Philip Kimball, son of Leslie Kimball and Eula Marjorie (Fry) Kimball, died on September 20, 2014, surrounded by family. He was born at home in Piedmont, OK, on July 21, 1941. The family moved to Hilltop Manor in Wichita and then to Derby, KS, where he graduated from high school in 1959. He was Phi Beta Kappa at University of Kansas, a Fulbright Scholar at University of Heidelberg, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, and a Stanford graduate student. He taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, and University of Bonn, Germany. He married Jennifer Brown in Boston, MA, in 1982.
Philip was a storyteller and a poet, capturing the tales of the prairie in two published novels (Harvesting Ballads and Liar’s Moon) and sonnets in The Coal City Review. He supported himself at various jobs, including at a Cincinnati junior high, a Michigan fiberglass factory, as a security guard, at a Wichita soybean crushing mill, in the Boston Public Schools, at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, as a school bus driver, and as a picture framer at Artframes in Lawrence. The job he was most proud of was father of Corinna and Lauren. He became headmaster of Wiseacre Academy, his daughter’s home school.
Survivors include his wife, Jennifer Brown (Lawrence); two daughters, Corinna Kimball-Brown (Portland, OR) and Lauren Kimball-Brown (Quincy, MA); two brothers, Alan (Eugene OR) and Steven with sister-in-law Sally (Belle Plaine, KS); two aunts, Lois Bestgen and Willa Gill with uncle J.Gene, and many nieces and nephews.
The family gives thanks for the perceptive diagnosis and compassionate care by Dr. Matthew Stein and LMH Oncology staff, Drs. Gilroy and Hajdu, LMH staff and Douglas County Visiting Nurses Hospice. Donations may be given to The Grassland Heritage Foundation, Social Service League, or Douglas County Visiting Nurses Hospice.
A memorial gathering was held on October 25, 2014, at the Carnegie Building in Lawrence KS.