Deceased September 14, 2016
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50th Reunion Book Entry
In Memory
Kim died in Scarborough, Maine, Sept. 14, of complications from neurological disease. He was 78.
A native Mainer, he grew up on a 200-year-old family farm in Rumford and was an active member of 4-H before coming to Amherst, where he majored in American studies and was a member of Kappa Theta.
He was not directly involved in athletics, his daughter, Lucy, told me, but his wife of 57 years, Alice, describes him as “a groupie” of the athletic program at Smith. “He came to see all of my games,” she told me. “They loved him. They adopted him.”
At Amherst he was a member of the college band and became its president. His instrument was the baritone, which he played throughout his life.
Following graduation and a summer in France with the Experiment in International Living, Kim married Alice, whom he had described to his parents as “a remarkable girl.”
Intrigued by Africa, Kim went on to earn a master’s degree in African studies at Columbia University and a Ford Foundation Fellowship to Sierra Leone in 1961.
Joining First National City Bank of New York, he began a lifelong career in international banking that led him to posts in Beirut, Puerto Rico, Monrovia (Liberia), Kinshasa (Congo/Zaire), Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) and New York City, as well as 12 years in London as a member of the bank’s Credit Policy Committee. Retirement at 65 did not sit well with Kim, who joined the Bank of Bermuda, spending four years in the colony.
“He started and ended his career in Bermuda shorts,” Lucy told me in an email. “With the British in Sierra Leone in the early ’60s and in Bermuda after his first retirement.”
He is also survived by a son, George; a daughter-in-law; and two granddaughters.
Claude E. Erbsen ’59