Kathleen M. Black; Nursing Administrator

Kathleen M. Black, former nursing education director at Ventura County Medical Center, has died of cystic fibrosis. She was 39.

Black, a Ventura resident, was born with cystic fibrosis, a genetically transmitted disease that causes chronic lung infections. She died Monday.

Many people who suffer from the disease die in childhood, but new antibiotic treatments allow some cystic fibrosis victims to live into adulthood.

Black showed no symptoms of the disease until 1989, the last year she served as nursing education director at the county medical center, family members and co-workers said.

“She did not allow it to interfere with anything she did at work,” said Joanne Stibor, who now heads the hospital’s nursing education program. “Many people did not even know that she had the illness.”

Born in Mojave, Kathleen Meehl moved to Fillmore with her family when she was a child.

After graduating from St. Bonaventure High School in Ventura, she earned her nursing license from St. Vincent’s College of Nursing in Los Angeles in 1974 and later received a bachelor’s degree in health science from Chapman College in Orange County.

She and her husband, Richard Black, married in 1972 and lived on a sailboat in San Pedro for seven years. They moved back to Ventura County in 1979 when she accepted a position as nursing education specialist at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard.

She left St. John’s in 1983 to take over nursing education at the county medical center, where she also helped launch a program that informs patients about the nature and course of their diseases.

In her spare time, Kathy Black hiked, read books about holistic medicine and similar topics and traveled with her husband.

Besides her husband, she is survived by her mother, Grace Meehl of Fillmore; one sister in Fillmore and one in Venice, Calif.; a brother in Richmond, and two stepchildren.

A memorial Mass will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Ventura. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, contributions be sent to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, 1950 Sawtelle Blvd., Suite 328, Los Angeles, 90025.