Kimball Bennion, Reporter

Since high school in Powell, Wyo., Kimball Lynn Bennion has been determined to find a career that was at once creative and personally fulfilling. After completing a two-year mission in Central America and marrying a hometown girl, he decided journalism was the career for him.

In 2004, after completing a year at Northwest Community College in Powell, Bennion decided to go on a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly known as the Mormon Church). He was assigned to live in Honduras for two years where he learned Spanish and performed service for the Church and the Honduran people on a strictly volunteer basis.

Bennion loved getting to know new people during his time in Honduras, and he gained a new perspective from a completely different culture. While there, he witnessed the destitute conditions most Honduran people live in took from that experience firsthand lessons about the evils of corrupt government. That’s what made him decide that the journalistic ideal of holding the powerful responsible to the public was the best way of combating corruption.

Bennion moved back to Powell in 2006 after his mission ended and finished his second year at Northwest College. He joined the school's student newspaper staff, the Northwest Trail, as a reporter, columnist and AP wire editor. He graduated in May 2007 with an associate's degree in general studies.
While at school, he met Elaine Hickman, a music major, and they got married the summer after her gradated.

Kimball and Elaine both transferred to the University of Montana in the fall of 2007. Elaine is a piano pedagogy major and Kimball is majoring in pre-journalism with hopes to get into the journalism school's professional program by next fall.

If school doesn't work out, Bennion said he has high hopes of making it big in the ventriloquism field.

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