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Fifty-three-year-old Helen Gooch Kimball (1849–1920) and the
youngest of her six children, seventeen-year-old Herbert H. Kimball (1886-1968),
survived the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago. Though
sitting in one of the balconies, from which came the most
fatalities, Helen and Herbert's seats were close to an exit, and
they were able to escape. Herbert, uninjured, was taken to the
family's home on Patterson St. Helen's face was burned, and she
was taken to St. Luke's Hospital for a few days. Her name was
included in a widely circulated newspaper list of injured
victims expected to die, but she survived for another seventeen
years, outliving her husband, Penn Townsend Kimball (1839–1912).
She died of diabetes at age seventy-one.
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Helen Gooch immigrated to America with her parents
as a child in 1867 and married Penn Townsend Kimball
in 1873. Penn's family was from Salem,
Massachusetts. In the 1880s, he worked as a railroad
passenger agent for the Lake Shore & Michigan
Southern and the Michigan Central and Lake Shore. By
1910, with three grown children contributing to
expenses, the Kimballs were able to afford a servant
and owned their home.
In the years after the fire
Herbert Kimball served for three months in World War
I then went to work as a sales representative in the
Chicago office of the housewares company his brother
Arthur managed in New Britain, CT - Landers,
Frary & Clark.
Herbert married Laura Franz in 1916. I did not find
evidence of offspring. They settled in Vero Beach,
FL in 1952.
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Three years after the Iroquois fire, one of Helen
and Penn's sons, Arthur Kimball, married and began a
family that would produce two exceptional
grandsons.
Namesake Penn
Townsend Kimball II (1915–2013) rose
to the rank of captain in the Marine Corps during
World War II. He graduated from Princeton as a
Rhodes scholar from Oxford, then worked as a
reporter (including stints with the New
York Times and Time
Magazine).
In 1959 he joined the journalism faculty at Columbia
University.†
Grandson George E. Kimball became a noted quantum
physics scholar, teacher, and author at Princeton
and MIT. For his work with submarine operations
research during World War II, he received the
Presidential Citation of Merit. In 1954 he was
elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* In 1906, the house number was changed from 425 to
1933 Patterson.
† Grandson Penn Townsend Kimball II authored several
books, including
The File in 1983, about his $10 million lawsuit against the U.S.
government. Republican officials in 1945 hadn't
liked his liberal democrat views, resulting in the
state department, CIA, and FBI labeling him and his
wife dangerous radicals. The Feds amassed a file of
half-truths, exaggerations, and falsehoods that
George discovered in 1977 through the Freedom of
Information Act. (The link above cites a few of the
consequences suffered as a result of that file.) A
1984 program on PBS featured Penn's ten-year effort
to clear his name. The battle concluded in 1987 when
the feds agreed to erase his file in exchange for
his dropping the lawsuit.
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