List of Famous people born in Kansas, United States of America
Julie Cypher
Julie Cypher is an American filmmaker best known for being the former partner of musician Melissa Etheridge.
Perry Ellis
Perry Michael Ellis is an American professional basketball player for Ehime Orange Vikings of the B.League. Ellis played college basketball for the Kansas Jayhawks. Playing for coach Bill Self, Ellis averaged 12.5 points and 5.8 rebounds over 144 college games, leading the Jayhawks to an 116-30 record that included 4 trips to the NCAA Tournament, including a trip to the Elite Eight during the 2015-2016 season.
Dean Smith
Dean Edwards Smith was an American men's college basketball head coach. Called a "coaching legend" by the Basketball Hall of Fame, he coached for 36 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smith coached from 1961 to 1997 and retired with 879 victories, which was the NCAA Division I men's basketball record at that time. Smith had the ninth-highest winning percentage of any men's college basketball coach (77.6%). During his tenure as head coach, North Carolina won two national championships and appeared in 11 Final Fours. Smith played college basketball at the University of Kansas, where he won a national championship in 1952 playing for Hall of fame coach Phog Allen.
Victor Ortiz
Victor Ortiz is an American professional boxer and film actor. He held the WBC welterweight title in 2011, and was formerly rated as one of the world's top three active welterweights by most sporting news and boxing websites, including The Ring magazine, BoxRec, and ESPN. His crowd-pleasing and aggressive fighting style also made him the 2008 ESPN Prospect of the Year.
Roscoe Arbuckle
Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle was an American silent film actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter. He started at the Selig Polyscope Company and eventually moved to Keystone Studios, where he worked with Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd as well as with his nephew, Al St. John. He also mentored Charlie Chaplin and discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope. Arbuckle was one of the most popular silent stars of the 1910s and one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, signing a contract in 1920 with Paramount Pictures for $14,000.
Duane Gish
Duane Tolbert Gish was an American biochemist and a prominent member of the creationist movement. A young Earth creationist, Gish was a former vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) and the author of numerous publications about creation science. Gish was called "creationism's T. H. Huxley" for the way he "relished the confrontations" of formal debates with prominent evolutionary biologists, usually held on university campuses, while abandoning formal debating principles. A creationist publication noted in his obituary that "it was perhaps his personal presentation that carried the day. In short, the audiences liked him."
Robert Ballard
Robert Duane Ballard is a retired American Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is most known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew. He leads ocean exploration on E/V Nautilus.
Frederick R. Koch
Frederick Robinson Koch was an American collector and philanthropist, the eldest of the four sons born to American industrialist Fred Chase Koch, founder of what is now Koch Industries, and Mary Clementine Koch.
Jim Everett
James Samuel Everett III is a former American football quarterback who played in the National Football League (NFL) for 12 seasons, primarily with the Los Angeles Rams. He played college football for the Purdue Boilermakers and was selected as the third pick in the first round of the 1986 NFL Draft by the Houston Oilers. Unable to work out a contract agreement with Everett, the Oilers traded his rights to the Rams, with whom Everett played from 1986 to 1993. He then played with the New Orleans Saints from 1994 to 1996 and ended his career with a stint with the San Diego Chargers in 1997.
George Tiller
George Richard Tiller was an American physician from Wichita, Kansas. He gained national attention as the medical director of Women's Health Care Services, which was one of only three abortion clinics nationwide at the time which provided late termination of pregnancy.