Yale University

 

In Memoriam

Frank Scott Letcher 


Frank Letcher

Frank Letcher
1963 graduation

from the Tulsa World;

Dr. Frank Scott Letcher, 74, passed away in the presence of his family on December 17, 2015. He was an accomplished physician; a loving husband and parent; a passionate supporter of the arts, with a lifelong interest in Russian music, literature and culture. He touched many lives, and he will be missed deeply.

Dr. Letcher was the son of Isabelle Letcher and Charles W. Letcher, M.D., who was a Navy flight surgeon during World War II and practiced family medicine in Miami, Oklahoma from 1945 to 1978. Dr. Letcher was deeply influenced by his father's example of service to the people of northeastern Oklahoma.

Dr. Letcher was a cum laude graduate of Yale University, majoring in Russian Language. During college he met Irene Koslova, and they married in 1963. After graduating from Washington University medical school in St. Louis in 1967, he went on to serve as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve in Philadelphia and two years as Director of the Head Injury Research Laboratory at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, MD. He completed his medical training as a resident at Washington University and was certified by the American Board of Neurological Surgery. He practiced neurosurgery for 30 years in Tulsa, at St. John and Hillcrest hospitals, until his retirement in 2005.

Frank Letcher had an enormous range of interests. He was fluent in Russian, and taught neurosurgical techniques in Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1991, he founded the first private practice of neurological surgery in Russia with Dr. G.S. Tigliev, which still exists today in St. Petersburg.

He was passionate about music. He served on the Board of the Tulsa Opera for five years. After his retirement in 2005, he became the founder, president, and CEO of the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra, which is now flourishing in its tenth year. He played French horn, first with the Yale Band, and, late in his life, with the TCC Community Band and Orchestra. He delighted in facilitating connections between colleagues and artists he admired. In 1994, for example, he published Metaphysical Head: a collection of the works of Mihail Chemiakin, and his introduction of Chemiakin to conductor Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, led to their later artistic collaboration. For his devotion to the arts, he was awarded the Oklahoma Governor's Public Service Award in 2007.

His integrity and commitment to excellence were well known by his colleagues, and he endowed two annual awards at Hillcrest, one for the person who, "by word or deed, best manifest the principles of compassion and selflessness enunciated in Matthew 25:40," and another to recognize "those nurses in surgical and critical care nursing who distinguish themselves by the excellence of their service to patients."

The center of Frank Letcher's life was always his family, and in particular, his wife, Irene. For his 50th college reunion, he wrote: "I will never be able adequately to express either the depth of my love for my wife or how much I owe her... Today an overwhelming sense of gratitude toward life fills me. I have known true love for 53 years. In spite of all the challenges in my lifetime, it has been given to me to avoid the cynicism and indifference to which one can fall prey at our age. I am enjoying life and I am at peace for which I am so very grateful."

He is survived by his brothers, Scott, John, and Bill Letcher, and their families; his wife, Irene; daughter, Elizabeth Letcher and husband, Steve Doberstein; daughter, Katherine Martin Groseclose and husband, Chris Groseclose, their daughters, Claire and Amelia and sons, Carey and Hawkins.

A memorial gathering will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, please make memorial donations to either Tulsa Opera, or to the Tulsa Special Olympics, in honor of his grandson Carey.     www.stanleysfuneralhome.com

 

from Val Dusek:

I learned with sorrow of the death of Frank Letcher recently:

Our first night as roommates at Yale he, Carton Chickering, and I argued until 3 AM about Baron Korzybski's interpretation of special relativity. I thought that is what college should be like. The original stimulus may not have been of the highest quality, but the argument was. He was very argumentative when young (If you said it was raining, he would argue, ingeniously, that it was not). This sometimes drove me up the wall.  But as he and I mellowed with age we got along very well. His interest in Russian and Russia, greatly enabled by his marrying Irene, led him to practice medicine in Russia for some years until the post-Yeltsin deterioration and corruptions drove him out. He also sponsored contemporary Russian art and facilitated the publication of "The Metaphysical Head," combining his aesthetic interests with his medical ones.

 He became a brain surgeon and, after retiring, revived almost single-handedly the Tulsa symphony orchestra and initially served as both financial and musical director of the Tulsa symphony on the side. He had an excellent but somewhat perverse sense of humor and once typed in a demo typewriter at the Yale Coop, "This typewriter has a lascivious carriage." He made Russian-Latin puns which none of us could understand, and then laugh uproariously. 

A few years ago I and my father in law visited Frank and Irene in Tulsa, where we were magnificently hosted and shown the city. Still more recently Frank and I corresponded about the philosophy of science course he was taking and particularly Heisenberg (not the "Breaking Bad" meth brewer, but the physicist-philosopher).

I will very much miss Frank.