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Vol 46 No. 9
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Kansas’ Largest Newspaper Kim Morrissey has taught thousands to swim, not done yet
August 2025
Printed at Valley Center, KS
Still in the swim
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Heart disease remains leading U.S. killer
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Family Features While medical advances have By Jennifer Lister At any given swimming party on helped people with cardiovascular any given summer day, there’s a good diseases live longer, many of the chance that someone is staying afloat risk factors that lead to these thanks to “Miss Kim.” diseases continue to grow. Kim Morrissey, a 69-year-old Fueled by ongoing increases Wichita retiree who has been teaching in high blood pressure, obesity swimming lessons in Wichita for four and other major risk factors, heart decades, estimates that she’s taught disease continues to kill more at least 5,000 people to swim, some people in the U.S. than any other from different generations of the same cause, according to the American family. Heart Association’s 2025 Heart For the last 33 years, she’s done it Kim Morrissey works with 10-year-old Miles McCulley, who has been in a sparkling swimming pool in the Disease and Stroke Statistics taking lessons with her since he was 3. backyard of her mid-century white Update. In fact, cardiovascular sessions of one-on-one lessons that side hustle for Morrissey, who retired brick home in the Sherwood Glen diseases including heart disease nine years ago from a long career as neighborhood, near 37th Street North happen for 30 minutes at a time, and stroke claim more lives than Mondays through Thursdays. By the an educator, most of it spent teaching and I-235. all forms of cancer and accidental end of each summer, 275 students will physical education in USD 259 For eight weeks every summer, deaths — the No. 2 and No. 3 have come and gone. elementary schools Stanley, Earhart Morrissey, with help from eight other causes of death — combined. The swimming lessons are a little hired instructors, offers two-week See Miss Kim, page 6
See Heart , page 10
now available in local bookstores and online. In an interview, Walling said the book grew out of a research project that started with conversations among older female physicians in Wichita. The women had all entered medical school in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, and were rightly viewed as trailblazers by a younger generation of female doctors, who said things to them like, “You were so brave! It must have been so tough!” The actual consensus of the older physicians was less dramatic. “You know, it was tough, but it was a lot of fun, too,” Walling said. “We all had the feeling our history was being reinterpreted in sort of a negative way. We all had 50-plus years of good careers.” “They didn’t deny there was a lot of prejudice against women,” she
Anne Walling has written about a book about what it was like to be a woman doctor before that was common. See Girls, page 7
‘The Girls in White’ tells story of trailblazing women doctors By Joe Stumpe As a medical student in the late 1960s, Anne Walling was required to read a book called “Boys in White.” It was the standard sociology textbok about medical students, and it completely ignored women. Walling didn’t forget. When it came time to name her own book about the challenges facing women doctors of that era, she couldn’t help but call it “Women in Medicine: Stories from the Girls in White.” “The whole idea was to try to get an honest picture of what it was like to go into medicine and live as a woman doctor at that time,” said Walling, a retired Wichita physician and educator. The picture may be a little different than people expect. Published last month, “The Girls in White” is
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