James P. "Jim" Storer '49 H'85

James P. “Jim” Storer '49 H'85 died on February 21, 2012, of complications relating to pneumonia and an infection. The Gates Mills, Ohio, resident was eighty-five.

Jim was a history major. He joined Delta Phi and Middle Kenyon Association.

He was a broadcasting executive and philanthropist who shaped opportunities at Kenyon in areas ranging from theater and music to history and financial aid. Jim had served as a Kenyon trustee from 1979 to 1991 and as an emeritus trustee since then. He chaired the 1985-89 “Campaign for Kenyon,” the College's first comprehensive campaign. His own generosity is reflected in the buildings and programs that bear his name: Storer Hall, home of the Music Department; the James P. Storer Professorship in Asian History, and the accompanying Storer Lecture Series; and the Storer Scholarships, which have benefited dozens of academically talented students over the past fifteen years.

“Jim Storer was a truly dedicated son of Kenyon, who was generous to the College in every way throughout his life,” said President S. Georgia Nugent. Nugent noted that Jim often corresponded with the students who received his scholarships and would visit campus to meet them. “Though blinded at a young age, Jim Storer was in many ways a man of great vision. His passing is a sad loss to Kenyon.”

Douglas L. Givens, who worked closely with Jim as vice president for development from 1980 to 2000, said, “Jim was one of the first alumni I met when I arrived here in the early seventies. What struck me, and what continued to strike me for more than forty years, was his abiding love of this place. There may have been a few people who equaled that love; nobody ever surpassed it. Jim didn't see Kenyon as a stop on the road to somewhere else. This was his destination.”

Jim “was interested in everything” at the College, added Givens. He gave a major gift to help build the Bolton Theater in 1978. In the early 1980s, he served as a trustee of the Kenyon Festival Theater, the professional summer theater on campus. In addition, he donated a good deal of equipment to WKCO, the College radio station, from Storer Broadcasting, the company founded by his father, George B. Storer.

Jim's $1 million gift in 1985 established Kenyon's first endowed faculty chair, the Storer Professorship. In 1990, he made another gift to establish the lecture series, which has brought internationally known scholars and artists to campus. Both the professorship and the lecture series have been crucial resources for the Asian Studies Program.

Storer Hall, with its array of modern facilities for music, was named for Jim after he made a $2 million challenge grant in 1998 to support the music program during the “Claiming Our Place” campaign. The Storer Scholarships, which go to high-achieving students, originated in 1995. Since 2008, the scholarships—benefiting at least five students every year—have been endowed by the George B. Storer Foundation.

“He was enormously loyal to Kenyon and deeply interested in whatever was going on,” said Philip Jordan Jr., College president from 1975-95. “Whenever there was a need that captured his imagination, he was generous in supporting it.”

Cornelia Ireland Hallinan '76 H'91, a former Board of Trustees chair and a trustee from 1978 to 2002, described Jim as “a kind and helpful mentor” who displayed gifted leadership on the board. “He was very smart and very quick to cut to what the real issues were, the important issues, and he was able to articulate them better than anyone in the room.”

Jim grew up in Detroit and spent a year at Swarthmore College before coming to Kenyon. He later attended Harvard Law School for a year and then joined the family broadcasting business. He focused his career on radio, working in various executive capacities in Miami, Florida; New York City; Philadelphia; and Cleveland, Ohio. He retired from the Storer Broadcasting Company as vice president in 1975 and as director in 1981.

He had been blinded at the age of six, when a tear-gas gun in a Detroit rubbish pile accidentally went off. “But he was hardly impaired by his sight deficiency,” said Jordan. “He just didn't hold back.”
Jim led a strikingly active life. He played both golf and the piano, taking a particular interest in jazz. He traveled extensively, sometimes on behalf of Kenyon. He also did graduate work, primarily in history, at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Case Western University, and the University of North Carolina.

“He had a delightful sense of humor,” said Givens, “and a very, very sharp mind.” Once, Givens recalled, Jim led a “Campaign for Kenyon” meeting in New York, meticulously and masterfully going through the agenda with the aid of Braille documents in a three-ring binder. Only afterwards did he tell Givens that he had mistakenly picked up the wrong binder—one containing a Braille version of the day's New York Times. He knew the Kenyon material so well that he could pretend to have it at his fingertips, when it was actually the newspaper in his book.

Kenyon was just one of many causes for which Jim provided leadership and generous gifts. He had been a trustee of the Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Blossom Music Center and the Cleveland Orchestra, and the American Foundation for the Blind, among other organizations. Other causes included the Cleveland Sight Center, Case Western Reserve University, and Lakeland Community College, near Cleveland.

Conservation was a particular interest, and Jim chaired Grand River Partners, an organization dedicated to protecting land in the Grand River Watershed in northeastern Ohio. He maintained a nature preserve on a 118-acre estate, called Walden II, in the area.

Jim was survived by Delores (“DeDe”), his wife of twenty-five years, and a brother, Robert Storer.