Irene Kirby of Baltimore, who served as president of the Women's Civic League and as chairman of the board of the Woman's Industrial Exchange, died Tuesday of lung disease at Union Memorial Hospital.
The 72-year-old Highfield Road resident also served on the boards of the Baltimore Burn Center and the Guilford Association, and was a member of the Baltimore's Best Committee. In addition, she was honorary chairman of the recent Capital Campaign of the Notre Dame Preparatory School.
The former Irene Bogart was a native of Shaniko, Ore., who moved to Washington in 1938 to attend George Washington University in a program that combined studies at the university with a job with the Bureau of Mines.
She graduated from the university and became personnel director for the bureau before her marriage in 1946 to Leroy Kirby. He started and still serves as president of the Roy Kirby & Sons Inc. construction company.
A memorial Mass will be offered at 10 a.m. tomorrow in the chapel of the Notre Dame Preparatory School, 815 Hampton Lane, Towson.
In addition to her husband, survivors include two daughters, Patricia Queen of Monkton and Mary Eileen Kirby of Rodgers Forge; two sons, Leroy Kirby Jr. of Lutherville and Michael P. Kirby of Baltimore; a brother, Cliff Bogart of Tempe, Ariz.; two sisters, Dorothy Barth of Massapequa, N.Y., and Catherine Withall of Santa Anna, Calif., and seven grandchildren.
The family suggested that memorial contributions for lung disease research could be made to the Department of Medicine at Union Memorial Hospital.
Rev. John Reckert
Jesuit archivist
The Rev. John G. Reckert, S.J., retired assistant archivist of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, died Wednesday of heart and circulatory disease at Stella Maris Hospice.
Father Reckert, who was 80, had been assistant archivist from 1972 until his retirement in 1985. For two years before that, he was assistant director of the Jesuit Seminary Guild.
In 1969, he served as assistant treasurer of Woodstock College -- where he had been treasurer in 1959 and 1960.
From 1966 until 1969, he had been assigned to the Jesuit novitiate in Wernersville, Pa., as minister or business manager, as spiritual adviser to the Jesuit brothers there and in work with the people of the area.
From 1964 until 1966, he was treasurer of the Jesuit community )) at Gonzaga High School in Washington, a post he also held from 1953 to 1959.
He was assistant pastor at St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church in Baltimore in 1963 and in 1960 and 1961, when he also served as treasurer of the Jesuit community there.
In Philadelphia, he was an assistant at Old St. Joseph's Church from 1961 until 1963 and treasurer of the community at St. Joseph's High School from 1950 until 1952.
He also twice served in the 1940s and 1950s as assistant to the provincial treasurer when the headquarters of the Province of Maryland was at Georgetown University.
Born in Washington, he was a graduate of Gonzaga High. He completed his studies at the Wernersville novitiate and then studied at Woodstock College and at Inisfada, a branch it maintained on Long Island.
Ordained in 1947, he was graduated from Woodstock in 1948 after teaching from 1940 until 1944 at St. Joseph's High School in Philadelphia, at Loyola High School here and at the Georgetown Preparatory School in Washington.
A Mass of Christian burial will be offered at 11 a.m. tomorrow at St. Alphonsus Rodriguez Church, 10800 Old Court Road in Woodstock.
Father Reckert is survived by two sisters, Lorraine Lyons of Arlington Heights, Ill., and Catherine Heime of Gaithersburg.
Alvin Balkind
Art critic, curator
Alvin Balkind, a Baltimore-born art critic, essayist and curator at several Canadian galleries, died Dec. 21 at the British Columbia Cancer Agency hospital. He was 71.
Last April, he received the $50,000 VIVA award, named for the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts, for "his commitment to the fresh and original in its most varied and astounding forms." The awards panel described him as "a seminal force in the Vancouver scene since his arrival here in 1955."
"What distinguished Balkind was his ability to present -- with the pizzazz of an impresario and the quiet conviction of a man who knows what he's doing -- shows that were impudent and serious at the same time," said Ann Rosenberg, art critic of the Vancouver Sun.
An associate, Abraham Rogatnick, said Mr. Balkind's "most important attribute was his refusal to be academic. The idea that there was one kind of art was anathema to him. When you walked into a gallery you had to be puzzled, and when the puzzle was unfolded you became enriched."
Mr. Balkind was educated at Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained a degree in literature and theater, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He became interested in modern art after World War II when he had served in the Navy and had survived the German "blitz" of London.
