers both in Liberia and The Gambia, were also taught English at Cuttington by Mrs. Judy Gay—Kenneth in the early and Mae Gene in the late 1960s and early 1970s  

Among Mrs. Gay’s students, during that period was our classmate, Z. Moulay B. Reeves, who later married his and our Cuttington classmate, Mrs. Ruth Lymas Reeves.  Ruth later became an author and an outstanding teacher of English and Literature.

In the early 1980s, when her classmate Kenneth Y. Best and his wife Mae Gene started their first   newspaper, the Liberian Daily Observer, Ruth Lymas Reeves, along with another of her colleagues, Mrs. Anna  Tarr, at the time wife of Economist Byron Tarr, conducted seminars in English for the Daily Observer staff at their first office building at Broad Street, Crown Hill, across from what is now Afriland Bank.     

The funeral of Mrs. Judy Gay is scheduled to take place in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, where she and her husband, Dr. John Gay, lived with their son David Gay, his wife and family.