Katherine P. Torgerson

Katherine Perris Torgerson, 76, of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, lost a recurring battle with cancer on September 3, 2024, at the Hospice of the Western Reserve, surrounded by her family. Having defeated colon cancer in 2006 and staved off breast cancer in 2018 and again in 2020-21, Kathy enjoyed many healthy and active years before a final, acute onset of cancer this past August 1. She leaves a huge hole in the hearts of her family and friends. She touched the lives of so many people across multiple generations with her gentle, bright spirit, and she will be missed dearly.

Kathy was born on October 2, 1947, in Springfield, Ohio, the first child of Donald and Barbara Perris. Don and Barbara met as colleagues in the newsroom at the Cleveland Press, and within a couple of years of Kathy’s birth, the family returned to Cleveland Heights, where Don grew up. As the Perrises added to their household with David in 1950 and Barbara Anne in 1953, the young family benefited from living within a mile of paternal grandparents David “Grandpa Dave” and Katherine “Grandma Kitty” Perris. Kathy survived polio in the early 1950s and soon transferred from Cleveland Heights public schools to St. Ann’s (now Communion of Saints), which was across from the family’s home on Stillman Road. Kathy credited her penmanship, her interest in classical music, and her steely grammatical sense to her Catholic grade school training.

In ninth grade, Kathy enrolled at Laurel School, beginning a lifelong devotion to Laurel that she continued as a parent, a grandparent, and a volunteer. She credited Laurel with supporting her intellectual curiosity; she excelled in her high school studies and was the first member of the Class of 1965 to be admitted to college through early acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont. After two years at Middlebury, Kathy returned to Cleveland, transferring to Case Western Reserve University, where she graduated with a degree in English. 

She started her career at the Greater Cleveland Growth Association and married Peter Kinsey in 1972. She elected to stay home with son Travis, born in 1974, and daughter Leslie, born in 1977, providing unwavering love and stability to her two young children. Kathy later divorced and returned to the workforce as a marketing manager at Penton Publishing (now Penton Media) in 1981.

In 1983, she married Ken Torgerson, whom she met through friends and neighbors in Cleveland Heights, and Kathy became stepmother to Kirstin and Ryan. Kathy was a selfless, patient, accepting, and dependable mom who balanced her work life with her dedicated presence and support throughout Kirstin’s, Ryan’s, Travis’s and Leslie’s childhoods.

Throughout her 30-year career in publishing, Kathy had roles on the mastheads of several business-to-business magazines before transitioning to corporate communications and ultimately an executive role. She prized the months she spent over two summers in the late 1990s in Northampton, Massachusetts, at Smith College’s Advancing Leadership executive education program. She finished her tenure at Penton in 2004 as senior vice president of human resources. 

Adding entrepreneurship to her professional skill set, Kathy and a team of colleagues, including a longtime friend from Penton, Dan Ramella, launched Harbor Communications, another business-to-business media company, in 2005; Kathy retired in 2011 but was proud to maintain an ownership stake in the company beyond her years in the office at Harbor. Throughout her career, Kathy was known for her confident, understated leadership; her fierce attention to detail; her clear and expressive writing style; and her shrewd anticipation of her colleagues’ needs.

On the heels of her retirement in 2011, Kathy began a second career volunteering for her alma mater, Laurel School in Shaker Heights, first for Laurel’s Center for Research on Girls and then on the Alumnae Association’s board, serving as the Alumnae Association’s president from 2015 to 2018. Finding ways to engage with the school and its alumnae body was a central pleasure of her retirement, and she discovered and deepened friendships with alums across many decades.

Her most treasured role was as Grandma Kitty to her and Ken’s brood of 10 grandchildren: Brandon, Brett, Daisy, Hazel, Heidi, Kellen, Lorelei, Louella, Pearl, and Sterling. While she and Ken periodically traveled to visit grandkids in New York, New Jersey, Texas, California, and Washington, D.C., Grandma Kitty was thrilled when Leslie and her family moved to Shaker Heights in 2013. Two granddaughters two miles away soon became four nearby grandgirls to visit and nurture. Spending after-school time each day with Hazel, Lulu, Pearl, and Daisy added a new sense of purpose and focus to Grandma Kitty’s last decade. Her car parked in the same spot daily on Eaton Road, Grandma Kitty assisted with the girls’ own Laurel School homework, drove carpool shifts, managed reading practice, and offered companionship to her four local granddaughters – and one grand-dogger, Roux, who enjoyed sleepovers at Grandma Kitty and Tata’s as much as her sisters did. Kathy remarked often how lucky she was to enjoy so much time with grandkids, and she was continually touched by the definition grandmothering brought to her life.

Kathy was a lifelong Clevelander and took part in the city’s many cultural and intellectual offerings. Together, Ken and Kathy were season ticket holders of the Cleveland Orchestra and maintained their mezzanine seats for decades. They also loved to travel together during retirement, visiting and accruing new friendships in England, France, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. Yearly trips to the beach in Sanibel Island, Florida, lengthened over the last decade. Having visited Sanibel with their parents since the late 1970s, Kathy and her brother and sister, David and Barbara, were grateful to maintain their parents’ condominium by the beach. Since Kathy’s retirement, annual drives to Florida from Cleveland allowed Ken and Kathy to explore New Orleans, Savannah, the Florida Keys, and Asheville, though Kathy figured their Southeastern trip calendars alongside grandchildren’s birthdays and performances so as not to miss important dates up north.

Kathy’s favorite rituals included planning and prepping meals at home with Ken, hosting family holidays and barbecues, walking around the Shaker Lakes, meeting friends for lunch, and practicing yoga. In addition to these more social hobbies, she spent hours each day reading quietly. From her earliest years, Kathy found great pleasure in books. As a schoolgirl, she needed to return to the Cleveland Heights Library more than once a week to replace stacks of books she had borrowed. Throughout her life, Kathy continued powering through piles of novels and filling up shelves with a wide range of titles, predominantly literary fiction. “Words are my life,” she would quip whenever she easily answered any language-related conundrum that arose in conversation. Her family is fortunate to carry forward her legacies of curiosity and broad-minded interest in the world.

Kathy was predeceased by her parents, Donald and Barbara Fisher Perris, and her stepson, Ryan Torgerson (Paige). She is survived by husband Ken; brother David P. Perris (Carol Dronsfield); sister Barbara A. Perris (Jeff Yablonka); children Kirstin T. Knight (Glenn Ruffus), Travis P. Kinsey (Libby) and Leslie K. Segal (Zach); the aforementioned 10 beloved grandchildren; and countless other relatives, friends, and colleagues she gained over a lifetime of camaraderie, connection, and kindness.

A memorial service will be held in early October, and this post will be updated with the details once they are finalized. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to Laurel School (www.laurelschool.org/giving/ways-to-give) or the Ding Darling Wildlife Society of Sanibel, Florida (dingdarlingsociety.org/)