A Challenge Met Environmental Engineer Jim Kimball Credits UI Professor For His Academic Turnaround

When Jim Kimball graduated barely from Coeur d’Alene High School in 1963, his friends used to joke that he should be voted the “least likely to succeed.”

Today, Kimball is designing a sewage-treatment system for the city of Walla Walla.

His business, Kimball Engineering, is a multimillion-dollar firm based in Hayden Lake.

Kimball found an interesting niche in North Idaho and has become a successful environmental engineer, but he says what he learned - or didn’t learn - in high school had nothing to do with it.

Instead, Kimball attributes his eventual academic turnaround to the inspiration provided by a professor at the University of Idaho.

This article is part of a Handle Extra series about education and the job market in North Idaho.

Kimball said he doesn’t think his high school teachers would have guessed that he would amount to anything.

A mediocre football player with an interest in psychology, Kimball suspects at least one of his teachers in high school let him “slip through” and graduate.

He went on to the UI and decided to major in civil engineering by default when he saw how low his placement exam scores were.

“I was just barely staying in school with like a 1.9 (or) a 2.0,” he recalled.

A.T. Wallace, a UI civil engineering professor, was in his first year of teaching in Moscow when Kimball enrolled in his sanitary engineering class as a junior.

“I thought he was a playboy,” Wallace said of his first impression. “In fact, I didn’t think he was a playboy. He was a playboy.”

Wallace said he was familiar with Kimball’s type.

“He wasn’t interested in studying,” Wallace remembers. “He was interested in girls and drinking beer and stuff like that.”

But Wallace saw potential in Kimball - something worth saving, he said - and started challenging him.

“You just run into somebody who is cocky and you are challenged to a certain extent that they’re not as smart as they think they are,” Kimball said.

It was the challenge that changed Kimball’s life. When he went back to college to get his master’s degree, he got straight As.

His small firm of five engineers beat out some worldwide conglomerate companies in the bid for the Walla Walla project. Kimball now hires Wallace as a consultant.

His experience, Kimball said, shows that it doesn’t take much to outsmart the system and become what people thought you couldn’t become.

“It shows that you can succeed. I mean, capitalism does work,” he said.

Both of his daughters are successful; one is a deputy sheriff and the other is an accountant. He believes kids have to be challenged.

Instead of watching movies, they should be reading, he said.

He visits schools on career day and tells kids to read more and believe in themselves. It’s advice he wouldn’t have followed in high school, and he wonders how much good his preaching does.

He said his own success has a lot to do with maturity.

“It took me too many years to really understand how the system works,” he said.

“Don’t let society put a bridle on you. You do what you want to do and not just what the crowd does.”