Walter Melody Kearns Jr.

March 27, 1922 to May 21, 2019

Dr. Walter Kearns passed away peacefully on May 21st at home in Woodland Hills. He lived 97 awesome years, enjoying incredible health and vitality and never complaining about anything. Walter did his part with a lifelong commitment to be healthy, active, productive, and maintain an eternally positive attitude. He was kind, friendly, and extremely chill at all times—a great role model as a father, grandfather and husband. Each sibling has this similar reflection: He rarely got angry or disciplined you, but you had so much respect for him you didn’t want to disappoint him.

Over the past two years, Walter’s mind and body declined at the same rate, making for an incredibly gentle and graceful cruise to the finish line and a simple death of natural causes after several months of hospice care. Whenever you thought he was bedridden, the guy would rally when family visited. He’d get up to eat dinner with extended family, watch sports on TV, and routinely move his walker out the way so he could walk back to his room—including the day before he passed. He hit his final two golf shots over the pool a couple weeks before the end, and was still smiling to family members in his final hours. The wonderful hospice program and dedicated hospice caretakers and his personal caregiver Laura Russo made this a very comfortable situation for the family. His dog Quincy never left his side in recent months, and joined him and Gail for years for a daily morning walk of a half-mile around Serrania Park.

Walter’s strength of mind and body helped him cheat death in 2011 at he age of 89 when he recovered quickly and miraculously from a major emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction while vacationing in Bend, OR. He was a kind and gentle person, but also a tough guy with a tremendous work ethic and a high tolerance for pain. He refused pain medication in Bend so he could heal quickly, and pulled a nasogastric tube out of his abdomen through his nose when the doctor (in this case, himself) decided he didn’t need it any more. He also battled prostate cancer successfully for about 15 years, and a couple brief hospital stints for urological conditions.

Walter graduated from Princeton University in 1943, then Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, then completed residency in New York and at Northwestern to prepare for a long career as a general surgeon. He worked for the US Indian Health Service in Wyoming and Arizona for a couple years, then settled in the San Fernando Valley because he liked the weather and the palm trees lining Sherman Way. Walter did minor surgeries in the office and major surgeries at West Hills Hospital for decades until closing his practice in 1993. He then worked an additional five years for the US Indian Health Services on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation in Shiprock, NM. This is a rural area near the “Four Corners” where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet, and Walter and Gail explored the American Southwest and hosted many visitors while they were there. His daughter Dr. Katie Kearns did a residency rotation in surgery at Shiprock and the two Dr. Kearns’s worked together on many cases.

After their Shiprock stint ended near 2000, Walter and Gail did some great traveling around the world, including Tierra del Fuego (the tip of South America), a Yangtze river cruise in China, and trips to the Mediterranean, British Isles, and Alaska. Gail and Walter hosted kids and grandkids at the Woodland Hills home that’s been Kearns family headquarters for 55 years. Walter continued to practice medicine until he was 95. He removed tattoos from gang members at the Black Panther clinic in LA. He traveled to Cuba (sneaking in through Mexico before Cuba was open for US travelers) with his daughter Dr. Katie to speak at an oncology hospital in Havana. He volunteered at a free clinic for uninsured patients once a week all the way into 2017.

Walter's lifelong competitive passion was golf, dating back to his youth in Milwaukee. His many amazing achievements and great photos are chronicled at walterkearns.com. Here is a 1993 LA Times feature article about going out with a bang winning the Lakeside Golf Club championship finals match at age 71, then heading off to a new life in Shiprock shortly afterward. Walter and his brother Jack had 11 children between them, making for some memorable Kearns golf gatherings. Walter also competed in swimming in high school, and baseball and boxing at Princeton.

Walter played golf at an extremely high level well into his 90s, and was arguable the best player in the world over age 90 for several years. Walter also has the distinction of qualifying for the national championships more years apart than anyone ever: He played in the US Amateur at age 19 while captain of the Princeton golf team, and again at age 71 in the US Senior Amateur (against age 55+ golfers). Anyone who played with Walter went away with a lasting memory of someone defying aging, displaying an ideal competitive temperament and sportsmanship, and mastery of the most difficult of sports.

The most esteemed benchmark for senior golfers is to shoot an 18-hole score that is lower than one’s age. Walter first achieved this very early, shooting a stunning 4-under par 66 at the age of 67 at his longtime home course Lakeside Golf Club. Over the ensuing three decades, he shot better than his age virtually every time he played golf, probably 2,000 times. His best age-related performances were an even par 71 at the age of 87, and a 75 at the age of 91 at the difficult Braemar Country Club in Tarzana. These “16-under age” performances are among the greatest ever achieved in this category.

Walter also had 11 hole-in-one’s in his lifetime, including a mind-blowing seven hole-in-one’s in a span of five years after turning age 80. This got to be comical after a while when Walter would make the obligatory phone calls to share the news, starting out the conversation with, “Well, today I got around the sixth hole, so I took out a six-iron and......”, and the reply being, “Oh no, no! not again! No way!” He loved playing in the annual father-son golf tournament at Lakeside with an all-Kearns foursome or even fivesome.

Walter Kearns is survived by his wife Gail of 55 years and children Wally (daughter-in-law Marie), Neil, Brad (daughter-in-law Elizabeth), Jeff (daughter-in-law Susan), and Katie, as well as grandchildren Jack, Zachary, Kendall, and Maria, and step-grandchildren Spencer, Lex, and Satchel.