Kathryn Agar

Agar was born in Chicago, the daughter of James Scanlon Agar and Minnie Adele Dye Agar. Her father owned a meatpacking company.^[2][3] She graduated from the Faulkner School for Girls in Chicago, and attended the Oaksmere School in New York.^[4][5] Actor John Agar was her nephew.^[2]

Agar and her older sister Louise were both known as athletes in Chicago as teenagers.^[6] She qualified for the United States team at 1922 Women's World Games in Paris^[7] when she set the new American record for the javelin throw at Mamaroneck.^[4][8] She also played basketball, ran on a relay team, and participated in the baseball throw events at the Paris games. The team of thirteen athletes appeared in newspapers across the United States, at a time of public and medical interest in the merits of running as an exercise for women.^[9]

Later in life, Jaicks ran the Lake Forest office of Quinlan and Tyson, a Chicago real estate company.^[10][11]

In the late 1920s, Agar married her older sister Ruth's widower, contractor Wilson Askew Jaicks.^[12][13] She became a mother to her three young nephews, including Agar Jaicks, a Democratic Party organizer in San Francisco.^[14] Her daughter Nancy Jaicks Alexander was an Episcopalian church worker who founded a prison hospice program in California.^[15] Her husband died in 1967,^[16] and she died in 1987, at the age of 84, at a hospital in Lake Forest, Illinois.^[11]