Who is Nancy Guthrie? Inside the life of Savannah Guthrie’s mother and Tucson community leader

Nancy Guthrie is a kind, upbeat and steadfast woman of belief, who has lifted her family out of heartbreak before, according to those who have known her during her more than 50 years in Tucson.

As “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie put it in an on-air tribute for her mother’s 80th birthday in 2022: “She has met unthinkable challenges in her life with grit, without self-pity, with determination and always, always with unshakable faith.”

Everything changed for Nancy on June 10, 1988, the day her husband, Charles, died suddenly at the age of 49, leaving her to finish raising their three children alone. She was 46 at the time. Savannah was 16 and about to start her senior year of high school.

The family rearranged itself around Nancy and forged a way ahead. In the years that followed, she found work at the University of Arizona and her kids found success in the world — son Camron as a fighter pilot, daughter Annie as a poet and a jeweler and Savannah in broadcasting.

“She loves us, her family, fiercely,” Nancy’s youngest daughter said in that televised 2022 tribute, “and her selflessness and her sacrifice for us, her steadfastness and her unmoveable confidence is the reason any of us grew up to do anything.”

Beyond grief

Nancy Ellen Long was born on Jan. 27, 1942, in Fort Wright, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

According to her wedding announcement in the Cincinnati Enquirer, she graduated from the University of Kentucky and then married Charles Errol Guthrie, a Georgia Tech grad by way of Pineville, Kentucky, on Dec. 28, 1963.

Charles was a mining engineer whose work took them around the world, including a stint in Melbourne, Australia, where Savannah was born on Dec. 27, 1971.

The Guthries moved to Tucson about two years later and settled into a burnt-adobe home in the Catalina Foothills near Campbell Avenue and Skyline Drive to raise their kids.

Savannah has said that she and her sister chose to go to college close to home so their mother wouldn’t be alone after their father’s fatal heart attack during a 1988 work trip to Mexico.

In a Mother’s Day segment on “Today” in 2023, she said her mom “set aside her own grief in many ways just to be there and make sure we could all move forward together.”

Nancy worked for the U of A from August 1990 until Jan. 1, 2007, first as spokeswoman for University Medical Center and later as associate to the vice president of university advancement.

As part of her duties, she coordinated the Center Stage program, which brought in musicians from the university and beyond to put on monthly lunchtime musical performances at the hospital for staff, patients and visitors. She also served as program director for Medcamp, the U of A’s annual introduction to the medical field for select Arizona high school students.

In recognition of her work, Nancy was elected president of the Southern Arizona chapter of the Public Relations Society of America in 2000.

'No enemies'

Retired U of A vice provost Elizabeth Ervin said she was working in marketing and communications for the College of Fine Arts in the 1990s, when Nancy was brought in to help them broaden their reach “beyond our own walls.”

She said Nancy would lead regular committee meetings on how they could improve and expand their messaging at a time when the university’s various departments were doing great things but in an isolated, “siloed” sort of way.

Ervin said she and her colleagues looked forward to those meetings because Nancy kept them upbeat and fun. “She was a good leader,” she said.

You never would have guessed the woman was in the early years of a new career after the death of her husband.

“She was always extremely positive,” Ervin said. “She has an amazingly positive spirit.”

Former reporter Carla McClain said she often interacted with the public relations team at University Medical Center during her career covering health care for the Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star. She described Nancy as level-headed, accommodating, gracious and “totally upfront.”

“She was just great to work with. She understood what my job was as well as her own,” McClain said. “When you encounter good people in life, you know it right away, and Nancy is a very good person through and through. There’s a kindness and an aura around people like that.”

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That’s what makes what’s happening now so unfathomable, she said. “This is a woman who I’m certain has no enemies," McClain said on Wednesday. “I just don’t get this at all. It’s a very hard thing to understand, I think for everyone.”

TV family

Former Tucson TV news anchor turned actor Sally Shamrell helped organize a candlelight vigil and prayer service for the missing 84-year-old that drew hundreds of worshipers to St. Philip's in the Hills Episcopal Church on Wednesday night.

“I just feel like she’s a revered member of this community,” Shamrell said. “We all need to come together and lift our hands up in prayer for her.”

Shamrell said she first got to know Savannah when they both worked at KVOA-TV Channel 4 about 30 years ago. And you can’t know Savannah without knowing her mother, too. Nancy "is loving and empathetic," Shamrell said. "They’re two peas in a pod.”

A number of current and former KVOA employees turned out for Wednesday’s vigil, among them long-time reporter Lupita Murillo, now retired.

She said she was reporting on a story at UMC when she first met Nancy in her role as hospital spokeswoman. Then she got to know her as a mom several years later, when Murillo worked alongside her devoted and destined-for-great-things daughter at KVOA.

“She’s an awesome woman,” Murillo said of Nancy before the vigil. “We’re here to support the family and for a former colleague who we dearly love.”

The pastor of Nancy’s church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian near Tohono Chul Botanical Gardens, helped deliver Wednesday’s prayer service at St. Philip's in the Hills.

Meanwhile, the Facebook page for St. Andrew’s offered a prayer of its own: “Dear God, we pray for our dear friend, Nancy, and her family in this scary time. God, we know You are with us always. As we wait in the unknown, please be with Nancy and allow her to feel Your presence. Be with Nancy’s family as they gather and wait for news. Guide the search teams, law enforcement, and those seeking answers. We lift Nancy up to you, God of all comfort. Amen.”

A mother's faith

Nancy has appeared on “Today” a number of times over the years, including a cameo in a Nov. 5 homecoming feature that Savannah filmed in Tucson.

During the segment, as Nancy and her daughters shared lunch and a few sips of tequila at El Charro downtown, Savannah asked her mom what made her want to put down roots in the Old Pueblo.

“It’s so wonderful — just the air, the quality of life is so laid back and gentle,” Nancy said. And, she added with a laugh, “I like to watch the javelina eat my plants.”

Savannah has also talked on the air about what she has learned about parenting from Nancy and about her mother’s close relationship with Savannah's own children — daughter, Vale, and son, Charley.

“She loves her grandkids, and they love her,” she said in 2023. “I never knew that she would get to know my kids, because I didn’t know I was going to get to have kids, and it’s just such a joy that she gets to.”

Here are some other words Savannah has used when talking about her mother on national TV: noble, smart and adventurous, “a consistent doer of the right thing and the hard thing,” strong like granite and “curious about everything,” and “a truthteller, whether you really want to hear the truth or not.”

At the center of all that momness lies unwavering belief.

In “Mostly What God Does,” Savannah’s 2024 book about faith, she describes the Christian journals her mother would dutifully write in, the hymns on CD her mother gave her to play for her kids and the parable-like “grandma stories” she sometimes tells them.

Fittingly, it was Nancy’s absence from church on Sunday that triggered the search to find her.

“Moms don’t usually tell you; they show you,” Savannah said on “Today” in 2023, “and what (my mom) showed me was to be consistent, to be faithful and to be truthful. That’s her in a nutshell.”