Personal Life
Kurtis and his longtime partner, Donna La Pietra, are very active on the Chicago social circuit, supporting numerous non-profit organizations. He has also done several public service announcements, including RFB&D (Recording For The Blind and Dyslexic). Kurtis's wife, Helen (who was his high school sweetheart and whom he married in 1963), died of cancer in June 1977. They had two children, Mary Kristin (born December 1965) and Scott Erik (born October 1970). Scott Kurtis, 38, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia since he was in his mid-teens, was found dead July 20, 2009, on his father's Kansas cattle ranch, where he had lived. His body was discovered by his sister, who lives near the ranch. Scott Kurtis suffered from heart and thyroid ailments as a result of weight-gain resulting from medication to treat his schizophrenia.
Kurtis's sister, Jean Schodorf, is a Republican Kansas State Senator. During her 2010 run for the United States House of Representatives, Kurtis narrated a campaign commercial for her.
Bill is a cousin to Frank Kurtis.
Read more about this topic: Bill Kurtis
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)