Dr. James E. Kent

Dr. James E. Kent, born in Chicago on July 9, 1920, peacefully died at home surrounded by his family at age 99 on October 24, 2019, just months after the passing of his beloved wife of 76 years, Renée. Theirs was a love story that was deep and one in a million.

Jim spent his childhood in Chicago while summers were spent in the country with his grandparents. It was there that he met a country doctor who visited patients in his horse drawn buggy. From then on, Jim knew he wanted to be a doctor and never wavered.

At 17, Jim enrolled at the University of Illinois and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. While there, he played intercollegiate polo for the last year of the horse-drawn cavalry and was quite the horseman! Jim then was admitted to Stanford Medical school at the end of his jr. year at U of I in 1940. He loved California and it was at Stanford where he met the love of his life, Renée. They married in 1943 at The St. Francis Hotel.

After graduating medical school, Jim was inducted into the Navy Medical Corps and served on the atoll of Truk in the South Pacific where he became senior medical officer of the Caroline Islands. During his time on Truk, Renée gave birth to their first daughter, Simone. After the end of World War II, Jim and Renée moved to Southern California where Jim opened his medical practice in Internal Medicine and became a Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians. In 1950, he was recalled to active duty during the Korean War and served at the US Naval Hospital in Corona, Ca. His final sea duty was aboard the guided missile test ship, The Norton Sound. Upon discharge, Jim and Renée made the best decision of their lives by relocating their family and his practice to San Francisco where he became a member of the faculty and opened his own medical practice at Stanford Hospital in San Francisco. There he cared for many patients and started the first pulmonary lab at Stanford Hospital. Jim loved practicing medicine and making a difference in peoples lives. During that time, Jim and Renée had two more daughters, Lisa and Nina.

Unfortunately in 1963, Jim suffered his first heart attack at the age of 42 and another one 6 months later. Following the second heart attack, he was forced to retire from active practice but was able to keep his license and worked as a consultant. After his retirement, Jim immersed himself in family life. His health improved and he was able to resume normal activities and even started an exercise class for cardiac patients at USF in the late sixties.

From then on, he and his beloved Renée traveled, often to England, as Jim was quite an Anglophile. The whole family would spend summers at Lido Isle in Newport Beach with their close friends Mickey and Philip Meltzer. He often spent Sundays at their other close friends Art and Peg Jampolsky’s home in Mill Valley where they had built “Kent’s Corner” for him to lie in the sun and get away from the kids!

Jim was known to his friends and family as one of the most kind and honorable person they ever knew. A devoted family man whose love for his wife and 3 daughters knew no bounds. Jim is so missed but has left a lifetime of memories for us all to cherish.