Doctor's Career Went Well With His Enthusiasms

Richard Whelton was among those most fortunate of men whose vocations and avocations were the same. By vocation, he was a family doctor. His avocations were his medical practice and his family.

In his 87 years, he was a man of varied loves and works, interests and affiliations. He was father of six and, for 63 years, the husband of a nurse who helped look after his patients, managed his medical office, paid his bills and handled insurance claims. He once told her that he wished he could practice medicine "without the dollar sign."

"Then you shouldn't have had six children," she said.

In addition to his private medical practice, Dr. Whelton served simultaneously as D.C. coroner. He did postmortem examinations in cases of suspicious, unexplained or unattended death, and he testified as a witness in court. His telephone often rang with calls from homicide detectives and people on the 800-family patient list to whom he had given his home number. His wife and children were his answering service.

There was one man who called every evening with unrelenting regularity during Dr. Whelton's years in the coroner's office, 1959 to 1971. That was Alfred E. Lewis, the veteran police and crime reporter for The Washington Post, and Lewis always began the conversation the same way: "What's for dinner?"

Once Lewis had ascertained the menu, he would get to the real purpose of his call: Had there been any newsworthy deaths he should know about for the next day's paper? If Dr. Whelton was out, Lewis would ask to speak with the doctor's wife, who generally knew the answer to that question.

Away from his medical practice, Dr. Whelton was an enthusiastic gardener, landscaper and careful tender of flowers, a lover of dogs, a collector of beer steins, and a fan of the athletic teams of his alma mater, the University of Maryland.

As an undergraduate, he competed in the pole vault and was student manager of the Maryland football team. As an alumnus, he was a stalwart of the Terrapin Club, which supports Maryland sports teams, and he was known to roam the parking lots after games, greeting tailgaters and inviting friends back to his home in nearby University Park to continue postgame festivities.

Dr. Whelton died Sept. 28 at the Arden Courts nursing home in Silver Spring. He had Alzheimer's disease.

Richard Lee Whelton was born in Washington. He graduated from McKinley Technical High School, U-Md. and George Washington University's medical school. He served in the Army during World War II and in the Air Force during the Korean War.

He met his future wife, Jacqueline Odell Taylor, at the old Gallinger Hospital, the predecessor institution to D.C. General Hospital. He was a medical student, and she was a nursing student.

In addition to his wife, of Silver Spring, survivors include six children, Paul Whelton of Rutland, Vt., Mary-Louise Raynor of Arlington County, Stephen Whelton of Owings Mills, Elizabeth-Ann Mouledoux of Metairie, La., Suzanne Whelton and Richard Lee Whelton, both of University Park; and 10 grandchildren.

As a young doctor, Dr. Whelton began his work days at 6:30 a.m., visiting patients at a clinic, and then worked a hospital shift. Beginning in 1955, he ran an evening medical practice at his home, where he had his office on the first floor. His children upstairs were told to walk and talk quietly and to wear slippers to assure an appropriate ambience of peace and quiet.

Dr. Whelton was said to have an easy and reassuring bedside manger and a sense of humor, and he never seemed to rush through a medical examination. This meant that patients had to wait in his office before getting in to see him, but most were willing to put up with the delays. His office was decorated with plants and flowers from his garden, and more than one patient was said to have commented that a doctor who would tend his plants and flowers so meticulously would surely care for his patients with equal diligence.

Until he retired in 1988, Dr. Whelton made house calls, raising his rates -- at the urging of his wife -- to $25 in the final years of his practice. On inclement days, he had his wife call elderly or infirm patients scheduled for appointments to tell them not to come in. He would see them on his way home from work.

Dr. Whelton helped write the law that in 1971 eliminated the office of D.C. coroner and replaced the position with that of chief medical examiner, who had to be a board-certified forensic pathologist, which Dr. Whelton was not. In his years as coroner, Dr. Whelton often did weekend postmortem exams at the D.C. morgue. Sometimes he brought his children along with him. When they tired of playing at the morgue, he got his police friends to send a scout car to take them to a Washington Senators baseball game at nearby D.C. Stadium.

When he was coroner, Dr. Whelton got in the habit of stopping in at the Ledo Restaurant on University Boulevard in Adelphi for a Coke and hamburger on nights when he worked late. He became fast friends with Tommy Marcos, the restaurant owner. In retirement, Dr. Whelton regularly delivered pizza and soup from the restaurant to friends in University Park, where he lived for 45 years before relocating to Silver Spring.

Marcos also became one of the doctor's patients. "He'd stop by every day and take my blood pressure," Marcos said. "If one of my kids was sick, my wife would call him, and the next thing you knew he was knocking at our door."