Keeping the FaithKysers most noted
post-retirement work was for the Christian Science Church.
His first experience with the religion was as a child, when
his mother was healed from her deathbed by a Christian
Science practitioner, Georgia said. "Kay remembered this
experience from when he was a child, and he turned to the
church later in life," she said. He told
the Greensboro Daily
News in 1981, he began to seek
spiritual guidance in 1932. "I needed straightening out," he
said. "My granddaddy had been a Baptist minister, and my
uncles were surgeons and my brothers were lawyers and
judges, and here I was leading a dirty old jazz band and
making more money than all of them together. I had such a
guilt complex."
"I felt
so healed that I quit worrying about it and for the next 18
years I couldnt think of anything except how to make
better records and how to make the music more danceable. And
I guess we did more than any bandleader in that time," he
remembered. "Underlying that was the unquenchable desire to
serve mankinds needs." According to Georgia,
Kyser turned to the church in earnest in the late 1940s,
partly because of his own health problems. "He had so much
energy, jumping around all the time, and put so much of
himself into everything that his feet started giving him
problems," she said. "It got so bad I had to push him around
in a wheelchair." He took
a more active role in the church after his retirement. He
first became a Christian Science practitioner, engaging
full-time in the churchs healing ministry. In 1974 he
went to Boston to work in the Christian Science Church
headquarters and directed the churchs radio and
television broadcasting division. In
1979, Kyser took to the road again this time in the
name of God. That year, he became a Christian Science
lecturer, touring the country and abroad spreading the
message of the Christian Scientists. In 1983, he was given
the honorary position of president of the nations
Christian Science Church. He remained active in the church
until 1985, when he died at age 80 of heart failure. Kyser
was laid to rest on the campus he loved, in the old Chapel
Hill cemetery. His memorial service was held in Gerrard
Hall, where he put together his first band. | |
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