By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Maj. Gen. Kathryn George Frost, 57, the senior woman on active duty in the Army at the time of her retirement last year and the wife of former congressman Martin Frost (D-Tex.), died Aug. 18 of breast cancer at her home in Latta, S.C.
Her final assignment was as commander of the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, or AAFES, which oversees the stores known as base exchanges and post exchanges.
"She was well-known for her work to champion personnel policies, education and leadership innovations for the U.S. Army," Army spokesman Paul Boyce told the Associated Press.
Gen. Frost was born in Dillon County, S.C., and grew up in Latta, where she was valedictorian of her high school class in 1967. Runner-up as "Miss Latta" as a teenager, she was recognized as a "South Carolina Woman of Distinction" at the 2005 Miss South Carolina Pageant.
"I was raised to be a Southern girl," she told the Dallas Morning News in 1999, "but I also grew up with a mother who worked and when opportunities were opening up for women."
She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of South Carolina in 1970, earning a degree in library science, and received a master's degree in counseling from Wayne State University in Detroit while on active duty in the Army.
She was working as a civilian counselor and program director at the Army Education Centers when she enlisted in 1974, while the Women's Army Corps was being phased out and women were being integrated into the regular Army.
She joined the Army, she told the Miami Herald in 2003, because she admired how officers she had counseled lived their lives on and off duty. She also said she wanted to prove something to feminists and to enemies of feminism.
"Most people wanted equal rights, but no one was asking for equal responsibility," she told the Herald. "Commitment requires sacrifice. Somewhere along the line, to be successful, one has to establish priorities and make choices."
She was first in her Women's Army Corps basic course and first in her WAC advanced training course.
She served four years as adjutant general of the Army and as commander of the Eastern Sector of the Military Entrance Processing Command. She had two tours in Berlin and also worked at the Pentagon on the staff of Gen. Colin L. Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"There were two guys applying for the same job, and the interviewer asked me why he should give me the job," she told the Herald. "I told him he should give me the job because I was a woman and Colin Powell could make a statement for diversity by adding a woman on his staff, since he had none."
She became deputy commander of AAFES in 1996. As commander, she headed an $8 billion retail operation with 48,000 employees in all 50 states and in 35 countries. Under her leadership, the command received a special award from the National Retail Federation for its work in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We're doing the best we can to make an awful environment a little more pleasant for the troops," she told Congressional Quarterly last year.
Her first marriage to Dolph Carlson ended in divorce. She met Frost when she was assigned to his district in 1996 as deputy commander of AAFES, headquartered in Dallas. They were married in 1998 in the prayer room of the U.S. Capitol in a ceremony presided over by the chaplain of the House of Representatives.
Her husband was a Democrat and 26-year House member who lost his 2004 reelection bid after his district was redrawn as part of a plan championed by former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).
The couple moved from Dallas to Washington in 2005 to be near Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Gen. Frost was undergoing treatment. They moved to Latta this summer and purchased the house in which she grew up.
In addition to her husband, survivors include a sister, Gwen Strickland of Marion, S.C.; three stepdaughters from her second marriage, Alanna Bach of El Paso, Mariel Sala of Fort Worth and Camille Frost of Santa Fe, N.M.; and three granddaughters.