4 minute read
Dan Kirby
PUBLIC SERVICE UPLIFTING ART AND COMMUNITY
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1946 • CATEGORY
BUSINESS • HOMETOWN
SIOUX FALLS, SD • NOMINATED BY
JENNIFER KIRBY Dan was born in Sioux Falls, among the first of the baby boomers and the oldest of five boys raised by Joe and Dona Kirby. He was among the 945 members of the last class to graduate from Washington High School before the opening of the "new" Lincoln High.
Dan developed an early interest in politics and served as chair of the SD Teenage Republicans. His support of free enterprise and individual liberty led him to become active early in the Greater Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce where, as Chairman, he kicked off the 1983 effort to market the city under the theme of "Sioux Falls-A Good Thing Going". Dan subsequently served as chair of the SD Chamber of Commerce and Industry and spent six years on the board of the US Chamber of Commerce.
Dan graduated in political science from Stanford and got his law degree at UC Berkeley. While in college, he met Arlene Wagner on a blind date. Fortuitously, this California native had spent many years visiting her dad’s family in Wagner, South Dakota. They were married in Sacramento after he finished law school and she spent three years as an international flight attendant. Their son Douglas lives in Longmont, CO with his wife Salihah and daughters Amadine and Sagan. Daughter Sharon lives in Fairfax, CA with her husband Shem and sons Thomas and Gabriel.
After practicing corporate law in San Diego for three years, Dan spent his career as Executive VP and General Counsel of Western Surety Company, a fourthgeneration family business founded by his great grandfather, Joe Kirby (SDHOF class of 1993). Dan traveled widely in the US promoting the surety industry. As the senior member of his generation, he was in charge
of the project whereby four owners/ executives bought out 124 other shareholders, most of whom were uninvolved in the business. Over an occasionally contentious period of two years, he was able to build a unanimous consensus that the transaction was a win-win for all parties.
In the public sphere, Dan's most significant project began innocently enough as he was walking out of Downtown Rotary in August of 1989. He was met at the door by the Mayor and Superintendent of Schools, who asked him to chair a "short study " of whether the abandoned Washington High School building could serve as a new performing arts center. Fifteen months of 7:30 a.m. meetings and a quarter-million dollars later, Dan's committee reported that the old building could indeed be repurposed by peeling back the roof over its center portion and dropping in a state of the art performance center.
Concurrently, the local arts community proposed that the existing Civic Fine Arts Center relocate to one side of the building and that a new science/discovery museum be built on the other side.
This is where Dan's history of community involvement positioned him uniquely to negotiate between the competing interests of the business community and the arts organizations. By virtue of already having earned the trust of each group, Dan was able to keep the project in motion right through the grand opening featuring the New York Philharmonic one weekend and Yo-Yo Ma the next, almost exactly ten years after having been cornered by the Mayor and Superintendent. Along the way, Dan chaired the election campaign that (barely) approved the project in a huge turnout, and the capital campaign that raised $13.5 million in non-property tax funds, to which he and Arlene made the largest lead gift. Finally, Dan served on several implementation committees that helped get the project built, and served one term on its management board before retiring to take a breath.
Dan was recruited to the board of Sioux Valley Hospital in the early 1990s and served as chair when it evolved in 1996 to an integrated health care delivery system. In that role, he hired Kelby Krabbenhoft (SDHOF class of 2017) who served as a visionary, transformational CEO of Sanford Health which is now the largest rural health care system in America.
Arlene and Dan are now blessed to be able to spend several months a year in the California desert. Dan played competitive golf as a youngster but now enjoys golf socially. He has shot his age twice but reports that after a certain point, getting older does not necessarily make that easier.
Throughout his professional and community efforts, Dan's philosophy has always been to leave the place better than he found it.
