Gilmer, Kathryn Newman

Kathryn Newman Gilmer, of Draper’s Valley, Va., teacher of music to children, and beloved storyteller, died Thursday, September 19, 2013.  Kathryn Newman Gilmer was born in a Presbyterian mission hospital in Korea on March 16, 1926, and cared for at the end of her life at Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC. She died at Care Partners Hospice, Solace Center in Asheville.

Kathryn began teaching first grade in 1946 in Annapolis, MD, rooming with four friends from her graduating class at Randolph Macon Women’s College (now Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA). She ended her career as a music teacher at Beall Elementary School in Rockville, MD, where she was known for her inventive teaching methods and her musical productions, often created jointly with the art teacher. Their bunraku puppet performance of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals was filmed for Maryland Public Television. She also taught on a military base in Tokyo, Japan, and in public schools in Booneville, KY; Morganton, NC; Richmond, VA; Los Angeles, CA; and Dallas, TX.

Kathryn was an innovative children’s choir director, at times as a volunteer for her church as well as in the schools where she taught, and from 1956-1964, she was Director of Children’s Music at First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, TX.

She graduated from Clifton Forge High School in the Alleghany Highlands of Virginia, where she grew up. In addition to her BA in music from Randolph Macon, she earned Master’s Degrees in Education from the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, and late in life studied journalism. She retired to Black Mountain, NC, in 1994 where she pursued her hobbies of bridge and theater, and continued her championship-level croquet playing. She learned croquet at the family vacation cottage on the Cowpasture River, where it was a fiercely competitive pastime of the Gilmer family. She recently moved to Lake Pointe Landing retirement community in Hendersonville, NC.

Among her extended travels was an around-the-world return from Japan to the US in 1967 on a ship, which was halted when the Six-Day War closed the Suez Canal. She left the ship and on her own visited Athens, New Delhi, Bombay, and Paris. Her travel highlights include a visit in 1967 to her birthplace in Mokpo, which she had left when she was 18 months old, an eventful journey to see the Taj Mahal, and the arduous climb of Mt. Fugi, spending the night in a hut on the mountain, as her mother had done on her way to Korea many years before.  In 2002, she joined Global Volunteers and spent three weeks teaching conversational English on the island of Crete. Previously she taught with a similar program in the Czech Republic.

Kathryn enjoyed her extended family, including twenty-one first cousins and their offspring, and her stories were formative for several generations of Gilmers and Newmans. Her nieces and nephews, and all the children who gathered round her, were entranced by tales of her travels and teaching experiences, and thoroughly entertained by her endless repertoire of memorable children’s songs.

Kathryn was born in Mokpo, a port city in South Korea, to missionary parents. Her father William Painter Gilmer was a doctor at the mission hospital and her mother Kathryn Newman, a teacher of missionary children. Her mother died shortly after giving birth and is buried in the Presbyterian Missionary Cemetery in Gwangju, South Korea. Her father returned with his little daughter Kathryn to the US and remarried in 1928. He and his wife, Kathryn’s aunt first and then step-mother, Helen Elizabeth Newman, have two daughters, Kathryn’s sisters, Betty Jean Gilmer Young (Philip) of Lexington, VA, and Blair Gilmer Meeks (Douglas) of Brentwood, TN. Kathryn is loved by her nephews and nieces, Elizabeth Barton of Natick, MA; Gilmer Young of St. Paul, MN, Rebecca Young of Jakarta, Indonesia; Stephen Young of Arlington, VA; Douglas Meeks III of Columbus, OH; and John Meeks of Los Angeles, CA. She has four great-nephews and six great-nieces, and many faithful friends in all the places she has lived.

The funeral and burial will be at Draper’s Valley Presbyterian Church, 2755 Old Baltimore Rd., Draper, VA, 24324. To sign the Guest Book or leave condolences, go to the website of Seagle Funeral Home in Pulaski, VA. http://www.seaglefuneralhome.com  (415 N. Jefferson Ave, Pulaski, VA 24301).

Memorials may be sent to the Stewpot, an outreach ministry founded by First Presbyterian Church, Dallas, http://www.thestewpot.org/donate.asp or by mail to The Stewpot, First Presbyterian Church, 1835 Young St., Dallas, TX, 75201. Or to Heifer International, http://www.heifer.org.