(Version 2.0: Updates/corrects bio info thanks to her son, Bob Wilmuth.)

Katie Castator surprised us. Again and again.

She was Somebody’s Mom, three times over. Yet she had a full-time job.

She apparently hadn’t graduated from college, and certainly didn’t have a journalism degree. But there she was in the newsroom, a 40-year-old rookie.

She was a casual sports fan, at best. But eventually we sent her out to cover the Los Angeles Rams and she not only survived but thrived.

Katie Castator was full of surprises. All of them good. Many of them fairly astonishing.

To put Katie Castator into the context of sports journalism of the early-to-mid-1980s … well, she shouldn’t have existed.

The sports journalism business was only beginning to admit women into its ranks. One or two here or there, most of them from my generation, not hers. Most of the pioneers were young, single, brash and self-assured (or could act the part), and nearly all of them were channeled into the soft sectors of sports reporting. Covering tennis or golf, probably. Olympics-type sports. Non-deadline stuff.

Very few women covered “major league” beats, on deadline, in the early 1980s. And if they did, they were feminists ready to confront obstacles head on.

Then there was Katie. Who was 40 when she got to the newsroom. And if she were a feminist, well, we never noticed it … behind her obvious role as the handsome mom who often fielded phone calls from her kids.

I cannot take credit for her being in the sports department. That would be a guy named Fred Meier, who preceded me as sports editor. She was newly arrived when I took over, in 1980, coming over from features in a trade for Gordon Coy (see “Seasons,” 1978) that, looking back, was a ripoff along the lines of Pedro Martinez for Delino DeShields or Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas or Lou Brook for Ernie Broglio. Sports got by far the best of this deal.

I also cannot take credit for Katie Castator, Rams writer. Because by the time we sent her out to cover the NFL team … she already had proven herself. Yes, on the golf and tennis beats, but also in the bang-bang on-deadline environment of Friday night prep football. And Saturday night college football, too.

So, yeah, I sent her to Anaheim to cover John Robinson, Eric Dickerson and Jim Everett. But by then, there was no doubt that she would succeed. Despite obstacles of gender, age, training and experience. And she did a crackerjack job.

Some background on Katie, trusting here in my memory (and a few stats from ancestry.com):

She was born Kathryn Ann on June 23, 1936. In Illinois. She grew up on a farm, or at least in the countryside. She had an older sibling who died at a young age, she told me. Perhaps 5? And she never felt as if she filled the void in her parents’ lives left behind by the dead sister.

She attended a business college for a time. She apparently took some classes at Bradley University. (Thing about journalism, by the time you’re in the newsroom for a while, nobody asks about your bona fides; all they have to do is look at your work. If you make deadline and write compelling copy, it doesn’t matter if you went to Harvard. And vice versa. So we never asked Katie about her schooling.) I remember Bradley because we were doing an NCAA pool and she wanted Butler, because she had gone there, she said.

She married fairly young. To a businessman, as I recall. And she was known for a long stretch of her life as Kathy Martin — before and after her first marriage, that is.

She was a housewife for more than a decade — which was typical for women born before World War II. She bore three children. The eldest, a son, was mentally handicapped. The issues around her oldest child apparently were a strain on the family and eventually her marriage collapsed, in 1969.

(These were topics Katie didn’t talk about. Not with me or the other guys in the department. She would reveal some of her past, carefully, if asked. But because we saw that it made her uncomfortable to be pressed, we rarely did.)

Eventually, Katie got into the work force — at the local newspaper, The San Bernardino Sun. I believe it was her first paying job. But she didn’t start in the newsroom; she began in the marketing department, organizing benefits, working with charities, getting the paper’s name out in the community.

At some point in the late 1970s, she had met enough people in the features department to wangle her way into the newsroom, where she did the usual features stuff — soft and non-deadline. About as non-sports as a journo can be. But even that was quite a jump, coming from marketing.

I no longer remember whose idea it was to get her into sports. I’m not sure I ever knew. But in 1979, she was among us. She had remarried by then, to a man named Castator who was working on a forever-unpublished novel. That is, he was unemployed.

When “Katie Castator” (goodbye “Kathy Martin” and “Kathy Wilmuth,” the surname of her first husband) got to sports, she took over Gordo’s beats, specifically tennis and golf.

Her timing was good. We were beginning to cover more and more events, and in the early 1980s we had an editor, Wayne Sargent, who loved golf. Katie covered the Bob Hope every year, as well as the Dinah Shore and L.A. Open. Even Pebble Beach a time or two, and I want to say one U.S. Open. Maybe at the Olympic Club in San Francisco?

That gave her access and exposure to some of the heavyweights in SoCal sports journalism, including L.A. Times columnist Jim Murray, with whom she formed a lasting friendship.

She began to shine as a writer. She had strengths not obvious at a glance.

She seemed soft, behind her big glasses … but that softness often elicited information volunteered by otherwise defensive or antagonistic news sources. The kind of sources who would dry up under tough questioning. I routinely sent her out for the “difficult” feature interviews and she rarely (if ever) failed.

She could construct a story. This is hard to teach. Mostly, you can or you can’t. Katie could, and with practice she improved.

She liked people. She was prepared to like you, and if she didn’t, you must have been a major jerk. She was invariably upbeat, and remembered people’s names. People liked having her around. They would help her, if she needed it, and be happy to do so. Katie would have helped them, too. It’s easier to succeed as a journalist with the sort of personality she had.

Had she not covered the Rams, her career in sports would have been a success. But it was the Rams beat that put her into a different category. That’s where she broke out of the constraints of the era, becoming the first woman to cover the Rams, a famed team in the ultra-male, testosterone-soaked realm of pro football.

We traveled with the Rams, back then, and Katie made the road trips to New Orleans and San Francisco and Atlanta, etc. I want to say she covered the NFC title game, Rams vs. the Ditka Bears in 1985, in Chicago. I don’t think she missed a game for two or three years, at the least, and she seemed to love the beat.

And if she didn’t know a “Will” linebacker from a Mike or a Sam, who cared? Because a lot of her male colleagues didn’t know either, and very few of them were personally as well-liked by the coaches (JRobby, Marv Goux, etc.). And none evoked feelings of “mom” from players in the way Katie could without trying. I mean, you just couldn’t be rude to her.

She could have covered the Rams in perpetuity, as far as I was concerned. But sometime in the late 1980s she was diagnosed with cancer. She had mentioned a sore wrist that didn’t seem to get better … and then came the diagnosis … a form of cancer that made her bones brittle. Prone to breaking.

It certainly was a serious diagnosis, but she downplayed it to me. She would continue to work. She wanted to stay on the Rams.

Soon, however, we all realized she couldn’t travel with the team anymore. She tried, but it wasn’t possible to drag a computer through airport terminals, she said. It saddened her, but the Rams beat was exhausting her.

About the same time, her husband, who may not have treated her very well, had a stroke and hovered on the edge of death for months, maybe a couple of years.

To better deal with all this stress, Katie moved back to features, which had kinder work hours. I was sad to see her go, but it was what we had to do.

While back in features, her husband died. A few years later, in 1991, she married once more, to a gentle soul named Bob Currie, and Katie took advantage of the opportunity to reinvent herself one more time. Her byline became “Kathryn Currie,” and she turned out nice copy for the features section for several years.

I thought her cancer was in remission. It wasn’t. She was in an automobile accident in the summer of 1995, an incident that shouldn’t have been fatal … but a few days later, on July 20, she died. She was 59.

I was stunned, and felt awful because I hadn’t grasped the seriousness of her situation and hadn’t visited her in the hospital. I thought it was a fender-bender. But apparently her health was so shaky, by then, that it didn’t take much to precipitate a crisis.

A memorial was held for her at the Redlands Bowl, a compact, verdant spot in Prospect Park. Apparently, she and her husband, Bob, had spent many pleasant hours there watching plays under the summer skies. Clearly, she was happy with Bob. Which pleased me, after being aware that her first two marriages had held lots of rough patches.

It was a New Age-y ceremony. A woman led it. People talked about how kind and thoughtful Katie was. And she was. But I don’t remember anyone talking about what a first-rate sports writer/reporter she was, and how she was part of the first wave of women who broke down ancient walls in sports departments — without making herself the story.

I wish I had spoken up. This is the best I can do, 13 years too late.

Katie Castator. We knew from the start she was a great person. We didn’t know she also was a fine journalist. Thankfully, we found out.