Elizabeth Walker Kilgore
Friday, May 9, 2008
Elizabeth Walker Kilgore, 88, who founded the Literacy Council of Montgomery County, died of cancer May 5 at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville. Mrs. Kilgore organized the council in 1963 and served as its president for seven years. She helped establish National Literacy Day nationwide.
She was also active in the Chevy Chase United Methodist Church, singing in the choir, and leading Bible studies and lay witness missions. After moving to Asbury Methodist Village in 1991, she formed the Asbury Literacy Program and sang in the Vesper Choir.
She was born in Moberly, Mo., moved to Washington as a child and graduated from  Eastern High School in 1937. She graduated from Cottey College in Nevada, Mo., and returned to Washington to work for the Coast Guard from 1939 to 1949.
She was a member of the Goshen Chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the PEO, a philanthropic education organization.
She was named the Greater Silver Spring Volunteer of the Year in 1994.
Her husband of 46 years, George A. Kilgore, died in 1993.
Survivors include two children, Sharon Kilgore Featherstone of Belmopan, Belize, and Mark Kilgore of Pensacola, Fla.; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
-- Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer        Sunday, May 18, 2008
She Felt Called to Do Good Work
Literacy Council She Founded Has Helped Thousands
The year was 1963. Beth Kilgore, attending her church women's group, heard about a Methodist missionary who was teaching thousands of illiterate people to read. Something about Frank Laubach's phonics-based, each-one-teach-one method          sparked her imagination. She, too, was Methodist and active in Bible studies and lay missions; just as important, she was an organizer.
She called a powerful group together in her living room: representatives of various churches; community leaders, including         members of the NAACP; and experts in teaching. The Literacy Council of Montgomery County was born that day.
Over the past 45 years, the council has trained 8,000 volunteers who have taught an estimated 12,000 people to read. Because Kilgore was a practical woman, she also helped people study for driver's license exams and citizenship tests.
I don't think that she was really aware of what the organization that she founded has become," said Pam Saussy, the council's executive director. "She was one of those quiet soldiers who had a huge impact in a rather unassuming way."
Kilgore, who died of cancer May 5 at age 88 at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Rockville, was president of the council for seven years, then stepped aside to let others develop the group. But she always stayed involved, and after she and her husband moved to Asbury Methodist  Village in 1991, she saw another opportunity.
The retirement home was full of active, educated and engaged people who relied upon a largely immigrant workforce to prepare their communal meals, do the laundry and maintain the property. Although they were fluent in their native languages, speaking and reading English flummoxed them.
Clearly, an affiliate of the literacy council was needed there.
"Her gift was administration, not teaching . . . until later in life, when she moved to Asbury," said her daughter, Sharon Kilgore      Featherstone. Sitting with the workers on their lunch breaks or before their shifts began, Kilgore began tutoring. By 2003, she had put in 1,000 hours of tutoring. She persuaded 60 other residents to undergo 14 hours of formal training as tutors, and they in turn taught 110 employees how to read, using the step-by-step phonics method by which people learn to sound out words.
"This was her mission from God," Featherstone said. "It's not enough to be faithful, but you have to do good works. Forher, [the two] were inextricably linked. She felt she had a calling."
Elizabeth Walker Kilgore, a native of Moberly, Mo., moved to Washington as a child and graduated from  Eastern High School in 1937. Raised by a single mother, Kilgore managed to go to college with the help of a loan from the PEO Sisterhood. After graduating from the two-year Cottey College in Nevada, Mo., she returned to the Washington area and worked as a secretary for the Coast Guard for 10 years, until she married and had Featherstone and a son, Mark Kilgore, now of Pensacola, Fla.
Kilgore was a stay-at-home mother with energy and independence. Her life beyond her family and literacy work revolved around her church, which for many years was Chevy Chase United Methodist.
She went back to paid employment for several years after her children were grown, as a secretary at Western Junior High School (later Westland Middle School) in Bethesda. She stayed just long enough to qualify for a county pension, which was useful after her husband of 46 years, George A. Kilgore, died in 1993.
When her daughter became a Foreign Service officer, Kilgore visited her in Belize for Christmas, never believing that just because she was in her 80s, she couldn't navigate Central America. It was that kind of willingness to address a challenge that had led her, 45 years earlier, to launch the council.
"She was always very goal-oriented," Saussy said last week, as she went through 14 boxes of handwritten and typewritten records that Kilgore left to the council. She never said, "This job is too big.'"
Kilgore was not comfortable with the honors that came to her later in life, but she was enthusiastic about bringing attention to the need for tutors. One of her favorite sayings came from Frank Laubach:
"When you sit beside your student as your equal, your heart overflows with love for that person. A thousand silver threads wind around his heart and yours."