Kitty Boniske

Kate Lee (Kitty) Coburn Boniske died on the morning of August 30th, 2022. She was born on August 4 1925 in Morganton, NC, to Julia Ervin, a teacher of the deaf, and Lambert Coburn, a civil engineer. At the time of her birth her father was living in Asheville where he worked for the company that developed Beaver Lake. When Kitty was an infant, she and her mother joined him in Asheville.  Kitty was just a few months shy of two years old when her father died of an embolism following gall bladder surgery. She and her mother returned to Morganton where they lived with her mother’s parents and her mother taught at the NC School for the Deaf.

Kitty’s grandfather, William Carson Ervin was a strong influence in her life instilling in her a love of nature and a deep appreciation for life in his beloved western North Carolina. He was a well-known storyteller as well as a lawyer and newspaper publisher and helped her develop a sense of humor at an early age. After graduating from Morganton High School Kitty attended Virginia Intermont College, an all girl junior college in Bristol. She would have preferred to go to UNC Chapel Hill but women were not allowed to attend there until their junior year in those days. As soon as she could go there, she did.

When she was a child and young adolescent her mother used to take her on a yearly one week trip to New York, which she loved and so it seemed only natural for her to go there to live shortly after her graduation from UNC. She headed for the big city, landed a job with the NY branch of Oxford University Press, and shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with two other young women. But after about three years city life began to lose its appeal and she returned home to Morganton, where she took a job as a social worker with the Burke County Welfare Dept. It was during this time that her mother’s best friend introduced her to a salesman who was boarding at her house, the man who would be her husband for more that half a century, Ske Boniske. They didn’t rush into marriage because Kitty liked her work and had decided to go back to Chapel Hill and get a Master’s degree in social work. She completed the first year of the program but then in 1952 she married Ske and moved to Asheville.

Once in Asheville, she began volunteering at Asheville Orthopedic Hospital’s Preschool for Handicapped Children. Kitty was a regular volunteer there and served one term as chairman of its board. Over the years she has served on the boards of a number of local organizations especially those working on issues involving social justice, the environment, and world peace. She traveled widely in her middle and later years and much of that travel involved her concern about these issues. In 1981 she traveled to Japan as a delegate to a conference on the need for abolishing nuclear weapons, visiting both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and speaking with survivors of the atomic bombing of those cities who were still suffering the effects. It was at that time that her concern for peace and the destructive effects of the Cold War led her to the formation of the Asheville Sisters Cities program. She was also a longtime member and Chair of the Asheville chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She served as Energy Chair on the State board of the League of Women Voters during the Carter Administration and through that experience became a passionate advocate for renewable energy. Her husband’s love of engineering and her enthusiasm combined with the result that they built a totally off the grid solar home in the 1990s. 

After Ske died in 2008 Kitty moved into town, living in an apartment heated by rooftop solar collectors, as she continued her life-long work to change the world for the better, most particularly to rid the planet of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, to educate those who continue to deny that climate change is a reality, and to achieve a more peaceful planet.

In addition to her fierce activism, Kitty loved reading and learning about the world, and sharing stories of her travels and adventures. She was know to be humorous and beloved in the Asheville community and will be sorely missed.

She is survived by her three children, Debbie, Jill, and Nathan, and five grandchildren, Julia, Katherine, Adam, Alex and Eliot.

Donations in her name may be made to Asheville GreenWorks or Union of Concerned Scientists.

A celebration of Kitty’s life will be held at a later date to be decided.