‘Pure and magical’: This KC hospital worker lights up spirits young and old as Santa
Behind a nondescript gray door in the lower level of Liberty Hospital where no patients ever go, a little bit of Christmas magic happens this time of year.
That’s where the hospital’s safety engineer, Rob Kinnard, keeps his best red suit hung on an IV pole and becomes Santa Claus.
Now, physically speaking, Kinnard isn’t really built for Santa work. He is 6 feet tall with a lean body strong enough to summit Colorado mountain peaks, and carry 70 pounds of firefighter gear on his back, which he did in a previous job. And this self-described “old cowboy” has no fluffy Santa beard of his own.
But duty called a decade ago when a hospital committee decided to bring Santa around at the holidays for the staff.
The group tapped the tall, skinny guy known for his easy rapport with colleagues and patients, the guy who smiles and talks to everyone, including strangers in the elevator. The guy who, when a hospital visitor asks him for directions, doesn’t just tell them, he walks them there “because it gives you the opportunity to spend maybe 60 seconds to get to know somebody.”
He’s the guy who speaks to people with the ease of an elected official, or a pastor. And actually, he happens to be both. (“Rob did ABSOLUTELY PERFECT!!!,” a satisfied bride wrote on his officiant’s Facebook page last month. “I would pay TRIPLE for what he charges.”)
Kinnard, who is 61, decided that though his belly doesn’t shake like a bowl full of jelly, if being Santa would lift someone at the holidays, he’d slap on a fake tummy and ho-ho-ho his way around the hospital.
“When I was asked to be Santa, it was an opportunity for me to use that as a tool,” said Kinnard. “Santa is a tool to share kindness, to show that no matter what is going on in your life right now, you are cared for.”
The gig began with greeting employees in the hospital cafeteria, but he was so popular that he also visits patients now.
Very quickly, Kinnard learned there is comfort and joy in red velour.
Sometimes, all it takes is a bear hug from a 6-foot Santa, who once dreamed of playing in the NBA, to bring a worried family member at a loved one’s bedside to tears.
It happened again during his rounds this week with the anxious son-in-law of an 84-year-old woman who fell in her apartment just days before Christmas. He wept in Santa’s arms.
“I’m just a regular guy,” Kinnard said. “You can do extraordinary things when you put your mind to it. You don’t have to have special talents. You just have to put your heart into it.”
That son-in-law didn’t know that Kinnard’s own mother, Shirley Ann Kinnard, died in August at the hospital.
On-call Santa
Santa’s lair, as Kinnard calls it, is in the hospital’s basement, hidden at the back of a room full of blinking computers, past “Reindeer Parking” and “Dear Santa, I can explain” signs on the wall. Kinnard calls it Santa’s Midwest Communication Center. If he knows company is coming, he’ll pick up the phone and pretend he’s talking to the North Pole.
Like a theater actor, Santa has a backstage dressing table. His is covered with a Christmas tablecloth. A tall mirror outlined with tiny Christmas lights sits on the table, along with a small, feathery pink Christmas tree.
A red slimline phone, circa 1980s, with “Merry Christmas” printed on the coiled cord, is there too for more calls to elves.
And of course, there’s a plate of Christmas cookies.
Kinnard owns three Santa suits — he plays Santa at other places, too — but keeps his best one at the hospital, where he makes himself available for Santa duty at any time. He calls himself an “on-call” Santa.
If he hustles, he can be dressed in about 10 minutes. He pulls on the pants and boots first, “because when you put the belly on you can’t see over the belly to see what’s going on.”
This Santa wears motorcycle boots. His cowboy boots are in the room next door.
Next comes the belly, a red pouch full of foam that hangs around his neck like a halter top and straps around his waist. “It’s not the most flattering thing I’ve ever worn but hey, you do what you gotta do here,” he laughed, checking himself out in the mirror.
He wears Santa’s coat over a long-sleeved black T-shirt. The belt helps hold everything in place. Usually. Once, it caused a mortifying wardrobe malfunction.
“It fell down and my pants were soon to follow,” Santa confessed. “I pulled them up pretty quick.”
With the belt buckled, he checked himself in the mirror again. “Yep. It’s a little light-sided there but we’ll take it,” he said, readjusting the belly. “All right, this is feeling pretty good. Now it’s going to get real.”
He picked up what looked like a pile of snowy cotton balls from the dressing table. His beard.
He looped the strap across the back of his head, and as he fluffed it pronounced: “Very nice, very nice. I like it.”
The white wig came next as he broke into sing-song narration.
“One, two, three, here we go. Ho-ho-ho. And the hat. Here. We. Go,” he said, swinging Santa’s floppy red cap onto his head.
Faux spectacles and white cotton gloves completed the ensemble.
It is a winning look, as patient Marietta Wimmer would conclude on this day after his visit. “He’s a nice Santa,” said Wimmer, hospitalized for an ongoing stomach ailment. “He looks good, too. He looks real.”
Kinnard took one last look at himself in the mirror, pointed two finger guns at his reflection and said, “Go get ‘em, Santa.”
And off he went.
Mom did without for her kids
Kinnard spent a lot of time outdoors growing up in rural Missouri, north of Hardin in Ray County, where he wandered the woods, climbed to the tops of trees and tried “to bring home animals.” He was the youngest boy in a family of five kids, the one who gave his mom fits by jumping off the garage roof into monster snow drifts that winters-of-old produced.
“Robert Allen, get off that garage,” he would hear his mom call out before he leaped.
This will be his family’s first Christmas without her. She left behind 13 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren and a great-great grandchild.
“My dad was a hard worker. He would go to work and bring home the bacon, and when we got a chance we would visit with him at night,” Kinnard said. “But it was my mom who … took us to church … instilled in us the giving of yourself because she would go without. My dad made fair money, but five kids, it wasn’t easy.”
That was especially true at Christmas, when he and his siblings dog-eared pages in the Sears and J.C. Penney catalogs to show their mom what they wanted.
“I believed in that hope that there were going to be such special gifts under that tree,” he said. “And she didn’t miss a beat. My mom would do anything to make us feel special.”
A hug and a handshake
Santa didn’t make it far from his dressing room before he was greeting a colleague in the hallway with a booming ho-ho-ho, the first of many that afternoon. They shook hands.
“Ladies, Merry Christmas!” he called out next to two women who passed him further down the hall.
“You see people light up,” Kinnard said. “That’s one of the reasons I really enjoy this, especially if people are going through a tough time. At least for a moment we can kind of, just, let our hair down and say you know what, for right now I’ll take whatever I can get, a hug, a handshake and I’m happy for the moment.”
He reached up to wipe sweat from his face. He’d only been in the suit a few minutes and his face was already reddened. No need for makeup to make those cheeks rosy.
On his way to the elevator he waved through the window of the Cardiology Services office, then stopped to talk to a new housekeeping employee pushing a trash bin. A woman in blue scrubs hopped on the elevator with him, and Santa chatted her up, too.
“Are you ready for Christmas? It’s here. The weather’s going to be a little rough, so be careful. You have very far to drive?” Santa asked her.
“I’m making my sister drive,” the woman said.
“There you go. Just be careful. Stay inside Sunday (Christmas Day).”
“I work Sunday!” she said.
“Oh you do?” Santa said sympathetically. “Thank you for doing that. That’s tough.”
Talking people off the ledge
Kinnard lives in Richmond, a town with about 6,000 residents east of Liberty and about 45 minutes from downtown Kansas City. He serves on the city council there. He was a full-time firefighter in 2010 when a friend working at the hospital suggested he take a part-time housekeeping job for some extra money.
Kinnard retired from the fire department when he won his council seat. He changed jobs at the hospital, too. As an anesthesia tech he got to know surgeons and patients alike and used the time transporting patients to surgery to calm the nervous ones.
That work earned him a Heroes in Healthcare award from Ingram’s magazine, which declared that “calling Rob Kinnard an anesthesia tech only scratches the surface of this one-man whirlwind.
“He’s also a philanthropist. A mentor. A coach. A firefighter and Fire Department chaplain, a volunteer, a medical missionary, a Richmond City Council member. He’s even Santa Claus to hospitalized children at Christmas.”
Later Kinnard moved into his current job as safety engineer. He manages everything safety-related. Fire drills. Broken safety equipment. He helps de-escalate dangerous situations with patients when necessary. Once, registered nurse Amy Templeton watched him talk a patient down from a ledge. Literally.
It was during a “code white,” which signals a combative patient, a possible danger to themselves or others. In that case, a female patient had climbed onto the window ledge in her room. She couldn’t get out but she was hitting her head against the window, recalled Templeton, nurse manager of the 6 South wing.
Kinnard walked into the room and calmly talked her down.
In Templeton’s eyes, there is no difference between Rob Kinnard and Santa Claus.
“Basically Rob is the same person as Santa,” she said. “He has a heart for people.”
A few years ago, Santa joined the family of a hospice patient. They had brought Christmas to her hospital room, with a tree and gifts. They sang carols as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
“There was no doubt in my mind as we were opening those presents and sang those carols that this lady felt loved by her family, she felt love from our hospital,” Kinnard said.
And toward the end, before she died, Santa leaned over and whispered to her.
“Your family loves you very, very much. And they’re going to be OK. You just go in peace when you’re ready.”
Then he gave her a Santa hug.
‘When you see Santa it just lights you up’
The sixth floor of the hospital is for patients there for surgery, oncology, palliative care and hospice. When Santa arrived on the floor this week, he first poked his head into the social workers’ office and started jawing with two women there, declaring it “the naughty department.”
“I don’t want anything for Christmas anyway,” one of the women teased him.
“That’s a potential,” Santa laughed. “I’m teasing. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Rob,” she said.
(At that point it became clear that it is a blessing that delivering gifts in one night is not tasked to this Santa, for the friendly chitchat alone would surely slow him down.)
When Templeton told the sixth-floor staff that Santa was heading their way, they got excited like little kids, she said. They love seeing Santa and yes, he stopped at the nurses station, too.
“It’s pure. It’s just pure,” Templeton said. “It just takes you back to a time when things were simpler and you had no worries and it was just joy and pure and magical.”
She huddled with Kinnard before his rounds, telling him about a patient named Danny Fink who wanted to see him. Fink, who lives in a group home, is 44, but developmentally is closer in age to a kindergartner. He loves chocolate.
“Ho-ho-ho! Danny! I’m so glad to see you! How you doing? You have a hug for Santa?” Kinnard cried out as he walked into Fink’s room.
Fink’s face lit up and he held his arms up for a hug.
“That’s such a good hug,” Santa said. “I understand you like chocolate.”
“Yeah!!! I love chocolate,” Danny said.
“You get chocolate from Miss Amy over there, don’t you?”
“Yeah!”
“How many pieces?”
“A lot!”
Santa knelt down on one knee next to the bed. “I’m going to get down close to you, is that OK?” he asked.
“Yeah!” Fink yelled, swinging his left arm around Santa’s neck.
“That’s my man. Thank you so much.”
After Danny told Santa that he wants “more movies” for Christmas and that Adam Sandler is his favorite actor, he was done with the visit.
He dismissed Santa with an abrupt “see you later!”
And Santa moved on.
It is said that this Santa is a genius at reading a room. Some people like to be loved up. Others, not so much. Robert Rippy of Independence welcomed Santa’s embrace.
His mother-in-law, Deanna Potts, was the patient who fell in her apartment in Lathrop last weekend and wound up as a patient on the sixth floor. Rippy, hoping to have her home by Christmas, cried when Santa hugged him.
“I just thought that was the neatest thing,” Rippy said after Santa’s visit, his voice cracking with emotion. “Because no matter what you’re going through, when you see Santa, it just lights you up, it just lights your heart up.”
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