Mr. Kimmel had the ability to work on a project and stay on it until it was completed.
He didn't ever give up and whenever he got going on a project, that's all he thought about.
He truly was a genius and there's so many subjects he was brilliant
on and was very willing to share knowledge about how stuff worked.
He shared it on a level that everybody could understand. He didn't try and
overpower you. I mean, he just would explain how something would work.
If you got him talking about something he was interested in,
then he became very animated. He loved to talk about politics or
theology or engineering or photography or whatever he happened to be into.
While Garman was in college getting an advanced degree in petroleum engineering,
he worked part-time for Black, Sivalls & Bryson, and when he finished his degree,
he went to work for them full-time. Mr. Smith, who was then gonna be in charge,
proposed that they moved the entire engineering department to Kansas City.
Most of them were located in Oklahoma City at that time. It got bad enough that, Smith fired Raymond
and two months later I quit. And we thought, well, we'd made Black Sivalls & Bryson
money in the past, maybe we could, you know, do something on our own.
We used the
first syllable of his name and the first syllable of my name, incorporated it as Kimray.
While I was in Stillwater going to college, I would come down on in the summer and I'd work
with Mr. Kimmell. He had several projects he wanted done. He asked me if I would come to
work for Kimray and I was elated because at that time they had a rule against
employee's family working for Kimray and they changed the rule so I could go to work there.
When I joined Kimray in 1971, I was the 64th employee at Kimray and about the
time I became president we had about 600 employees. And that was in 2005.
I think my father was able to grow the company simply because he was willing and able to pay
attention to some of the details and I think that made them a really good team because Garman
continued to focus on product development and on vision, on leading the company.
More from the visionary standpoint, the only products we had were products he designed.
Most engineers, if they're designing things, they have a scratch pad and
they keep drawing things. Mr. Kimmell did all his design work in his mind.
And whenever he finally finished the design, he would sit down at his breakfast room table
and in one evening, all the drawings would be made to make a a product.
The products that we started with that we still make today,
70 years after Garman introduced a piloted pressure regulator into the industry,
has been virtually unchanged for 70 years and it is still the standard.
Whatever one needed, Garman had it in his shop and he had everything labeled so he could go right
to it and he didn't say, "oh, I have to look for it." He always knew where everything was.
Whenever he was on a project or a design project,
I would go over to his house at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon
and he would work until sometimes 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. You'd go to bed, you get up and
go to go to work and do your regular job, then you come back at 3:00 or 4:00 and work with him again.
He lit up at night and that's when the juices started flowing and the
things got drawn and then he went out in the shop and built them.
If he came over for dinner, he would come for dinner and
come and go home, because he had things to do out in the shop.
If you wanted to work with Garman
it usually meant working after dinner late at night in his shop. And if you were still
working with him at midnight, we'd come inside and have a dish of ice cream and a cookie.
A lot of products were engineered
at the Kimmell house in the kitchen, and a lot of times over a bowl of ice cream in those cool
little stainless steel bowls and we all liked ice cream. It was a nice little break, get a little
snack and some ice cream and cookies and then go on with whatever project we were working on
Growing up, I heard Garman say more times than I can count that we actually owed something to
the community where we lived and worked. That because we were able to work and thrive and make
a living in the community that it was up to us to, to put back, to give back to that community.
He was very involved in, in the music industry in Oklahoma. Worked with some of the early
people that that put recording studios in town and he recorded the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra
for 35 years and edited those tapes for replay on radio so that people who couldn't afford to
go to the symphony could listen to the symphony a week later on a Sunday afternoon on public radio
so they could hear those same pieces and be exposed to that music and that culture.
And he did a lot of recording for a lot of other people also, either in his den,
which was almost like a recording studio in itself. He built his own audio console
because it was cleaner, lower noise, better frequency response than any of
the commercial stuff that was made. This is a tiny, mono to stereo or stereo to mono mixer.
He built his own tape machines. He built his own turntable. He built
his own television audio tuner, he made all his own circuit boards for all the
electronic gadgets he made. And there was also a line of electronic products that
Garman and another guy made from power amplifiers and some pre amplifiers.
Garman was so talented that if you needed something, he'd make it for you. He would solve
all kinds of problems and he could repair, you know, a lamp and it would be prettier and better
than before. I mean, just almost anything you brought him, he would improve upon it.
Garmin was actually involved in the medical community, was a good friend of many doctors,
and they would come to him for solutions to problems and that led to him being involved
developing the equipment necessary for open heart surgery. Later on developing the Vena Cava filter.
We finally wound up building them a prototype
open heart machine that had a lot of automatic features about it. And along with it came the
necessity for catching clots that developed the lower extremities when there's injury.
Dr. Greenfield came to him and said we have this blood clot and it's gonna, and if it breaks loose,
we need to keep it from going to the heart and the lungs. But we can't block the blood
vein or the vessel. We can't keep the blood from flowing through the vessel.
So Garmin took the cone filter idea from the oil field and adapted it and,
literally built a cone filter that goes in somebody's vein.
A woman came into my office one afternoon and wanted to see me,
and she introduced herself and said, I just wanted to thank you. And I said, uh, uh, I don't think I
even know you. And she says, well, I want to thank you anyway because you saved my life.
He helped an awful lot of people in a lot of different ways to help make
their lives better or help solve a problem for somebody. I mean,
the stuff he did behind this scenes to help people that we'll never know who all they were.
Garman gave away far more of the money that he made and the wealth that he had in his
lifetime than he ever spent on himself or his family. And he did it to help people,
oftentimes people maybe who didn't even have a great chance of making it,
but Garman believed in them and he thought they should have a chance
to try their idea or to do their mission work or whatever it was he was supporting.
Well, if he could do something to help somebody,
he was always so willing to do it. I think that the 12 points of the Scout law would
probably describe Garman if you had to use words: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly,
courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
Garman taught Sunday school and he taught Sunday school for I think 65 years. Whenever you set in
his class, you were gonna learn things. You didn't sit there and have a discussion about
small things. That probably molded my view of the Bible and my view of God as much as anything did.
Probably the finest Christian man I've ever met,
not probably Garman Kimmell is the finest Christian man I've ever met.
I remember him as one of the most unusual, most brilliant young men I had ever met.
He was always looking to do what other people said couldn't be done,
and he was pretty successful at it.