Montgomery Planning Board member

Jean B. Cryor, 70, a Montgomery County Planning Board commissioner who was long active in Maryland journalism and Republican politics, died Nov. 3 at her home in Potomac. She had cancer.

The Montgomery County Council appointed Mrs. Cryor to the Planning Board in 2007 after she had spent 12 years in the state House of Delegates, where she served on the Ways and Means Committee and became the ranking Republican member.

She represented a district that included most of western Montgomery. Her voting record was described as fiscally conservative and socially moderate.

The election of Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) as governor in 2002 was said to have given Mrs. Cryor more clout on transportation funding issues important to her jurisdiction. She was the county's only GOP state legislator when she lost a bid for reelection in 2006.

Mrs. Cryor spent most of her early career in journalism and was an executive at the suburban Gazette newspaper chain before winning elective office in 1994.

Jean Brown was born in Darby, Pa., on Dec. 13, 1938, and grew up in Lansdowne, Pa. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and received a master's degree in business administration in 1979 from what is now Loyola University in Baltimore.

She was a reporter for the Philadelphia Bulletin in the early 1970s and then worked in Philadelphia and Washington as an administrator at the News Election Service, a media consortium that reports election data.

She worked for the Gazette chain from 1987 to 1993, initially as an editor and publisher and then as a vice president of the company. The Washington Post Co. bought the company toward the end of her tenure.

Last year, Mrs. Cryor taught classes in state and local government at Montgomery College. She was a past president of Women Legislators of Maryland, and she was a member of the boards of the Maryland Commission for Women, the BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, the Potomac Theatre Company and Montgomery Women, a leadership and political action committee.

Her husband of 18 years, Dan Cryor, died in 1978.

Survivors include three daughters, Allison Cryor DiNardo of Alexandria, Jennifer Baldwin of North Potomac and Deirdre Cryor of Denver; a brother; a sister; and three grandchildren.

-- Adam Bernstein