From a humble start in the farming town of Mapleton, Minn., Dr. Leo Gehrig would travel the globe in a career ending with the rank of rear admiral with the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), in which he was deputy surgeon general.
Gehrig was also the first medical director of the Peace Corps when it was created in 1961, helped to see that segregated hospitals in the South complied with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was the physician on the Coast Guard's tall ship USS Eagle and established sanitariums in Alaska.
Gehrig, 92, died Dec. 19 at his home in North Oaks. He had Alzheimer's disease.
"He had a good life -- he did a lot of things," said his wife, Marillyn, with whom he shared a bond of love, adventure and devotion to duty for 66 years.
The eldest of six children, Leo Gehrig worked at banks in North Dakota and Montana to save money to attend the University of Minnesota, from which he received his medical degree in 1945, she said. A rheumatic heart condition kept him from combat duty in World War II, but he joined the PHS -- one the nation's seven uniformed services -- while an intern in Utah.
His first assignment was to establish sanitariums to treat tuberculosis patients in Alaska, then a U.S. territory, Marillyn Gehrig said. He then went to Boston for thoracic surgery training and spent five years in Staten Island, N.Y. While there, he took a three-month assignment on the USS Eagle.
In 1957, after spending time as chief of thoracic surgery at a Seattle hospital, he became deputy chief of the PHS hospitals division. Four years later, he was tapped to be the first medical officer of the Peace Corps, a program championed by President John F. Kennedy.
"He was just so proud of these young people," said Marillyn Gehrig, and he was in charge of seeing to the medical care of the volunteers and the public health initiatives of the corps. The work took him to Africa, India, South America and elsewhere.
Surgeon General William Stewart (a Minneapolis native) then picked him to be deputy surgeon general, she said. An early task was to travel to the South to help integrate hospitals after the Medicare program was created in 1965. Like schools, hospitals had followed a "separate-but-equal" policy, and the law required an end to such discrimination.
Gehrig retired from PHS in 1970, then joined the American Hospital Association, serving as Washington office director for 10 years.
In a 1990 interview for the Lyndon B. Johnson Library's oral history archives, Gehrig fondly recalled the Peace Corps, and the young volunteers who shared his idealism and drive to make the world a better, healthier place.
"I had a period of my life, of two years, that I have looked back upon as some of the most rewarding time that I've spent," he said. "And one of the times in life where it seemed that everything you touched had enthusiasm, and the quality of the people, and the volunteers, were absolutely fabulous."
Along with his wife, he is survived by two sons, Gregory of St. Petersburg, Fla., and Mark of St. Paul; two grandchildren; two sisters and two brothers. A funeral mass will be celebrated at 11 a.m. Friday at St. Michael's Catholic Church in Stillwater.
Jim Anderson • 651-735-0999
