Understandably, the headlines are all in 12-point type about the private-equity guy who paid $6 billion — the highest-ever price for a North American sports team — to buy our beloved Boston Celtics. But William Chisholm’s wife, Kimberly Ford Chisholm, has an interesting — and impressive — backstory herself.
Bill Chisholm’s spouse — she was Kimberly Vhay Ford when the couple met as undergrads at Dartmouth College in the late 1980s — is the great-granddaughter of Gutzon Borglum. Doesn’t ring a bell? Borglum was the American sculptor who spent 14 years (1927-1941) chiseling the likenesses of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt into a massive granite crag in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
But being a relative of the person responsible for the Mount Rushmore National Memorial doesn’t define Ford Chisholm. Indeed, it turns out she’s not a big fan of Borglum’s most famous work. Five years ago, after President Trump held one of his rallies backdropped by her great-grandfather’s handiwork, Ford Chisholm — writing as Kimberly Ford — penned a controversial opinion piece in USA Today arguing that Mount Rushmore is not a monument Americans should be proud of.
Citing her great-grandfather’s involvement with the Ku Klux Klan and evidence of white supremacy and anti-Semitism, the monument’s location on Native American land, and the fact that two of the four presidents carved into the rock were slave owners, Ford Chisholm argued that Mount Rushmore should, in fact, be removed.
She also criticized Trump for summoning his supporters to the monument, writing that he “used my great-grandfather’s work as a background to foment division and willful ignorance, a rally on the ancient sacred land of a people we have persecuted, a rally that further threatens that population with pandemic.
“All of this speaks to the monument as symbolic of white male leaders who have utterly, aggressively failed enormous swaths of people who lived on this continent before them,” she wrote.
For that reason, Ford Chisholm argued, it’s “time to remove a monument that celebrates the perpetrators of a genocide, a monument that sits on the sacred land of the very people who continue to be so deeply wronged today.”
Attempts to reach Ford Chisholm were unsuccessful Thursday. But she’s not a complete unknown. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1991, Ford Chisholm received a master’s degree in romance languages from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley in Spanish and French literature in 2001. She has since worked as a writer, adjunct professor, and lecturer and also leads occasional writing seminars for Kepler’s Literary Foundation, an offshoot of the celebrated San Francisco bookstore, Kepler’s Books & Magazines.
Ford Chisholm, who has three children with her husband, is also the author — under the name Kimberly Ford — of “Hump: True Tales of Sex After Kids,” which, alas, isn’t as saucy as it sounds. In an interview with SFGate after the book’s publication in 2008, Ford Chisholm characterized “Hump” as a sort of manual for marrieds-with-children needing ideas and inspiration to maintain intimacy. The book, she said, was the result of many conversations with friends and others: “A lonely me needed to create adult intimacy in a household subsumed by unpredictable, insatiable, nonverbal people.”
“Hump” didn’t get a rave from Publisher’s Weekly, which hailed the author for being “capable of movingly depicting the pure doggedness of lust after childbirth,” but, ultimately, labeled the book a “flaccid affair.” Author Jennifer Margulis, in a blurb for “Hump,” disagreed, writing: “Hide it where the kids won’t find it! This bawdy memoir is what every parent needs to spice up the daily dose of diaper changing and drool.”
Mark Shanahan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.
