Lester Kimber, Hall of Famer, Dies at 54

By MARK CARTNER

As a boy growing up in the little town of East Bend in Yadkin County, Lester Kimber dreamed of playing big league baseball – but he never made it past the outfield of the semi-pro Elkin Blanketeers.

Instead, he migrated across the Yadkin River to Winston-Salem, where he settled on welding as a career and golf as a passion.

On October 12, the Triad golf community lost one its best players and persons when Lester Kimber succumbed to complications arising from a stroke suffered two weeks prior. 

Kimber was 54. 

His wife, Dianne, stated that the stroke came as a surprise, that her husband had been in good health and following doctors orders since a heart attack a couple years ago.

Longtime friend and golfing buddy, Ron Morgan said respectfully, “A bunch of us are going to miss him.”

Lester Kimber’s introduction to golf was unexpected.  He received a set of starter clubs on a Father’s Day in the early ‘70s and quickly learned the game that, on the surface, was about as foreign as could be for a quiet black man from rural Yadkin County.

Kimber won his first tournament at the East Bend Jaycees event in 1976 – and kept on winning.  When he won the Sarah Marsh tournament at Winston Lake this past April, it was the 65th victory of his career. 

Most of those 65 wins were local.  

He won four Forsyth Invitationals, the first coming in 1979 and the others in ’80, ’85 and ’87.  In the 2001 Forsyth, recently recovered from knee-replacement surgery, he tied for second at the age of 53.

“There for a while, from about ’77 to ’88, we won nearly every tournament we played in (as partners),” said Morgan who first met Kimber on the golf course 30 years ago and who himself is a three-time winner of the Forsyth Invitational. 

“But I think we enjoyed buttin’ heads on the golf course as much as we liked playing together,” Morgan added with a laugh.

Perhaps Kimber’s greatest honor however was his induction in July of 2001 into the National Black Golf Hall of Fame.  It was a remarkable feat considering he spent most of his golfing life inside the confines of the Triad, playing golf on the traditional Forsyth County public standbys like Reynolds Park, Winston-Lake, Tanglewood and Grandview.

 Kimber’s final tournament appearance came Sept. 21-22 at the Reidsville Jaycee. He shot 69-67 and finished tied for fourth. He had won the event the previous two years. 

Despite his accomplishments on the course, it will be Kimber’s manner off it that many will remember most.

“I admired his honesty,” Morgan says. “There was nothing phony about him…Lester was Lester.  I knew if I needed something I could call Lester and there’d be no ifs, or whys, or how comes … just, ‘what can I do?’, ‘where do you need me?’, and ‘when do you need me?’

“You just don’t have many friends like that.”

In addition to his wife, Diane Coles Kimber, survivors are a daughter, Wytonia “Toni” Kimber of Elkin; a son, Kevin Kimber; his father, Lester Boyd Kimber Sr. of East Bend; three brothers, Dewayne Kimber and Kenneth Kimber of Winston-Salem and J.C. Martin of East Bend; four sisters, Jackie (Robin) Speaks and Darlene Smyre of East Bend, A. Renee Kimber of Winston-Salem and Gertrude Martin of Union Grove; three stepchildren, Michelle (Tracy) Howell, Rickie Holbrook and Anthony Holbrook of North Wilkesboro; two granddaughters and five stepgrandchildren.