Kim Corcoran was born on Oct. 18, 1955 in Albion, NY and grew up in Kendall, a small town approximately 35 miles from Rochester, NY. She attended Kendall public schools for both elementary and high school. Her parents worked at Kendall Elementary School: her mother, Geraldine Corcoran, worked as an administrator, and Rudolph, her father, taught sixth grade. As a teenager, Kim played piano, bassoon, saxophone, and clarinet, and also performed as a drum major in her high-school marching band. She was a fan of the Beatles and other rock bands—to her father’s chagrin.
After graduating high school in 1973, Kim attended the State University of New York at Oswego, where she majored in music education. She performed regularly on piano and gave private lessons while at college. She graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1977. After briefly attending a graduate program in Normal, Illinois (most likely at Illinois State University), she moved to New York City in late 1978.
Kim initially shared an apartment with her boyfriend on 46th Street and 9th Avenue (in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood). She took dance classes near Times Square and occasionally tried out for parts at theatrical auditions. She worked various jobs, mostly in business administration. Always a fitness buff, Kim worked out regularly at various New York gyms. She entered several body-building competitions in the mid 1980s and won at least one first-place trophy. She jogged regularly and ran the New York City Marathon in 1982 and 1983.
In 1983 she also became romantically involved with Donald Mathe, an artist and antique restorer she met while they were both working at Banner Press, a New York publishing house. They enjoyed traveling together; in August 1984 they performed a private marriage ceremony on a glacier in Switzerland, near the town of Mürren. Although they were never legally married, Kim and Donald lived together in NYC’s East Village from 1984 to 2011. Their first child, Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe, was born in 1988, and their second, Bellisant Corcoran-Mathe, in 1993.
In the late ’80s Kim began tutoring high-school students in math at the Brooklyn Learning Center in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn. She switched to freelance tutoring in the early ’90s and gradually built up an extensive clientele. She bought a bicycle in the mid ’90s and began cycling to her appointments. Kim adapted quickly to the intimidating streets of 1990s New York City, becoming an accomplished city cyclist.
Geraldine Corcoran died of cancer in 1995. The loss was hard for Kim, who had always been close to her mother.
Kim was extremely busy in the late ’90s and 2000s. She supported her family with her tutoring business after her partner Donald’s antique restoration work dried up. She also taught at home: beginning in 1996, she and Donald home-schooled both of their children. In her limited free time, Kim studied flamenco, tap dance, and (briefly) bagpipes and accordion. She enjoyed dining out, and occasionally went to the Red Blazer, a 1940s-themed nightclub in Manhattan’s Midtown district, to dance to Frank Sinatra songs.
In 2009 Kim’s father, Rudy, died of a stroke. Shortly afterward she and Donald divorced (extra-legally) and, in 2011, Kim moved back to her childhood home in Kendall. She repaired and redecorated her parents’ house extensively, making it her own.
At first, Kim struggled to adjust to life in a rural area after years in NYC. She took up knitting and sewing and started a business selling her craft work online and at local fairs. She worked briefly at Wegmans, Kohl’s, and at a local real estate office. On some weekends she would fly to NYC and give a closely-packed series of tutoring sessions.
Kim soon found things to do in the Kendall area. She founded the Kendall Lawn Chair Ladies, a comic color guard that performed at parades in Kendall and nearby towns. In 2013 she began hosting a Broadway radio show, “Two on the Aisle”, on Rochester’s Jazz 90.1 FM radio station. Initially a one-hour program on Sunday afternoons, it was extended to two hours in the late 2010s. She played songs from her favorite musicals and provided hammy but knowledgeable commentary. She eventually broadcast over 300 episodes, and wrote over 1,400 posts on the show’s companion blog.
In the mid 2010s Kim took up cycling again, and began to undertake long yearly trips. Cycling with a friend, she traveled the entire Erie Canal Trailway in 2015, then circumnavigated Lake Ontario in 2016, Lake Huron in 2017, Lake Erie in 2019, and Lake Michigan in 2020. During her last major bike trip, in summer 2023, she traveled from Kendall to Montreal, Canada, and back.
While cycling near Albion, NY around 9 AM on June 15th, 2024, Kim fell off her bike and suffered a severe head injury. She was taken to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY and treated, but died on July 26th, 2024. She was 68. She is survived by her children, Wolfgang and Bellisant. Her ex-partner, Donald Mathe, died from complications with Parkinson’s Disease in 2021.
Edit 2024-08-01: Add the 2015 Erie Canal trip to the list of Kim’s excursions. Thanks to Carol Peterson for noticing the omission.
Edit 2024-08-02: Kim worked at the Brooklyn Heights branch of the Brooklyn Learning Center. The Park Slope branch may not have existed in those days.
Edit 2025-05-02: Correct details of Kim’s move to NYC using information found in her biographical notes.
Obituary written by Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe 2024-07 and dedicated to the public domain. See the CC0 deed for details. Please feel free to share and repost this obituary.
The following biographical notes, from January 2021, were found in one of Kim’s personal files:
Personal story? This might go well with the pic of 3-year-old Kim dancing. :)
I moved to NYC when I was 23. I had recently enrolled in grad school out in some place called Normal, Illinois (that name should have been a sign). After 1.5 rotten weeks of cornfields and bratwurst, I knew Illinois-annoying school wasn’t for me (that name shoulda been a sign!!!). So with about $60 in my pocket, and an 18 hour Amtrak ride ahead of me, I moved to Hell’s Kitchen, which is what the name for “Clinton” was at the time. 46th and 9th Avenue. To live with my boyfriend. Both the move and the move-in-together arrangement was scandalous to my parents. But thanks to the NYC economy, I had a temp job the day after I got there.
Then I started dance lessons (well, I’d been tapping for 18 years, but now I would enter the big leagues). Not the best dancer in the world, but I believed the old Broadway saw...that luck would bolster my lack of talent and make me a star. Three years of classes/auditions/and rejections (well, I DID get called back for a Best Little Whorehouse In Texas try out), I let the dream go (as well as the waitressing gigs) and met Reality. I stayed in New York City, if not with the boyfriend, for 33 years.
I’m still a sucky dancer, but excellent in Denial. A Broadway baby, if only in my own mind!
The following is a series of memoirs from a personal file last edited 20 March, 2023. The first section describes Kim’s childhood vacations in Black Lake, New York; the second, her decision to leave graduate school and to move to New York City; the third, her return to Kendall, New York in 2011, and her subsequent life there. The fourth section is incomplete. In early 2023, Kim nearly moved to Philadelphia, so it’s possible that she meant to write about her experiences after leaving Kendall.
1
Every year, Black Lake. Destination, well not exactly the Adirondacks. Destination, the “foothills” of the Adirondacks. Much cheaper white and “Adirondack Green” cabins, little fishing boats you could rent…even motors if you didn’t have your own. No showers in those cabins. For that you had to use the little “shower house” plunked down in the middle of the camp. No laundry services (you brought enough). And no beach. Just down a hill to the docks where the tiny boats were moored. You either sunbathed on the docks or just jumped off them, but you’d better wear your old Keds, because a murky bottom and the occasional beer bottle might bite you. But you didn’t care. It was that summer vacation ether in the air.
1 week a year. That was it. My frugal dad and mom were willing to pay $60 for 1 week’s rent for the cabin AND the boat, but no more. Grandpa and Grandma shared the cabin cost (sprung for their own boat), so let’s talk way cheap. Way frugal. Mom would bring cooking supplies from home. “Why buy coffee (or flour or sugar) from the locals if you can just shove it the Ford station wagon?” No TV. No radio. The kitchen/living area didn’t come with a couch. Just a big yellow chrome kitchen table and chair set (for nightly games of euchre). Two bedrooms, sectioned off from the main room with curtains for doors. BUT…
A big screened-in porch. And a even bigger table. For outside breakfast, and rocking, and breathing the lake, and viewing sunrises. And an old fashioned toaster that I still carry a burn mark from.
Did I miss a TV? Did I require friends my own age to play with ? No to the former, Yes to the latter. Sometimes I’d luck out and a family would rent another one of those cabins for the week, and I’d have a week-long new best friend to swim with and tell tales to. One time a family of 6 kids…the Skeletons! A herd of kids! And among them, Earl, age 10. Me, age 9, with a red and white nylon tricot swim suit. Best summer ever. Still have the photo. Somewhere.
I did discover comic books there (The 3 Wives Of Superman!). And a Sunday newspaper that sported 2 score (or more) of cartoons. I learned to “pilot” that tiny fishing boat. I learned to clean fish, having caught dozens with mom and dad and g and g in our favorite fishing spots. I saw fireworks over the lake and heard military drills from across the lake in Fort Drum. I wrote my first love letters. I was “in vitro” on my first visit to Black Lake, and 19 years old on my last.
Mom putting on lipstick in the tiny bathroom, before going fishing. “You never know who you’re going to meet!”
My grandma falling in the lake trying to get in the boat from the dock. Her old fishing hat. The only week of the year when she’d wear pants!
My dad and grandpa holding up a string of what seemed like 100 perch and sunnies and bass after a banner day on the water.
Reading The Forsythe Saga clean through in one week, sitting on a rock every day. I tried to re-read it a few years ago. One HUGE soap opera.
And a light and airy feel of summer. Never found again.
2
I started dreaming/fantasizing about a life in NYC one summer in between college semesters. It was probably a combination of movie musicals and magazines feeding into that romantic side of my brain. Both sides actually. I remember “sunbathing” in the back yard, reading Cosmopolitan (what a rag to set your life pathway by…) and a.) finding out I was probably anorexic, and b.) that New York City was edgy and hip and every model there was probably anorexic, too. Just the place.
It also provided an answer to what I’d be doing after graduation and where I’d do it. Despite the fact that I was getting a degree in education, I did NOT want to teach. I found that out a little too late in my college career to do much about it. So…. NYC could be a distraction for a few years, right? I could type my way into a secretarial job, take dance classes, and pretend to fit into New York life, at least for 2 or 3 years. I mean, wasn’t that a thing you were supposed to do in your youth, before “strings” attached to you like tentacles?
But first I made the ridiculous decision to try grad school. Because someone out there in Illinois liked me and awarded me a fellowship. Loving external praise the way I do, I accepted. Should have read the signs. I had no money. I had no desire to move 1,000 miles away from my boyfriend, who was finishing out his senior year in college. Annnnnd after about 3 days (literally), I quit. Embarrassing as hell, but my heart wasn’t into more education/research/practicing (piano)/teaching (piano) and missing said boyfriend. And then “the boyfriend” and his buddies decided to move to NYC. WHAT? Without me? No effing way. This was my chance. My opportunity to live there, with people I knew (and mostly loved). With $60 in my pocket, after that 24 hour train fare was paid for, and after shipping most of my stuff back to Kendall, I landed in Hell’s Kitchen in October of 1978. A duplex leased by one of the “friends.” We had the basement level, which came with roaches and crabs (an old mattress) free of charge.
My parents didn’t understand (nor approve) of my reactive choice, knowing I was now living with a guy, giving up on higher education, and seemingly so so happy to be living far away from them IN AN EVIL CITY. I think they took it as a slap in the face. And indeed, it was sort of the beginning of a slow distancing from them emotionally, as well. I didn’t understand my move at that point, never really thought any of this out rationally, but convinced myself that this was just for a WHILE. Not a long term thing. Like it was Kim’s “year off”, and that I’d ultimately run back to my old rural existence. That I’d fail at this too, say uncle, and end up back in Rochester, working for the likes of Kodak, with digs in some suburban cul de sac. I was emotionally immature, or at least emotionally driven, afraid, and hoping to quell those fears with …what? Love? Jesus, I had no clue.
I would leave NYC in 2011. Staying longer than any of that bunch of friends I moved down there with. Even the one native New Yorker left before I did. Somewhere along the way, I sort of (but not entirely) woke up.
3
Back in these digs.
Back in the house I was raised in. Now, after 33.3 years in NYC. Why did I come back and what’s it like to live here. The cute little saying I tell everyone: It was like moving from Mercury (close to the Sun, hot, fast orbit) to Pluto. And Pluto is not a planet. Funny. That’s the cute way of telling it.
But I knew all that moving in. I knew it would be an incredible change from a city that never sleeps to one that rolls up its sidewalks at 9pm (Wait! It doesn’t have sidewalks). But I very much needed solace. Country-quiet, country breezes (yes, I moved in in the summer, not the winter, when those breezes turn to gales), no noisy apartment neighbors, no overwhelm at stores and restaurants, a place to bike, a place to nap. And it was all mine. My paintings on the walls, my objet, my favorite foods. And my schedule, not something that had to be agreed upon or anyone to “check with” before making plans.
First, of course, I changed as much as possible about this house, given my “budget” (note quotes: “budget” being the topic of another chapter)… to make it my own. New coat(s) of paint, new furniture, new curtains and rugs…a black topped driveway. A new furnace, new appliances, the first ever computer in this house…the first ever “stereo” and “speakers”. I sometimes have to remind myself that this house actually was the same place I grew up in, it seems to have changed that much.
And things didn’t really go south until, well maybe it was that same 7 year itch people talk about happening to relationships. But yes, around the 7th year, those people made me itch. They were the major problem. I stopped wanting to do stuff with them. First, they were all “coupled”. Connected to another, while I was a lone entity. Or they were Republican. Or church goers. Or scared to adventure with me. The organizations I joined (or formed) started driving me crazy, because I had to deal with the people in them, or the people they were stapled to. So I started coping…with travel ($$$), biking away (long distances!), exercise, and shopping therapy. Living alone and living a life of avoidance (no to a lot of social stuff) made me cranky/bitter/pissed off/ and ready to ESCAPE. The coping bandaids stopped working.
I should use the present tense there. Because that’s the state I’m still in. And when I’m not cranky, I’m re-actively lunging to fantasy plans…like moving away. Only problem, I’d have to bring ME along with ME.
4
Not being there.