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Letter to the editor

Everything was organized - except his dinner plate

By ANDREW MEACHAM, Times Staff Writer
Published October 2, 2007

Dr. Rex Orr kept a neat house, a neat garage and a neat garden on Snell Isle. He organized most everything, except the food on his plate.

"He would take a biscuit with his jam on it," said granddaughter Lauren Orr. 21, "and put some beans onto the biscuit with the jam."

"He said it was all going to the same place," she said.

By all other accounts, Dr. Orr led an orderly life. During a 27-year career at St. Anthony's Hospital, Dr. Orr served as head of the radiology department, chairman of the board of directors and chief of the hospital's staff. The prestigious American College of Radiology named him an honorary fellow.

Even so, "He treated everybody the same, whether you were a doctor or a housekeeper, somebody he met in the grocery store or the mailman," said daughter-in-law Lani Orr, 48. "And there are not a lot of people you can say that about."

Dr. Orr died at St. Anthony's on Friday, surrounded by his family. He was 75.

Dr. Orr impressed friends and family members as an easy conversationalist who remembered what people said. "He didn't ask questions as a matter of course," said daughter-in-law Yvonne Orr, 46. "He really wanted to know. He could describe the teammates on my son's soccer team from last year."

A low-key parent, he knew how to get his message across. When Mike, his eldest teenager, would come to the dinner table late or shirtless, Dr. Orr would say, "You may excuse yourself."

He was adventurous, and once tried to talk Betty into a helicopter descent into a Hawaiian volcano.

He once handled the swimming leg in one of the first St. Anthony's triathlons, recalled Dr. Thomas Egan, a radiology colleague. "He was one of the last guys out of the water," Egan said.

In the operating room, where he inserted catheters in veins, Dr. Orr jumped in where other physicians might have balked, Egan said. "To attempt CPR on a patient with a communicable disease is a potentially serious thing," said Egan, 58. "That was something I always admired about him."

While practicing, he kept piles of books and medical journals on his nightstand. He switched to fiction in retirement, tried his hand at cooking, and took his wife to Turkey and Russia.

After being diagnosed in 2003 with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer, Dr. Orr explained the course of the disease to his family.

"He might say, 'I don't think I have more than a year,'" said his wife, Betty, who met her future husband in junior high. "He was very open about dying."

Dave Orr, 48, said that numerous friends who visited the family at St. Anthony's bore a similar message: "Over and over again they said, 'He was one of the nicest guys I ever met.'"

Dr. Rex Orr

Born: Feb. 21, 1932. Died: Sept. 28, 2007.

Survivors: wife, Betty; daughter, Becky; sons, Mike and Dave;brother, Max; and five grandchildren.

Services: private.

[Last modified October 1, 2007, 21:16:39]