Nurse, model, volunteer — Delores Shine Kerr always says ‘Yes!’
Delores Shine Kerr
Nurse, educator, philanthropist, model and singer — the multi-hyphenate Delores Shine Kerr never met a task she couldn’t tackle. Trained as a nurse educator, she broadened her reach beyond her professional work to help others through volunteering.
The Brookside resident received her bachelor’s degree in nursing in 1957 from Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), where she met her late husband of 66 years, Ben Kerr, an aerospace engineer. They had two children, Mark Steven Kerr (d. 2018) and Karen Benae, who graced them with a granddaughter, Jade James.
After moving to Los Angeles shortly after graduation, she earned her teaching credential at UCLA and worked in numerous medical capacities, including as an emergency room nurse, assistant director of nursing, psychiatric treatment instructor, a nursing education instructor and as a health consultant for the State of California.
Never one to trod a narrow path, Kerr has also been a singer and model. She sang with church choirs, choral groups and the Ebell Chorale. Always impeccably dressed, in 2015 Delores and Ben Kerr attracted the attention of a representative from American Apparel, who selected them as American Apparel Sweethearts, featuring them in an advertising campaign. She continued modeling on runways in department stores in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, on the Queen Mary and at fashion show luncheons in Texas and Colorado. She even had the opportunity to design clothes that American Apparel manufactured and sold.
Although Kerr is only 5 feet, 5 inches tall, she attributes her modeling success to lying. “I said I was 5 feet, 6 1/2 inches and wore my hair piled high and wore heels as high as I could!”
Volunteering is a true passion, and the breadth of her involvements is extraordinary, from work in science and medicine to the arts. She and her husband were founding members of African Americans for LA Opera and regularly hosted Opera League musical events in their home. She is an honorary trustee of the California Science Center. She was the first Black docent at the Music Center, and she volunteered with Reach Out, an initiative for outreach to ethnic communities. She founded and chaired the mentorship program Mentors for Youth and Adults Worldwide. As an executive board member of Family Planning Centers of Greater Los Angeles, Kerr founded the People for Family Planning support organization and the Rubella Clinic for free testing. As part of the Los Angeles Medical Association’s 100th anniversary celebration in 1992, Kerr was president of an international humanitarian development effort for hospital technical training in Vietnam. She was an ambassador for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The list is endless.
Noting the many philanthropic activities she and her husband engaged in together, she states, “A lot of it was saying ‘Yes.’ If we don’t do it, they won’t see a Black face. If we don’t do it, no one’s going to do it.” She continues, “Many places, we were the only two Black people there.”
Kerr came from modest means in Pleasant Hill, Alabama. Her mother, Ardenia Shine, who was 17 when Kerr was born, worked as a maid before becoming a stay-at-home mom. Kerr states, “On my birth certificate it said my dad was a house boy.” In fact, her father, Paul Shine, was initially a chauffeur for a wealthy physician. He would speed through the streets. “My dad was a hot head,” she reports. “He got run out of two towns.” One of those times he had been threatened with lynching.
In spite of his temper, Kerr learned compassion from him. He later owned a coal and ice business and she observed him pulling invoices out of the pile, explaining, “These people cannot pay, so I don’t bill them.”
From her mother, Delores Shine Kerr learned a love of words. She remembers seeing her mother reading the paper with a dictionary by her side since her lack of a high school education left holes in her vocabulary. It made a big impression on Kerr, who learned to read, with her father’s help, from the Sunday comics in the Birmingham News before she was old enough to start her formal education.
“If you read well, that’s one of the greatest necessities,” states Kerr. “[As a reader] I can accomplish anything!”
Indeed, Kerr accumulated accomplishments, awards and honors throughout her long life, starting with her 1947 award for “The Neatest Student” in elementary school and continuing through her becoming Miss Tuskegee in college and being included in Who’s Who in America in 1957 and Who’s Who in Black Los Angeles in 2008. The NAACP designated her as a 1994 Black Woman Achievement Honoree, and she received a certificate of appreciation from Pope John Paul II and a Service Award from the United States Olympic Organizing Committee in 1985. Gov. George Deukmejian awarded Kerr the Outstanding Record of Achievement and Notable Contributions to Health Care in our Nation in 1990, and Congressman Adam Schiff designated Kerr as a 30th Congressional District Woman of the Year in 2023. That’s just a fraction of the more than 100 awards and special recognitions received by Delores Shine Kerr over her 89-year lifetime.
“Some people work hard and aren’t successful,” Kerr notes. “We were mainly successful. Made some ‘blobs’ and ‘bloops,’ but kept walking.” We are lucky she did.
Category: People
