Barbara J. (Gimla) Shortridge

Barbara Joyce Gimla Shortridge died June 6, 2020, at a dementia-care home in Leawood, Kansas, ending a decade of struggle with the disease.  She was born January 6, 1943, in Janesville, Wisconsin, to John and Anna Bertha (Oertwig) Gimla.  Her parents met while working in a Montgomery Ward store in Bloomington, Illinois.  Her father was the son of Ukrainian-speaking Galicians who had migrated to Milwaukee in the 1910s.  Her mother’s parents grew up in the rural German community of St. Paul, Illinois, south of Vandalia.

Barbara’s childhood in Janesville featured a yard full of roses, frequent trips to the library, and a large circle of friends.  She held summer jobs while in high school at a root beer stand and in the office of a Chevrolet assembly plant.  For college she selected the University of Wisconsin—Madison.  Barbara loved the liberal, intellectual atmosphere of that city and discovered a personal passion for the art and science of cartography.  Upon graduation in 1965 she considered service in Africa with the Peace Corps and a map-editing career with the Rand McNally Company in Chicago, but accepted instead a three-year NDEA fellowship for graduate study at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Barbara completed both an MA and a PhD degree in geography at Kansas, writing about the nature of map symbolization under the direction of Professor George F. Jenks.  She also fell in love, marrying fellow student James Robert Shortridge August 12, 1967.  With academic matters placed on hold while raising two children, she assumed leadership roles in three of Lawrence’s parenting organizations:  Small World (1971-1981), the Lawrence Community Nursery School (1974-1979), and the Hillcrest Elementary School PTO (1980-1987).  Running organizations well seemed to be in her nature.

Barbara gradually reentered academics in the middle 1980s.  She conceived and published a major Atlas of American Women for the Macmillan Company and was appointed as a lecturer and director of the cartographic services laboratory at the University of Kansas.  A decade later, under an initiative by the provost, she became a full-time assistant professor.  In the 1990s Barbara shifted her research interests from maps to American foodways.  Although a self-described “picky” eater herself, she saw people’s food selections as a neglected but valuable marker of cultural identity.  She published a pioneering reader on the subject—The Taste of American Place—with Rowman and Littlefield in 1998 and undertook a detailed nationwide survey of regional foods.  The Great Plains portion of this appeared in the Geographical Review for 2003; the Appalachian portion, published in the Journal of Geography for 2005, was named that publication’s article of the year.

Barbara enjoyed all aspects of her varied life:  motherhood, professional work, family and friends, together with the avocations of needlepoint, travel, and KU basketball.  She wore food-related pins and patterned jackets while lecturing, sewed matching holiday dresses for her young children, and looked forward to monthly papers and conversation with the Friends in Council women’s group.  Her husband misses the sharp click-click of her shoes as she moved efficiently from project to project and her daughters the supportive atmosphere she created for all their aspirations.  Barbara was preceded in death by her parents and a younger sister, Janet Lynn Gimla Worden (1948-1983).  She is survived by husband James of Lawrence; daughters Amy Margaret Shortridge (Thomas Casey) McCarthy of Leawood and Katherine Ellen Shortridge of Salem, Virginia; grandchildren Quinn Robert McCarthy and Margaret Suzanne McCarthy of Leawood; nephew Cody Reid Worden of Edwards, Colorado; and niece Blaise Lindsey Worden of Hartford, Connecticut.

No services are planned.  Memorials may be sent in support of Kansas Public Radio.