So much to give the legacy of Garman Kimmell: Garman O. Kimmell founded a business that became an icon in the oil and gas industry, created a slew of valuable patents, and gave away the bulk of what he earned.

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So much to give the legacy of Garman Kimmell: Garman O. Kimmell founded a business that became an icon in the oil and gas industry, created a slew of valuable patents, and gave away the bulk of what he earned.

It is a classic story of Americana, with all the excitement, dreams, struggle, disappointment, ingenuity, resilience, triumph, love, loss, and enduring lessons common to the most memorable of such tales. Also common to such sagas--particularly those of the Christian sort--the most enduring impact is still uncoiling with the long passage of years and the generations.

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Those who knew Garman O. Kimmell, founder and builder of Oklahoma City-based Kimray, Inc., remember him best as a brilliant design engineer and a devout Christian man. He revolutionized the field of oil and gas production and made significant personal contributions to the field of heart treatment. But the technical nature of his inventions, coupled with a humble personality that eschewed personal glory, has consigned him to anonymity in previous American and even Oklahoman histories. That is the problem with history books--most of the men and women who possessed the noblest character and made the greatest contributions were too busy impacting other lives to get their own written about.

An American Boy

As with so many great American leaders across the fields of industry and business who were the children and grandchildren of immigrants in the 19th century, Kimmell took his cue on how to get ahead in America from his forebears. Kimmell's father, for instance, was an imaginative capitalist. "As a young man, around the turn of the 20th century," Kimmell's son-in-law and current Kimray chairman Tom Hill recalls, "Garman, Sr., would pe...

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