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JANUARY 2016 •
PPB
• 31
Planting Seeds
Of Service
PPAI honors the servant leadership of Mark Gilman, CAS,
with its H. Ted Olson Humanitarian Award
BY JEN ALEXANDER
BELOW
Among
Mark Gilman
’s
many humanitarian pursuits is
the
Shawnee Mission North
High School
’s performing arts
department. Over the years, his
company has printed and donated
dozens of posters using artwork
provided by the students and
their teachers.
Mark Gilman, CAS
2016 H. Ted Olson Humanitarian Award
PPAI’S 2016 RECIPIENT
OF THE H. Ted Olson
Humanitarian Award is proud
to have called just one town
his home for nearly all his life.
But before Mark Gilman, CAS,
became a permanent resident
of Shawnee Mission, Kansas,
life was a bit nomadic.
“My family came to this
area in 1945 at the end of
World War II; I was in the
eighth grade. Before then, I
hadn’t gone to the same
school for more than a couple
years.” Once his family
planted their post-war roots
in the Shawnee Mission
community, Gilman was
comfortably at home.
In 1962, after two years in
the Army and graduate
school in California, plus a
brief stint teaching at San
Francisco State College,
Gilman returned to Kansas
with his wife and high school
sweetheart, Nancy, to work at
her father’s company, Gill
Studios. “Specialty advertising
at the time was in a period of
robust growth,” he says.
And Gill Studios grew
along with it; from Gilman’s
earliest days working along-
side Forest Gill and an
administrative assistant, to
the company’s present num-
bers of nearly 350 employees
and 250,000 square feet of
operational space. “All that
time, I’ve been mainly
involved in sales and market-
ing,” says the company’s
chairman of the board. “I’m
nearly 83 and I’m still
allowed to come in, and I try
not to cause too much trou-
ble. I see myself as repre-
senting the shareholders—
Nancy, her brothers Bruce
and Don, and their kids.
The company has been good
to me.”
And Gilman, in a lifelong
show of gratitude to the com-
munity that he joined so
many years ago, has passed
along that goodness to oth-
ers. “In the early 1960s, the
interstate highways were built
to bring people into cities,
but they also made it easy for
people to leave and come
out to the suburbs. Shawnee
Mission was the closest
Kansas suburb to Kansas
City,” Gilman says. Situated
in Johnson County, Kansas,
Shawnee Mission experi-
enced boom times in the late
1950s and 1960s. With the
rush of growth came a rush of
community challenges.
Simply put, essential commu-
nity institutions like hospitals,
libraries, and schools were
lacking. So Gilman got
involved.
Gilman’s brother-in-law,
Bruce, practiced medicine at
what was then known as
Shawnee Mission Hospital. In
1966 the hospital held a capi-
tal campaign, for which
Gilman volunteered. “It’s
hard to grow (as a communi-
ty) when you don’t have good
health care,” he says. His vol-
unteer role morphed into a
place on the new hospital’s
foundation, where Gilman is
the last original member from
those early campaign days.
Gilman and the other hos-
pital supporters also aided