Dixy Lee Ray, Former Head of U.S. Atomic Agency, Dies : Politics: The outspoken ex-governor of Washington state was known for her support of the nuclear industry.

Dixy Lee Ray, former chairwoman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Washington state governor, died Sunday at her home on Fox Island. She was 79.

Miss Ray had suffered from a severe bronchial condition for several months, said KIRO-TV commentator Lou Guzzo, a longtime friend.

Miss Ray showed her mettle early. At 12, she became the youngest girl to climb Mt. Rainier, Washington’s highest peak, located between Seattle and her Tacoma birthplace.

Fifty years later, at 62, she was sworn in as the state’s first woman governor--the only one so far.

“I guess I’m a late bloomer,” the Democrat quipped.

An outspoken supporter of the nuclear industry, she headed the Atomic Energy Commission from 1973-75. She served a single term as governor from 1977 to 1981.

Miss Ray issued her last no-nonsense commentary on nuclear issues Thursday, when she dismissed media reports about past federal radiation experiments as alarmist. She also took Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to task for “blaming all of her predecessors for things she says are terrible.”

“Everybody is exposed to radiation. . . . A little bit more or a little bit less is of no consequence,” Miss Ray said in an interview with the Associated Press.

She also had no patience for environmentalists she considered too strident. She and Guzzo, who was her policy adviser when she was governor, co-authored two books on the subject, “Trashing the Planet” in 1990 and “Environmental Overkill” in 1993.

Never one for artifice, Miss Ray set tongues wagging in 1972, when President Richard Nixon appointed her to the AEC and she startled observers in Washington, D.C., by living in a motor home and taking her dogs to work.

When the AEC was phased out, she was named assistant secretary of state, overseeing the Bureau of Oceans, International Environment and Scientific Affairs.

Miss Ray returned to Washington state in 1975, complaining that former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had given her the cold shoulder.

Her straightforward political style frequently ruffled feathers. When she succeeded Gov. Dan Evans and dismissed virtually his entire Administration, promising “change, change, change,” a public outcry followed. She dismissed that, too.

“No one owns a job,” she said. “From now on, we’ll send them a Kleenex at the time they’re fired if they’re going to be a crybaby.”

She battled with reporters throughout her term, complaining that they were “bitten with the bug of cynicism” and unfair to her.

Her popularity plummeted over the four years, and she failed to win her party’s nomination for reelection in 1980. She blamed the media for her defeat.

Her candor while in office was considered refreshing by many, and her fiscally conservative approach to government had supporters. A Boeing Co. lobbyist called her “the best friend business ever had.”

In 1986, Miss Ray was named a director of American Ecology Corp., a toxic waste management firm based in Agoura Hills. Ironically, while governor she had shut down one of the company’s low-level nuclear waste dumps in Washington state.

She did so, she later told The Times, because “the people who generate the waste weren’t packaging it properly.” But the company itself, she said, was not to blame.

In her later years, Miss Ray also served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

A short, chunky woman with cropped hair and tailored clothes, Miss Ray was born Sept. 3, 1914, in Tacoma, one of five girls. Christened Margaret, she was called Dick as a child--short for “that little Dickens.” She renamed herself after a favorite region and a Civil War general.

Miss Ray never married.

She earned her undergraduate degree at Mills College and a doctorate in zoology at Stanford University.

Before entering public life, she was an associate professor of zoology at the University of Washington for 27 years and director of the Pacific Science Center for nine years.