Necrology
Perry Worthington Stafford '67
Jul. 9, 1945-Mar. 14, 2022
Perry Worthington Stafford ’67 died on March 14, 2022, in Wichita, Kan. Born on July 9, 1945, in Fall River, Mass., he came to Hamilton from the Mount Hermon School in Gill, Mass. On the Hill, Perry became a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, played lacrosse, and sang in the College Choir his freshman year and in the Buffers as a junior. He initially pursued a pre-medical major but quickly ran into academic difficulties. By the end of the first semester of his senior year, he was struggling as an underachieving government major and was ultimately asked by Dean Winton Tolles to leave the College.
With the Vietnam War intensifying, Perry joined the U.S. Marine Corps and after completing basic training was sent to Quantico, Va., for Officer Candidate School. He graduated in the top fourth of his class and then began training at Naval Flight School to fly the A-4 Skyhawk, the U.S. Navy's primary light attack aircraft used over North Vietnam during the early years of the war.
Perry was sent to Vietnam where, during two tours, he flew many sorties over North Vietnam including in the vicinity of Hanoi. Among his targets were surface-to-air missile (SAM) installations which aimed to destroy American bombers and fighter jets like his. Understandably, these were the scariest missions.
In 1970, between his first and second tours in Vietnam, he was stationed in El Toro,
Calif., where he met Sandy Richey, a Florida native then teaching in Huntington Beach. They were married in Okinawa, Japan, in April 1972, and later had two daughters, Bethany and Brittany. At the end of that year, his sixth year of military service, he resigned his commission, having attained the rank of major and been awarded three Air Medals and a Meritorious Unit Citation.
In 1973, Perry sought to return to the Hill to complete his undergraduate education but was denied readmission — a lasting disappointment. He then joined the Navy, which offered the promise of paying for his premedical and medical education, and was admitted to the University of Florida in Gainesville. He completed his undergraduate studies with honors in 1975 and earned his medical degree in 1979. He interned in surgery at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Portsmouth, Va., from 1979 to 1980 and completed his residency in general surgery at the same location four years later. Receiving a two-year fellowship in pediatric surgery, he worked at the Ohio State University’s Columbus Children’s Hospital from 1985 to 1987. Pediatric surgery became his specialty for the rest of his career.
Following his postgraduate fellowship, Perry was appointed head of pediatric surgery at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Concurrently, he practiced as a pediatric surgeon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In 1991, he was deployed to the Persian Gulf as chief of surgery on the USNS Comfort, one of the Navy’s hospital ships. Upon his return, he was appointed assistant chief of surgery and subsequently acting chief of surgery at the National Naval Medical Center.
In 1992, after 25 years of service in two branches of the military, Perry resigned from the Navy with the rank of captain. Having been on the staff of George Washington University Hospital as a pediatric surgeon since 1989, he left Washington D.C., and moved to Philadelphia to accept an appointment as attending pediatric, general, and thoracic surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he also served as a member of the medical school’s admissions committee. He soon accepted additional responsibilities both there as well as at the Philadelphia Hospital, Bryn Mawr Hospital, Abington Memorial Hospital, and at the Children’s Seashore House.
In 2004, Perry received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, prompting his retirement to Florida with the expectation that he had only a little time left. Happily, that prognosis was not realized for almost 20 years, and Perry went back to work, now in Central New Jersey where he accepted a position as attending pediatric surgeon and head of the division of pediatric surgery at the Jersey City Medical Center. Two years later he took up the first of a series of positions at the Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J.
In 2014, Perry retired from the children’s hospital. That is not to say, however, that he retired from the profession. He became a surgeon locum tenens, meaning that he stepped in to cover for colleagues in various hospitals, and entailed travel to Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia.
During the course of his career, Perry notably displayed both compassion and a sense of social justice. He would create personalized bandages for each child on whom he had performed surgery. When parents of a child requiring treatment lacked the means to pay for his services, he did the procedure anyway, which did not earn him points with the accountants in the hospital’s business office. On at least two occasions, he and a team returned to Vietnam to perform operations that local hospitals could not handle. He was a much-admired instructor and mentor to students and residents at the teaching hospitals where he served on the faculty: the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda; Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.; Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers. Perhaps in a tribute to her father, his daughter Bethany followed in his footsteps, becoming a pediatrician who now practices in Los Angeles.
Perry had been an accomplished sailor in his younger days, beginning in the Bahamas where his adoptive father, John Stafford, was a charter boat captain. (He never knew his biological father, whose last name was Caldwell.) Sailing continued to be an interest of his; for a time while working in New Jersey, he lived aboard his sloop, Lucy. The voice that had found a home with the Buffers would be put to good use when he joined Philadelphia’s venerable men’s choir, the Orpheus Club.
Perry’s illness eventually caught up with him despite his taking advantage of every medical intervention available, including a splenectomy and a stem cell transplant that almost proved fatal. His marriage having dissolved in 2018, he moved from Florida to Wichita, where he spent his final days.
Perry W. Stafford is survived by his former wife and his two daughters.
— This memorial biography was prepared in collaboration with Barrett Seaman ’67
