Lindsay Jack Kirkham MD

Kirkham was born Sept. 11, 1923 to Lindsay Jack Kirkham Sr. and Abigail Lillis Kirkham. He spent his childhood in the greater Kansas City area and was a 1940 graduate of William Chrisman High School in Independence, Mo.

He completed pre-medical studies at the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Kansas. He enlisted in the Navy in 1942 but remained on inactive duty while pursuing medical training in an accelerated program for the Navy. In 1946, he graduated from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., only six years after leaving high school, and completed an internship at Harper Hospital, Detroit, Mich.

He immediately went on active status as a lieutenant and served as medical officer aboard the U.S.S. George Clymer. While the ship was stationed in the East China Sea off the coast of China, he was responsible for preventative medicine for more than 3,000 naval and marine personnel in the area. After his discharge in 1949, he continued in the Navy Reserve until 1954.

In 1949, he returned to Detroit to serve a residency in internal medicine at Harper Hospital and the Veterans Administration Hospital. While there, he met Mary Ann Reynolds of Silver Spring, Md., on a blind date in Toledo, Ohio, where she was a social worker. They married in 1952.

Soon after the wedding, he joined a medical partnership in Mason City, Iowa, and practiced there until 1976. During these years he and Mary Ann raised seven children.

Unable to sit idle, Kirkham threw himself into hobbies, including woodworking and electronics, in the basement of the family home. He was granted patent 3,343,528 for an electrocardiographic switching system that improved the mobility of EKG machines.

He designed and built many pieces of furniture and installed an intercom system for the family's large house. He converted a retired school bus into a camper, which the family took on many vacations. In the 1970s, he mastered sailing and spent many hours at this beloved sport in Clear Lake, Iowa and in St. Petersburg, Florida.

A lifelong Republican, he became a lifetime member of the NAACP and a great admirer of Martin Luther King Jr. after being moved by images of the civil rights struggle in the media in the 1960s.

From 1977 through 1980, he worked as an examining physician for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, living with Mary Ann and their youngest child, Douglas, for short periods in Houston, Boston, New York City, Racine, Wis., Truman, Ark., Rock Hill, S.C., and Waianae, Hawaii. In 1980, they moved to Honolulu, where Kirkham earned a master's degree in public health from the University of Hawaii and went on to work for the State of Hawaii as chief of Hospital and Medical Facilities and of the Research and Statistics Division.

After retiring to Sun City West, Arizona in 1988, the couple moved to Lynnwood, Wash., in the late 1990s to be close to grandchildren. There, Kirkham volunteered at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, where he taught woodworking, donated tools and supplies, and built custom furniture to be auctioned at the annual fund-raising gala. He also built many award-winning pieces of furniture which he gave to friends and relatives.

In his seventies, he began researching historical rates of heart disease in the United States, and in 1999, published a book on his findings, "The epidemiologic characteristics of a century of end stage atherosclerotic deaths: ischemic heart disease and cerebral thrombosis: a surprise, a disappointment, a new etiologic concept."

He is survived by his wife, Mary Ann of Bellevue, Wash.; children, Clifford of Seattle, Wash.; William of Elizabeth, N.J.; Richard of Bellevue, Wash.; Maura Taggart of Madison, Wis.; Jeffrey of Seattle, Wash.; Christine (Tina) of Helena, Mt.; and Douglas of Bothell, Wash.; son in-law Timothy Taggart; daughter in-law Eileen Garry Kirkham; and five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the NAACP, the Spina Bifida Association or Opportunity Village of Clear Lake, Iowa. Messages of condolence can be made at the online guestbook at www.dignitymemorial.com by clicking on Obituaries at top center, and then typing Kirkham in the Last Name box.

A burial service will be at 11 a.m. Sept. 20, 2016 at Purdy and Walters at Floral Hills, 409 Filbert Road, Lynnwood, Wash.