When Leon Meier stepped off the Army plane that transported him to Korea, he noticed that the Red Cross was hawking doughnuts for 10 cents apiece.
And that ticked him off.
“He was putting his life on the line. He thought he should at least get a free doughnut,” recalls Meier’s daughter, Amy Hunicutt.
“I love my father. He didn’t even eat doughnuts. That’s the beauty of that story.”
Meier — a doctor who won the Bronze Star in Korea for leaping out of a helicopter and dragging several GIs to safety under fire — died on Feb. 21 due to heart failure. The longtime Castro Valley resident was 82.
He was born in Tacoma, Wash. in 1924, the son of an apartment manager mother and pawnbroker father. Meier was the first of his family to receive any sort of higher education. He graduated from the University of Puget Sound and went on to Tulane Medical School before his Army stint.
He first moved to the Bay Area when his internship took him to San Francisco’s Mt. Zion Hospital in 1950. After the war, he founded a private practice in Hayward he kept for 35 years, along the way delivering the first baby born at Hayward’s St. Rose Hospital.
“In the 1950s, when no one would treat the Puerto Ricans in Hayward, he’d go down there after work and treat all the children,” recalled his daughter.
“When I was little, he’d take me on his rounds in the hospital on Saturday and Sunday. Then he’d go make a house call or two and then see his mother, whom he took care of. He would get medicine for people. He was a good guy.”
Meier’s friends and family also recalled him as an extraordinarily good listener, which made him a great advice-giver as well.
“Most doctors allow you 15 minutes, if that. He would listen to people if they had sorrow or anything. He would give them all the time they wanted,” said his wife, Annette.
Added longtime friend Hillel Levine: “Professionally or socially, he’d give you all the time in the world if you wanted. That was his thing.”
In the mid-1960s, Meier co-founded Congregation Shir Ami in Castro Valley, a small Reform temple whose membership has held steady at around 60 member families for decades. His family also belonged to Oakland’s Temple Sinai (where, every year when he showed up to buy his High Holy Day tickets, he’d offer the staff his “joke of the year.”).
Meier was an “old-fashioned guy” — it wasn’t unusual for him to start a story with an “In my day…” — who kept his left-handed typewriter from medical school throughout his life. His daughter speculated that he never bought a computer because no one ever produced one with a left-handed keyboard.
That’s not to say he used the typewriter. Meier liked to write letters by hand, even though, like any doctor, his handwriting was illegible.
After retiring, Meier traveled throughout the nation practicing at clinics and on Indian reservations where doctors were in short supply. He also visited Alaska once a year for a fishing trip. He’d catch and smoke his own salmon and ship it back to California for his family. He always had a freezer full of fish but, because he had a harder time moving around in the past two years, his freezer grew a little emptier. The day he died, the freezer broke.
Leon Meier is survived by his wife of 27 years, Annette, and his four children by his first wife, Anne Meier: Arthur of Oakland, Josh and Adam of Clovis, Calif. and Amy Hunicutt of Reno, Nev. He’s also survived by Annette’s three children, Deborah Sclarsky, Howard Lerch and Jeanne Humes. He had six grandchildren and a step-grandchild.
Donations may be sent to the charity of your choice.