Angela Razook Wright lived by her 50th birthday tattoo: ‘We rise by lifting others’
Angela Razook Wright took stock of her life this year.
She turned 50 in February and wrote reflections of each of her decades in an essay called “Hello 50.”
Her husband, Don, never read what she’d written until Wednesday, two days after Wright died from pancreatic cancer that had metastasized.
There on the page was the unrelenting positivity for which his wife was known.
“I was thinking back over the past years of my life,” she wrote, “and the blessings are so overwhelming it brings tears to my eyes.”
Some people knew Wright from her family’s Old Mill Tasty Shop downtown, where she sometimes popped in to help with the cash register during busy lunches.
Others knew her from the East YMCA, where she taught classes.
“At 5 a.m., they’d get up to be at her class because she was so inspirational,” said Cindy Hayes, Wright’s friend since fourth grade at College Hill Elementary School.
Wright’s enthusiasm for fitness helped her win the Venus international swimsuit competition in Florida at age 18.
Modeling followed along with a couple of TV shows, including Hulk Hogan’s “Thunder in Paradise,” and life in California where Wright lived with a Playboy Playmate of the Year.
That’s how she wound up at the Playboy Mansion chatting with actor Tony Curtis, who told her she was beautiful but not cut out for Hollywood. Wright expressed an interest in business, and Curtis encouraged her to pursue it. She immediately packed her bags and returned to Kansas.
She’d already purchased rental properties while in high school. Then she came back and bought a liquor store and worked at an apartment complex.
Wright also owned Answer Advantage, an answering service for medical offices, apartment complexes and other businesses that she eventually took nationwide.
“She was driven,” Don Wright said. “She was not somebody who was ever going to fail at anything.”
Friends said Angela Wright’s love of business started young.
Hayes said Wright would take scraps from her parents’ leather shop and make key chains to sell in the neighborhood.
Don Wright said his wife’s father died when she was 4, and her mother had schizophrenia, which he said affected her. Though her upbringing had challenges, Don Wright said his wife never wanted to use that as an excuse not to succeed.
“She was always real big about you make your own path in life.”
Wright served on the board at HopeNet, a nonprofit that provides mental health services.
“She wanted to be an ear and shoulder for other people,” Lynde Greco said of her longtime friend.
For her milestone birthday this year, Wright got a tattoo that said, “We rise by lifting others,” along the length of her back.
“Every minute of her life she was giving to someone else,” said her close friend Casey Sigg. “She was the brightest light in the room.”
A vegetarian since she 19, Wright made a renewed commitment to clean eating and went vegan for a few years in her 30s. She also became a fitness coach. While she was always thin, suddenly she had six-pack abs.
Friends said Wright did lunges down the hallway with her chemo bag in tow.
A memorial fund in her name has been established at HopeNet.
A celebration of life will be held at 10:30 a.m. Oct. 10 at NewSpring Church.
Wright is survived by her husband, Don Wright; children, Keaton (Kelli), Brecken and Croix; in-laws, Mary and John Wright, sister-in-law, Shannon (Jeff) Stehman, and many uncles, aunts and friends. She was preceded in death by her parents, Max and Christy Razook, and grandparents, Chester Cook and Nonnie Johnson and Jimmy and Winnie Razook.
Mary Wright said everyone will miss her daughter-in-law and “that little lilt in her voice that was always happy.”
“We just have to bring her up, that memory of all that love and joy, and we’ll have her there.”
