Serving North Carolina"Kay
didnt seek publicity," Georgia said recently, "but he
gave the whole second half of his life to public service."
Among his causes were health care, educational television
and highway safety. Disappointed with the
condition of medical care in North Carolina, helped in a
campaign to raise $62 million to build more hospitals and
train more nurses and doctors in the state. Kyser and Billy
Carmichael spent four years lobbying the state legislature
to improve health care. Tapping into his entertainment
friends talents, Kyser had Frank Sinatra and Dinah
Shore do a commercial for North Carolina to expand health
care.
Improving health care was
an interest of Kysers when he lived in California,
too. There, he also persuaded Ringling Bros and Barnum and
Bailey Circus to use movie stars as performers in a charity
circus; it raised $1 million for a new hospital. Kyser
also had a hand in starting public television, working again
with Carmichael to open a station in Chapel Hill. Thanks to
his ties to NBC, Kyser acquired equipment and writers for
the station. Another
cause of his was establishing a highway safety program for
the state on the governors behalf. "He worked with a
highway trooper who was named, appropriately enough, Major
Speed," Georgia laughed. Today, the Governors Highway
Safety Program encourages tougher seatbelt laws and uses
random checkpoints to crack down on drunk drivers; the
number of highway fatalities drops every year. | |||
| |||
©1999 All Rights Reserved Feedback | Credits |