Richard Loren Kaping

1941 – 2015

Richard (Dick) Kaping, a tenor, was a music teacher in Missouri, Idaho, and Colorado and a professor of aviation in Michigan. He was a kind and outgoing person who enjoyed music and aviation and working on projects from woodworking to motorcycles.

Richard was born in Leavenworth, Washington, the oldest of four children of Elmer Julius and Rosalie Lucretia Quick Kaping. He attended Upper Columbia Academy in Spangle, Washington, where he graduated in 1959 and then Walla Walla College, now University, where he completed a B.Mus.Ed. in 1965. While at WWC he met and married Glenice Joan Lukens, a student from San Diego, California, on September 1, 1963. They would have one child, Stephanie.

He began his career teaching music at Sunnydale Academy in Missouri (1965-1968) and then taught at Gem State Academy in Idaho (1968-1971) and Campion Academy in Colorado (1971-1976). Glenice taught piano and secretarial science in each of these academies.

Kaping was mechanically gifted and while living in Colorado after leaving CA he became head airframe and power-plant mechanic at High Country Helicopters. He then became a professor of aviation maintenance in Michigan, where he taught until he retired in 2004. The Kapings returned to the Northwest in 2009 and were living in College Place, Washington, when she died in 2014, at age 71, and he died in 2015, at age 74.

Sources: NPUC Gleaner, 22 July 1968, 4; Campion Academy Rocky Mountain Fine Arts Festival printed program, 22-24 March 2007 (listing of former teachers at CA); Lake Union Herald, 17 March 1981, 4,5; GleanerNow, Obituary,22 January 2014; Herring-Groseclose Funeral home, October 2015; Ancestory.com.