Kim Webster
Kim Webster, whose full name was Mary Louise McKim Sibley Webster, passed away peacefully at home on January 28, 2015. Kim was born May 3, 1921 in the old Stanford Hospital (then in San Francisco) and spent her childhood years in San Francisco and summers at her grandfather’s ranch in Napa. Her parents were Dorothea Jefferys Sibley and Arthur Sibley.
Kim moved to Palo Alto to a house on Bryant Street in 1930, and she attended Addison School, the Channing School, and Palo Alto High School. Before her senior year of high school, Miss Elizabeth Gamble (whose house became Gamble House and Gardens) offered her a scholarship to Simmons College if she would spend the next year as an aide to an elderly woman living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kim agreed, and as a consequence she graduated from Cambridge Latin in 1938. She kept a diary of her 1937 drive across the country with her employer, an extraordinary record of a young woman’s adventurous trip.
While at Simmons, Kim met the love of her life and future husband, Sam (Sanford H.) Webster, a West Point cadet, to whom she was married for almost 72 years before his death. They married in June 1941 and moved to Carmel while Sam was stationed at Fort Ord. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sam left for the war. Kim moved in with her sister Amy on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, where she spent the war years working for the Navy. Over the next four years, Kim wrote to Sam faithfully even when he was not able to reply or to let her know where he was or what he was doing. Her letters reflect her ingenuity in figuring out which news stories might provide her glimpses of his life. At the end of the war, Sam was granted a 30-second telephone call to her. He told her to get on the first boat of Army wives out of New York for Germany. Famously, she said to him, “I’m not a fireball like you, Sam!” But she did get on a train for New York almost immediately, landing in Bremerhaven when the rubble of the war was still everywhere. They spent a year in Germany as the Army helped with the rebuilding effort.
The life of an Army wife followed: babies born in Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Fort Belvoir, Virginia, as well as years spent at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, Germany, and in the orbit of the Pentagon in Washington. When Sam retired in 1962, the family moved back to Palo Alto, where they stayed for good. Kim worked for years as a volunteer for the Stanford Art Museum, and she took courses in literature and in art at Foothills College and Stanford. With her initiative, she and Sam travelled all over the world in the 1970s and 80s. In 1997, she and Sam moved into The Hamilton, a retirement residence that they helped to conceive and build.
Kim was a devoted mother, and also a loving grandmother to her four grandchildren: Eva, Hannah, and Stephan Goodwin and Octavio Hingle-Webster. She was pre-deceased by her husband Sam in 2013, by their oldest son, Sanford Jr., in 1969, and by her sisters Dorrit Sibley Merritt and Amy Sibley Tyler. She is survived by their son James Webster (Denise Hingle) and daughter Sarah Webster Goodwin (Neil Hannon). She will be remembered for her generosity, her wicked sense of humor and great sense of fun, her beauty and elegance, her love of art and literature, her knowledge of songs and joy in music, and above all for her devotion to her life’s partner, Sam. The family is deeply grateful to her marvelous caregivers, especially Rosalia Rodriguez and Joy Cinquini; to the dedicated and loving staff of The Hamilton; to Pathways Hospice; and to Sharon Acker, Todd Lewis, and Bruce Gee of Webster Financial. In lieu of flowers, donations may be sent in Kim’s name to the Elizabeth F. Gamble Garden (http:// www.gamblegarden.org/ support-gamble-garden/). The family will hold a private memorial celebration.