With the death of Dr. William “Bill” Kirby, I made a decision to refrain from further comment. If you are a reader from outside Northern California, Dr. Kirby was killed in a plane crash near the Auburn Arifield last week. I deliberately did not post about it on social media until the family was notified – and in a long standing tradition on Right on Daily when a subject of the blog dies we refrain from posting further information about the deceased except to provide historical context for other more current posts. (such as referring to the late Sam Annestad or Dick Dickerson)
The saddest thing to me is the fact that Bill Kirby did not know the Lord and did not want to know the Lord. Everything else seems rather trivial compared to that.
In order to close the loop on a couple Auburn Stories, I will be contacting both Maki and Berlant next week to ask more questions.
America wasn’t introduced to Dr. Bill Kirby until his final days, when the mayor of a conservative small town smeared President Donald Trump and his supporters on social media.
Kirby’s incendiary outbursts made national headlines, but at home in Auburn those will just be footnotes in an abundant life story that ended with a fiery plane crash Saturday in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The Placer County Coroner’s Office confirmed Monday that Kirby, 72, died when his single-engine Cessna crashed shortly after takeoff near Auburn Municipal Airport. A second occupant of the plane suffered undisclosed injuries. The Placer County Sheriff’s Office and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash, which occurred two days before Kirby planned to resign mayoral duties due to public backlash over the social media controversy.
“I’ve known Bill since I was a kid in Little League,” said Auburn City Councilman Daniel Berlant, who is expected to become the city’s next mayor. “He’s always been a very strong-willed person, but a person who still leaves this legacy of all this involvement in Auburn that betters our community. It’s such a sad thing to think that this last week, as much as I disagree and don’t believe in what he said — that really shouldn’t be his legacy.”
Kirby spent three decades in Auburn, crafting a distinguished reputation in a community of about 14,000 people. He was a respected physician, a community benefactor, an eager volunteer, an avid lover of the arts and the father of two children, daughter Sarah Kirby-Gonzalez and son James Kirby.
“This is going to be hard,” Kirby-Gonzalez said Monday in a tearful telephone interview, “but let me tell you about my dad.”
Kirby lived in Auburn for 30 years. He was a practicing urologist and surgeon who saved lives with his scalpel, removing tumors in bladder-cancer patients. He was chairman of the Tumor Board at Sutter Auburn Faith Hospital, where he previously served as chief of medical staff.
Kirby was the former chief of the Surgery Department at Roseville Community Hospital and the first chairman of the Institutional Review (Cancer) Committee at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital. He spent 10 years on each of the respective boards at Roseville Community and Sutter Auburn Faith.
Kirby was president of Auburn Little League, director of the Auburn Area Recreation and Parks District and a member of the Auburn Rotary Club. He was a physician for the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run. And he volunteered with Flying Doctors of America, which has provided medical care to more than 300,000 people in poor parts of the world, according to its website.
Kirby-Gonzalez noted her father was an extremely experienced pilot who owned a number of Cessna airplanes since she was a young girl.
Kirby was recently inducted into the athletics Hall of Fame at Placer High School, where he provided free physicals to students for 30 years and volunteered as an on-field physician during sporting events.
“All my life, I had to run to keep up with this man,” Kirby-Gonzalez said. “I remember as a little girl, running down the hospital hallways on Saturdays as he saw patients, and he loved them. He absolutely loved serving as a doctor. This was a doctor who made house calls — and people would come to our house. Just last week, he had friends coming to see him because they were worried about medical issues.”
MAYOR SUPPORTED ARTS, EDUCATION
Kirby-Gonzalez also remembers how much her father loved the theater. He was a regular in the front row for Sacramento’s Broadway at Music Circus for at least 35 years, she said.
“He was a season-ticket holder and he would always tell me, ‘When I die, you keep these tickets because they’re the best seats in the house and it took me 30 years to get them,’” Kirby-Gonzalez said. “He would always take me to those shows and he was taking his granddaughters now. He loved the arts and he was so proud to support them.”
City Councilwoman Sandy Amara said Kirby supported art and education in Auburn as well.
“I think not many people know he contributed a lot of money to putting up the salmon statue in town that’s the pride and joy of Auburn now,” Amara said.
Kirby-Gonzalez said her father also funded a downtown mural.
Kirby was married three times. Both of his children attended Placer High School and Sierra College. His son is a lawyer in Los Angeles who recently graduated from Loyola Marymount University. His daughter teaches fifth grade at Mather Heights Elementary School in Rancho Cordova.
“He would come in to talk to my students,” Kirby-Gonzalez said. “That was the only day he wore that white robe.”
CONGRESSIONAL RUN AND CONTROVERSY
Many of Kirby’s patients used to say he should run for Congress. So he did, opposing U.S. Rep John Doolittle (Roseville) for the 4th District Republican congressional nomination in a March 2002 primary.
Kirby told the Sierra Sun he was running as a “Teddy Roosevelt Republican” with more moderate positions than Doolittle. Even then, Kirby’s mixed political views made him difficult to define. At the time, the Sun wrote: “Doolittle is pro-life, conservative on environmental issues and a vocal supporter of the controversial Auburn Dam, while Kirby is pro-choice, against the Auburn Dam and takes a gentler line on environmental issues.”
Doolittle said Kirby was “almost a liberal democrat.” Kirby said Doolittle was a “right-wing extremist.”
Kirby was endorsed by The Sacramento Bee, which concluded he “has the smarts and confidence a newcomer needs.”
Doolittle defeated Kirby in a landslide and went on to trounce Mark Norberg in the general election. Kirby continued his work in Auburn, where the dam project was never completed.
Kirby spent nearly 12 years over three terms on the City Council, but he didn’t gain national notoriety until April 5 when he reposted an internet meme likening Trump voters to the Ku Klux Klan. An image of hooded KKK members was accompanied by the words: “Good news for Trump supporters is that most of them already have masks,” a reference to increasing state and federal recommendations regarding the use of face coverings to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Kirby shared the image to a personal Facebook page, commenting that the meme was: “True.” That triggered several heated exchanges between Kirby and Facebook users, some of whom, including Councilwoman Cheryl Maki, called the mayor’s remarks hate speech.
Kirby announced April 13 he would “hand the gavel” to Berlant at the April 27 City Council meeting, something he planned to do later in the year due to a planned surgical procedure, Berlant said. The City Council had scheduled a vote for Monday to transfer mayoral duties, but the emergency session was canceled in the wake of Kirby’s death.
Kirby was known to be opinionated and sometimes aggressive in defending his positions, but Berlant noted that he often deferred to more knowledgeable colleagues in areas of their expertise. Kirby was not known for the kind of rhetoric he demonstrated on social media in recent weeks. Berlant said extreme views are out of place in Auburn’s relatively apolitical political environment.
“Most people in Auburn don’t know each other as Republicans or Democrats,” he said. “If you need to have a pothole repaired or get a fast police response, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat. Those kinds of issues don’t really have a place in our style of city government.”
Kirby died less than two weeks after posting the KKK meme, a story reported by ABC News, Fox News, the New York Times, Newsweek, the U.K. Daily Mail and others.
‘HIS ACTIONS SPOKE LOUDER THAN WORDS’
Kirby is survived by his son and daughter, son-in-law Adam Gonzalez and grandchildren Addison and Chloe Gonzalez.
Kirby-Gonzalez said her father dressed up as Santa Claus each year for her two young daughters, and played the part convincingly.
“His actions spoke louder than his words,” Amara said. “He was a person who administered to the community as a doctor, day and night. He was always stepping up and becoming involved in many capacities throughout our community.
“I think the consensus is that we want to focus on all the positives. That’s why I said his actions spoke louder than his words. There were words and things were said back and forth, but he was a man of action and I think that’s going to be his legacy.”