Preston Lea Wilds
ORR'S ISLAND -- Dr. Preston Lea Wilds, 86, of Orr's Island and Brunswick, died of metastasized prostate cancer on Oct. 3, 2013, in hospice care at home as he had wished.
The namesake of his great-grandfather, Preston Lea, Governor of Delaware in the early 20th-century, he was born in Aiken, S.C., the son of Dr. Robert H. Wilds and Eleanor Phelps Wilds.
Lea, as he much preferred to be called, attended the Aiken Preparatory School, Brooks School in North Andover, Mass., and a now-defunct preparatory school in New Mexico, before enlisting at the age of 17 in the U.S. Army, which took him to the Philippines and the U.S. Army of Occupation in Japan at the close of World War II.
Lea was a member of the Class of 1949 at Yale and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1953. There was some difficulty about medical school acceptance with 'only' an English B.A. from Yale, but he argued his way into Penn and did well. Decades later, after he had long led and served on medical school admissions committees, he was very pleased to gain access to his own MCAT score back then and find that, despite the official foot-dragging, it was satisfyingly impressive.
After residency at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, he returned to South Carolina to practice and then to teach at the Medical College of Georgia as a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, becoming board-certified in 1962 and later, in 1977, in the then- new sub-specialty of Maternal- Fetal Medicine (in lay terms, high-risk obstetrics). Patient care under challenging circumstances was as satisfying to him as the teaching and mentoring of the residents for whom he was responsible. 'What?' he was heard to say on more than a few occasions. 'You can't tie a surgical knot with either hand alone? Then go off by yourself and practice until you can do it with your left and right hands equally well.'
A high point of his personal and professional life was a sabbatical year (1976-1977) at the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research, the University of Oxford, England. The area of his research team's investigations was fetal breathing, and the effects of a mother's smoking on her unborn child. Sheep were used as their experimental subjects, with the important result that the deleterious connection was proven, and eventually the now- well-known human connection became widely accepted.
In 1978 Lea transferred to the new Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va., where he again taught and also served on numerous state and regional committees, moving in the late 1980s into public health work, where his particular interest was fostering modern maternal and gynecological care for underserved rural Virginia women. In 1988 and again in 1990 he volunteered for temporary duty in the U.S. Public Health Service at the Indian Hospitals in Pine Ridge, N.D., and Shiprock, N.M. These non-traditional types of care were among the experiences he especially valued.
An inveterate reader, Lea also had a prodigious memory for poetry he had learned by heart in childhood. Similarly, he could often identify not only the (unannounced) orchestra playing a classical work on the radio, but the conductor as well, and he typically resisted any interruption before he could find out whether his guess was right. After a number of years of reading about the early Antarctic explorers, he fulfilled a dream of cruising the continent himself- twice-on Russian icebreakers, and returning home with first-rate photographs.
Any chance to be on the water, in fact, was a pleasure he could rarely resist: from the age of six he was a salt-water sailor, with the catboat in varying sizes his particular favorite. In later life he restored an early Beetle Fiberglass Cat to such a high standard that it was later accepted and displayed by the Mystic Seaport Museum. Then in 2007, for this and other services, he was the recipient of the John Killam Murphy Catboat Association Award, which surprised and pleased him greatly. A dozen or so of his articles were published in the Association's Bulletin, and he was a dedicated online problem-solver for new catboat owners.
Lea was especially glad in recent summers to have the opportunity to take sailing some adult participants in the Seeds of Peace movement dedicated to overcoming deep cultural hostilities. They were typically from the Middle East and some had never before been on a boat, but they all were enthusiastic about their sailing experience.
Some other examples of Lea's wide-ranging interests included Early and Renaissance Music, Inuit sculpture, camellia- growing, the history of sailing ships, oriental and Native American rugs, the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and more. Before and after they retired, he and his wife traveled to warm and cold climates around the world, always enjoying diverse cultural experiences, but still concluding that Maine was the place they wanted to live in at the end.
Dr. Lea Wilds was a wise, humane, and tolerant man, who nevertheless did not tolerate willful ignorance and sloppy thinking. He was a feminist before most people knew what that meant, encouraging and underwriting his wife's graduate education in spite of having three teenagers and a toddler underfoot. He then matched her years as a faculty wife by gleefully becoming a faculty husband. His memories of that 'position' at the Armed (now Joint) Forces Staff College in Norfolk for two decades counterbalanced, he said, those as a lowly and still teenaged PFC.
He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Nancy Glover Wilds; their son, Preston Lea Wilds Jr. of Philadelphia, Pa.; his son and daughters, Alexander Wilds of Columbia, S.C., Ellen Wilds of Silver Spring, Md., and Stephanie Wilds of Black Mountain, N.C.; and his step-son and step- daughters, Stephen Bancroft of Atlanta, Ga., Ellen Bancroft of Woodinville, Wash., and Betsey Bancroft-Wu of Chapel Hill, N.C.; as well as by five grandchildren and three step-grandchildren. Also special to him was a close friend, Ken Thompson, who acquired a love of sailing from him.
His family members are deeply grateful to the three intelligent and dedicated young women who themselves organized Lea's round-the-clock hospice care shifts and were of inestimable help to the family.
There will be no funeral services, at his direction. Instead, his ashes will be scattered from a small boat sailing a portion of Lea's favorite Maine coastline.
Memorial contributions, if desired, may be sent to the Friends of the DaPonte String Quartet, to the Family Planning Association of Maine, or to of one's choice.
Published in Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram on Oct. 8, 2013
