Jill Zink Tarbel

Jill Zink was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the daughter of John Steele Zink and Swannie Estelle Smith Zink. Her father was a businessman and rancher.[1] She survived polio at age 13, with paralysis from the waist down; She spent some months recovering at Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1938. She used leg braces, a cane or crutches as a young woman,[2][3] and a wheelchair later in life.[4] She graduated from Will Rogers High School in 1942, and from the University of Tulsa in 1946.[5] Her brother Jack Zink became an automotive engineer, inventor, and motorsports owner.[6][7]

Tarbel was appointed to the Mayor's Commission on Concerns of the Disabled in Tulsa. In 1983, she was appointed a trustee of the University of Tulsa. She also served on the Oklahoma advisory board of the United States Civil Rights Commission.[8] Other organizations she supported with her time and leadership included the Tulsa Junior College Foundation, River Parks Authority, Tulsa Senior Services, Hillcrest Medical Center Foundation, Philbrook Museum of Art,[9] the Tulsa Opera, The Tulsa Philharmonic,[4] the Magic Empire Council of Girl Scouts,[10] the Simon Estes Education Foundation, Daughters of the American Colonists in Oklahoma, and Planned Parenthood.[11][12] She and her second husband, who was also a wheelchair user, worked especially for accessible public transportation and parks in Tulsa.[13] "Jill Hott Tarbel moves through Tulsa like a bloodhound on the prowl, sniffing out physical and attitudinal barriers that make life difficult for Tulsa's handicapped community," began a 1982 newspaper story. "The wheelchair is her lifeline and she operates it with the same zest of a golfer driving an electric cart."[14]

Tarbel was chair of Oklahoma's programs for International Year of Disabled Persons in 1981.[14] In 1992, Tarbel received the Newsmaker Award from the Tulsa chapter of Women in Communications Inc.[15] Tarbel was honored on behalf of the Zink family by the Magic Empire Council of Girl Scouts, for their decades of support for scouting.[10] The Jill and Brook Tarbel Lifetime Achievement Award was named for the Tarbels in 1996. In 2001, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame. A section of a Tulsa street was named for her in 2009;[16] there is also a meeting room named for her at the University of Tulsa.[17] A wheelchair-accessible treehouse and park space was named for the Tarbels in 2014.

Zink married Donald Ray Hott in 1946.[5] They had four children. She married again to petroleum engineer and oil executive Brook Tarbel.[13] She died in 2009, at the age of 84, in Tulsa.[12]