Legacies Project Oral History: Dick Kimball

Dick Kimball was born in 1935 in Rochester, Minnesota. He was the Minnesota high school diving champion four years in a row, and he also excelled in gymnastics, trampoline, and cheerleading. At the University of Michigan, he was the NCAA springboard champion in 1957, and in 1963 he was the Professional World Diving champion. Kimball coached the University of Michigan diving team for 43 years, and several U.S. Olympic diving teams.

Polio in Ann Arbor

Kids showing off their vaccine marks People were so desperate to save their children from the dreaded disease of polio, that when the first vaccines were sent to Ann Arbor in 1955, they were stored at the police department in a refrigerator, locked with a chain around it. Just three weeks previously, on April 12, Dr. Thomas Francis of the U-M’s School of Public Health had made the momentous announcement that the vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk, which used killed polio viruses to give immunity, was “safe, effective and potent.”

“Vaccine will end polio as a major health threat,” was the headline in the April 12, 1955 Ann Arbor News, shortly after Francis gave his report at Rackham Auditorium. The announcement was made in Ann Arbor because of the key role the University of Michigan had played in the vaccine’s development. Francis, who had earlier developed a flu vaccine, joined U-M’s Public Health Department in 1941, followed the next year by Salk, who Francis had mentored at New York University. Salk left in 1947 for a job at the University of Pittsburgh, where he developed the polio vaccine using tools he had learned from Francis.