The letter, unsigned, showed up in a local newspaper last month. Its stark message stung Betty Ann Krahnke: Isn't it time Krahnke gave up her seat on the Montgomery County Council?

"Most of you don't know how badly she has deteriorated," the letter said. "She now needs helpers to drive her, help her walk and stand. But worst of all," it continued, "her speech is so unintelligible that Channel 9 had to print subtitles." Surely she can't complete her term without "great and costly assistance." Her insistence on doing so "is not admirable, but sad and unfair to her constituents."

The letter was not the first disappointment the 56-year-old Krahnke had faced almost daily since she announced last summer that she'd developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, the deadly degenerative muscle disease known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

It had been shock enough to learn that her body would fail, that her muscles, one by one, would cease to work, starting with her voice. For a woman who had lived by her words, by her powers of persuasion, to learn she would be so silenced was tragic irony. Her mind was about to be trapped inside her body.

But she had vowed to press on, to continue to serve the constituents who have elected and re-elected her, a rare and revered Republican in a Democratic county, Maryland's largest and most affluent. These days, the esteem in which she is held can be measured by the silence in the council chambers when she tries to speak. Sometimes the only sound is her breathing as she struggles to form a word to argue for one more cause.

Her courage surprises no one who knows her.

Still, some are uncomfortable witnessing her decline.

Why doesn't she do her dying privately?

Why won't she stop talking?

Betty Ann penned a detailed response to the anonymous letter writer, but the simple answer is that serving in elected office isn't her job, it's her life.

For most of the last three decades, the girlish voice of Betty Ann Krahnke has been synonymous with the quality of life in Montgomery County. Less traffic. More police. Better snow removal. So when she began to slur her words last April, people noticed. Had she taken to drink? Suffered a stroke?

By July, when doctors determined the cause of her flattened sound and drooping smile, already half of the nerves that control her muscles were under attack. Ultimately, the doctors told her, she would be paralyzed.

Betty Ann and her husband shared the devastating news with family and close friends, weeping with them. But she resolved that the public would be spared her pain. She kept whatever emotions she felt private.

She sought ways to ensure that her colleagues would not be distracted from business, making the usual heavy demands of staff and insisting that those who couldn't understand her just say so.

The disease stole her trademark smile, but her blue eyes still sparkled. She kept up her good humor. Most people with ALS live two to five years, she told her three daughters, "but you know I've always been above average."

One of her early goals was to finish her re-election campaign without applying for a handicapped parking permit. Betty Ann's opponent had obtained one after an auto accident, and she quipped that the Democrat could walk better than she could. But her slower speech forced her to halve her four-minute televised campaign speech.

By November, after her re-election, her voice was too soft to hear above the din at the Thanksgiving table, so she began using a portable microphone. By December, her hands were moving slowly, but she sewed a glittery stocking for her new grandchild anyway; what matter if it still carried a straight pin or two on Christmas Eve? Despite the effort it now took, she kept putting on the jewelry she picked out so carefully each day. When the council president suggested she didn't have to attend every meeting, her response was a stern glare.

Her calendar remained full, with speaking engagements and political events mixed in with parties to mark birthdays and engagements and trips away with her husband, Wilson, an accountant.

If she couldn't work the phones at this year's annual charity phone-athon at the Jewish Community Center in Bethesda, she would provide moral support. She accepted invitations to conferences a year away.

In fact, Betty Ann did everything she used to do. She simply got up earlier to do it.

Why was she still working, colleagues wondered; they'd be on a beach somewhere. But as her determination to stay on the job became clear, the council's staff responded, even seeking out ALS experts to learn how to help her.

Once, in December, her tough veneer cracked. She'd been asked to give the farewell tribute to a retiring colleague. In mid-speech, she went silent, then started crying. Soon, everyone was crying -- council members, staff, clerks, reporters.

Her husband had supported her decision to stay in office, but grew worried about the potential "circus" aspects. Her friends admired her tenacity, but blamed her relentless pace for her decline. Her daughters respected her persistence; the eldest, Carolyn, noted wryly that no one but their mom would ever die wishing she'd spent more time at the office.

People assumed she was in denial.

But that wasn't it. "You can't bury your head in the sand with ALS," Betty Ann said. Not when the disease was robbing her of something each week, sometimes a little thing, sometimes a big thing. She discovered what it was only when she tried to use it. In September it was her pinky finger, in November her ring finger.

Mornings, she'd awaken to find her hand curled in a fist, like a baby's. "It's like going backward," she said.

She had already lost her lovely soprano voice, and had to quit the Episcopal church choir she had sung in for 30 years. During services, by the time she'd say, "I believe in God, the Father ..." the congregation was on the next sentence.

Rather than track the losses, though her goal was to make the best use of whatever gifts she had left. Every day she prayed for a miracle that would extend her life. She had no time for self-pity. It was a code she had always lived by.

It took some time for her to realize that not everyone shared this philosophy.

There was the neighbor's abrupt response when she sought help putting on her beloved jewelry: "Oh, that's not important." And a doctor's brush-off when she asked for a speech therapist to help her pronounce her bungled B's and K's -- letters she needed to say, "Hello, I'm Betty Ann Krahnke." There's no point, the doctor said. Your voice will go regardless.

On the first day of the new council term in January, Betty Ann's distinguished presence -- she wore a classic purple suit and tiny gems at her ears, her blond hair coiffed -- was punctuated by black sunglasses and greenish bruises on her cheek. Thankfully, the cameras were too far away to show the white plastic wire holding her loosened teeth in place. She had lost one tooth and split open her head in two falls in less than a month.

During the meeting, speaking in a soft slur, she introduced a plan to improve traffic flow in Bethesda and questioned police sluggishness in executing warrants. As always, she spoke more than anyone else. As always, her colleagues argued over the questions she raised.

Still, everything was different. Gone was her pocketbook, as heavy as a bowling ball, and her portable microphone. A hand on her shoulder steadied her. Her coffee cup tilted; soon she wouldn't be able to hold it at all.

Her friends, her children, her husband urged her to shorten her days and her sentences to conserve energy. She was willing to scratch only the weekly 7:30 a.m. Kiwanis meeting -- until one awful Monday in late January.

For months she had looked forward to meeting Stephen Hawking, the British physicist who has had ALS for 15 years. His disease has progressed at an exceptionally slow pace. Since paralysis set in a few years ago, he has communicated by blinking at a computer to form letters. She marveled at his singular focus on making discoveries with his mind despite the loss of all sensation in his body.

When the day to meet him at Washington's Kennedy Center came, she arose at 5 a.m., only to meet frustration.

That morning, she and Wilson waited two hours in vain for a speech therapist before leaving angry and hungry. Then a police officer couldn't understand Betty Ann's explanation as he ticketed her for illegal parking while Wilson ran into a fast-food restaurant.

When she arrived at her Rockville office, she was in no mood to try out the battery-charged scooter the staff had ordered. But with 28 people lining the hall to cheer her on, she rode it back and forth wearing her best smile.

By the time she got to her front door, she was anxious and running late. As her volunteer driver, a county attorney, opened the screen, Betty Ann toppled backward, hitting her head on the sidewalk.

Inside, Wilson ran to the door. As he and the attorney struggled to help Betty Ann, her face puffed in fury. She had been so careful! Now this! And on this night!

They never got to meet Hawking. The fall had opened an artery in her head. It was after midnight when they finally got home from the hospital. She missed the next day's council meeting -- her first absence in years.

A few days later, Wilson brought home a walker. He inquired about an elevator for their home and lined up a wheelchair. And although the Krahnkes were about to hire a full-time aide, he decided he would retire early, at 60, to help her. Convinced that her independence depended on her ability to communicate, he asked an ALS support group to help him find a voice-synthesizer, a lap-top computer that can translate typed words into sound.

The falls embarrassed Betty Ann. Not because people saw her bleeding, she said, but because they made her look like she was taking an unacceptable risk. They impugned her judgment. She thought she was being reasonable, considering she had been riding a bike only six months earlier. "I didn't understand how fast things would happen," she said.

She thought about Hawking, about how he says he has too much to do to worry about the things he can no longer do.

Slowly, in little ways, Betty Ann began to make concessions. She began to choose jewelry that would match three days' outfits; that way, she could sleep in it and avoid the struggle of putting it on each day. She accepted the walker. But she held out against the voice-synthesizer. Her mind was so busy, her thoughts so fast, she didn't see how a machine could possibly keep up.

On a February night at a neighbor's home in Chevy Chase, 39 people gathered with Betty Ann, Wilson, and their daughters, Carolyn, Cathy and Peggy. The evening had a warmer, lighter tone than a campaign strategy session, but its purpose was similar: to make it possible for Betty Ann to continue to speak for them.

One by one, they told of the first time they met Betty Ann. These were the people who had sung in the choir with her, played tennis with her, cheered at their kids' swim meets. In sneakers and sweats, they had plastered car windshields with her campaign fliers.

Like other women of her generation, Betty Ann had started her public service in a small way, when a child on a bike collided with a car on her corner. Diaper in one hand, phone in the other, she made calls. So many stop signs were installed in Chevy Chase at her behest that people can't travel more than two blocks in any direction without stopping.

Quickly she became the standard-bearer for holding the line on commercial growth in the neighborhoods lining Wisconsin Avenue north of Washington. People remembered her marching in the first big anti-development demonstration in the early '70s, when the neighborhood rose up against a zoning plan that would have resulted in another Tyson's Corner. There was Betty Ann, toddlers on her arm, her youngest in her belly, a button pinned to her shirt: "Enough!"

Some neighbors at the February session had baked the cakes to finance the legal battles to save the neighborhood 30 years ago. Betty Ann's strength had been to scour a zoning plan for the one word that could change its whole meaning.

By the time she was named to the county planning board, many thought she was a trained zoning lawyer. Razor-sharp mind, down-to-earth manner, she served eight years, revealing herself not as anti-growth, but in favor of reasoned growth.

In Montgomery County, few from the planning board ever win higher office, certainly Republicans never do. But when 10 women took her to lunch one day in 1986 and asked her to run for county council, Betty Ann agreed.

There was just one thing. It wasn't a condition, exactly, but Wilson was accustomed to having dinner at the same time every night. The women knew Betty Ann well enough to know that she wouldn't let Wilson down. Good cooks all, they popped casseroles into the Krahnke freezer each week. She didn't win that race, but she won the next one, in 1990, and has won each re-election since.

The casserole committee was there that February evening 13 years later. The battle cry back in '86 was "Quality of Life." Now, it was about Betty Ann.

A sign-up sheet was passed around asking for volunteers to drive Betty Ann, to shop for her, cook for her, wash her hair, or turn pages of council papers while she reads. They organized under a chairwoman, with captains, precinct leaders, specialists and reservists. Everyone needed for a campaign.

In coming weeks, the list would grow to more than 100 people wanting to give back to Betty Ann.

Hunched on a kitchen chair, Betty Ann was speaking into the phone, slowly, patiently, trying to explain her view of a proposed restaurant smoking ban.

"Repeat back what I said," she told the reporter for the Montgomery County Journal. The reporter could not decipher her drawn-out slur, so she began anew.

"The interview did not go well," she said when she hung up and guided herself to a sofa in her small brick colonial. Everywhere were stacks of council papers -- important material highlighted in one color and the really important parts in a second.

Faxes and letters had piled up; the phone, though, was ringing less and less. When a reporter didn't call back after promising to do so, Betty Ann got angry. She wanted to give her opinion; after all, she knew more than anybody about how things work -- or should work.

Plenty of her council projects had become or will become public policy throughout the state. Because of Betty Ann, when victims of domestic violence win restraining orders, they get cell phones programmed to call 911. Crime victims keep abreast of defendants in their cases via a new computerized phone notification system. She helped push through juvenile justice system reforms and funds for a program to help spouse abusers.

She remained true to the neighborhood. She won the baseball field for the Geico development site, the recreation center at the Hecht's site, the performing arts theater on the first floor of a Bethesda parking garage. She won limits on the mansions that were being built up to the sidewalk in her old, tree-lined neighborhood, playing havoc with its simple grandeur and its property values.

Her condition didn't keep her from seeing possibilities to improve life -- no matter where they occurred. In the ambulance after her second fall, Betty Ann was indignant when rescue workers, hearing her voice, assumed she'd had a stroke and started massaging her heart. "I am not elderly, and I am not having a stroke," she corrected them. She made a mental note: Amend the county's emergency response training manual to include ALS symptoms.

By last month, though, her staff was asking her to e-mail them instead of phoning. On televised council sessions, her voice was incomprehensible, leading some constituents to assume her mental capacity was gone, too.

Colleagues pressed her to tackle the voice synthesizer.

Finally she tried. But when she did succeed in making an impromptu comment on it, during an anti-smoking debate, no one heard it. And when reporters scurried for comments after the vote, she found herself alone at the table with her papers.

It's April, and the forsythia and cherry trees are blooming in Montgomery County. Betty Ann, in a neck brace now to support her head, still keeps 10- to 12-hour days. A sofa has been moved into her office to encourage naps, but she rarely uses it. There's too much left to do.

Budget season began last week. As the council's expert on public safety, she will once again argue that there are cheaper alternatives to building a new jail in Clarksville. She will continue to push for computers to be installed in recreation centers, at basketball courts, libraries -- anywhere ordinary people can get to them. The disparity between "haves" and "have-nots" was once about money, she'll argue. Now it's about technology.

Then there's the excitement of the new domestic violence center Betty Ann helped plan. Two weeks ago, County Executive Doug Duncan -- a Democrat -- surprised Betty Ann, the Republican who grills him mercilessly about spending, by announcing he would name the $3.5 million building for her.

And there's her ALS support group. Betty Ann lingers after meetings to listen to patients on ventilators and to shake hands. Wilson will nudge her out. "The campaign is over," he jokes. But Betty Ann is deep into a new cause: helping ALS patients focus on the gift of life, not the specter of death.

And that's what she tells the anonymous letter writer, the person who thinks she ought to give up her council seat:

"I thought the day had passed when people with disabilities were shoved aside and treated as useless. One wonders what the world would have missed if Stephen Hawking had decided to give up and quit."

Like Hawking, she tells the local newspaper, she will use a voice-synthesizer. It will allow her to continue to contribute to public debate long after her voice and her fingers have given out.

The synthesizer allows Betty Ann to speak in four ways. She can type shorthand codes, "HH" for "Hello, how are you?" She can call up instant phrases, such as, "Doug [Duncan] has it wrong again!" Her staff can send statements from their computers to hers. Or she can type a fresh statement, the machine anticipating what she wants to say from the first letters she enters, then speaking it in a synthetic voice.

She has a choice of how her surrogate voice will sound. "Rita" is gravelly; "Wendy" sounds possessed. Betty Ann likes "Ursula"; it's young, high, like her own voice was. But it's not very clear.

Oddly enough, there's also a "Betty" voice. She picks that one. It's the strongest of all.

About ALS

In the United States, about 30,000 people have ALS. Its cause is unknown, and there is no cure. For more information, contact the National Capital Area chapter of the ALS Association in Washington; 202-331-1448.

For another look at Betty Ann Krahnke, see SunSpot, www.sunspot.net

Pub Date: 04/11/99