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- Redlands Daily Facts (CA)
August 28, 2005
Dr. Willard Raymond "Bill" Centerwall, a pediatrician and geneticist and longtime faculty member of the Loma Linda University School of Medicine, died Aug. 2 at his home in Silverton, Ore., after a long illness. He was 81.
He had lived in Silverton for the past 20 years. He lived in Redlands from 1968 until he went to Davis in 1982. While in Davis, he was head of the genetics lab and family planning clinic at the University of California, Davis.
He was born Jan. 16, 1924, in Missoula, Mont., and his mother, Charlotte, raised him in Maple Plain, outside of Minneapolis, Minn. Her family homesteaded there in the 1890s after coming over from Norway. Most of his cousins still live in the Minneapolis area.
He, however, wanted to visit unusual places, and as a young man he worked one summer on a coal barge between Havana and the East Coast ports. At the end of World War II, he went to Italy as an officer in the Corps of Engineers, a member of the 88th Infantry Division, the "Blue Devils," stationed in Naples and Trieste.
After attending high school in downtown Minneapolis during the Depression, he received a scholarship to attend Yale. There he discovered his lifelong passion for medicine, in particular for pediatrics and genetics.
While attending Yale Medical School, he met Siegried "Siggy" Achorn, who was also studying to become a doctor. Before 30 days had passed, he proposed to her and, after some initial caution, she accepted and they were married in 1949. Over the next 10 years they had seven children (the second born, Ann, died in infancy).
After graduating from Yale Medical School, he earned a master's degree in public health from the University of Michigan.
He and his wife co-authored studies on how to detect phenylketonurea (PKU) in newborns and through his specialty in pediatrics and her work in public health, they also worked on the detection and treatment of Down's syndrome, a form of hereditary mental retardation.
Through most of his career as a pediatrician and geneticist, he served on the staff of Loma Linda University as a physician and instructor. From 1956 to 1982 he was on the staff as a professor, teaching pediatrics and genetics at the School of Medicine and genetics at the School of Public Health. For much of that time he headed up the Loma Linda University Medical Center's family genetics lab.
His work on Down's syndrome and phenylketonurea benefited thousands of affected families.
Three of his six children also went into medicine, and his son Ted said he was always interested in his children's accomplishments, instilling in them a strong desire to achieve scholastically. His greatest joy was to take the entire family on camping or car trips, visiting national parks or historic sites.
He was a great reader and accumulated a library filled with books about animals and the natural world.
He also enjoyed music and singing with the family, and his son Ted remembers long car rides filled with rousing renditions of American classics. "I've Been Working on the Railroad" was a great favorite.
From 1961 to 1966, he volunteered to serve as a physician and professor of medicine at the Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India. He and his wife went as representatives of the Disciples of Christ Church, and the children attended missionary and Indian schools, acquiring a lifelong taste for Indian music, cooking and clothing styles.
While in India, he traveled to Kashmir, Nepal and many remote places. He was always interested in meeting new people and visiting unusual sites, and he took hundreds of slides. Exotic animals were the subject of intense study, and the family acquired at various times a monkey, a mongoose, a civet cat, a loris and a leopard.
His wife died in 1992.
Survivors include two sons, Theodore Centerwall of Jacksonville, Fla., and Brandon Centerwall of Seattle, Wash.; four daughters, Krista Erickson of Turner, Ore., Alison Volz of Harrah, Okla., Jennifer Dysinger of Amity, Ark., and Rebecca Centerwall de Osornio of Silverton; 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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1924 - 2005 (81 years)
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