LEE PORTER

Funeral service for Lee Porter of Oklahoma City, Okla., will be held at 9 a.m. today at Penwell-Gable Funeral Home in Topeka, Kan. Pastor E.L. Eckhardt will officiate, with burial in Memorial Park at Topeka.

Porter, 62, died Wednesday, Jan. 26, 1994, in an Oklahoma City hospital, following a brief illness.

He was born March 20, 1931, in Blytheville, Ark., son of William and Eva Musgraves Porter. He was reared in Cape Girardeau. He and the former Sue Cauble were married July 7, 1956, in Cape Girardeau. She died June 18, 1987.

Porter was currently editor and publisher of the South Oklahoma City Leader newspaper.

After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1956, Porter went to work at the Topeka Capital Journal, a Stauffer Communications newspaper. In 1977 Stauffer named Porter editor and publisher of its Shawnee, Okla., paper and director of 10 other Stauffer newspapers.

In 1982 Porter went to Stauffer's newly acquired newspaper in Ardmore, Okla., as editor and publisher. Four years later he retured to the flagship paper in Topeka as editor and publisher.

Porter was winner of the 1986 National Best Daily Newspaper Editorial contest sponsored by the National Newspaper Association, five-time winner of the best editorial in Oklahoma contest, and a four-time juryman on the Pulitzer Prize panel.

He had served on Chamber of Commerce boards in Shawnee, Ardmore, and in Florida.

Porter's military assignments spanned 27 years, including Korea and Vietnam.

Survivors include a son, David Porter of Oklahoma City; a daughter, Nancy McCrite of Hoover, Ala.; three sisters, Joan Stehr of Cape Girardeau, Delva Parks of Memphis, Tenn., Vivian Keith of Leachville, Ark., and two grandchildren.