Prominent LV physician, civic leader Boyer dies

Monday, Jan. 21, 2002 | 8:25 a.m.

Dr. Harold Boyer lived to help people. So it's understandable why 1958 was a low point for him. Twice that year he found himself feeling helpless.

On April 21 he led a team of emergency medical personnel responding to a site where a United Airlines plane had collided with a fighter jet from Nellis Air Force Base, killing all 49 people aboard both planes. It was the worst airline disaster in Las Vegas history.

Later that year he had to fly his daughter, Mary Elizabeth, to Los Angeles for treatment after she became one of the few Las Vegans to contract polio from vaccine.

"Those all were horrible times for my father because he felt helpless," his son, Las Vegas attorney John Boyer, said. "He could do nothing at the plane crash site but gather body parts into body bags."

Dr. Harold Boyer, a dermatologist who treated thousands of Las Vegans for conditions from acne to skin cancer, died Friday of stomach cancer in Las Vegas. He was 85.

Services for Boyer, a Las Vegas resident of 50 years, will be 11 a.m. Wednesday at University United Methodist Church. Burial will be in his birthplace of Hartman, Ark.

"My father's goal in life was just to help people," John Boyer said.

On his deathbed, Boyer told his family: "Be kind to people. It's the easiest thing in the world to do."

Born May 22, 1916, he was one of five children of Dr. Herbert Boyer and the former Lois Wofford. Only Harold and a brother survived to adulthood. Harold was raised in Hartman and later in Fort Towson, Okla. He graduated from Fort Towson High School and attended the University of Oklahoma, earning his medical degree in just six years.

Boyer served internships in Ann Arbor, Mich., St. Louis and New Rochelle, N.Y., before joining the military after the war broke out.

Boyer served as an assistant surgeon in the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Division at Henderson Air Field on Guadalcanal in 1942.

On Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943, Boyer distinguished himself as a battlefield surgeon. He and his team had to operate on many of the 3,301 Marine casualties aboard a ship off the island.

After the war Boyer married the former Jane Bohle in St. Louis in October 1946. She died in 1994.

The couple settled in Las Vegas in 1952. There were only 50 doctors at the time in the Clark County Medical Society, of which he later became president.

Boyer became head of emergency at the county hospital, then called Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital, and a consultant of dermatology at Nellis Air Force Base, a post he would hold until the late 1980s. He co-founded the Las Vegas Skin and Cancer Center and later founded the Arkansas Country Doctor Museum in the clinic where his father practiced medicine.

He retired in 1999.

A civic leader, he was past president of the Las Vegas Rotary Club, a charter member and board member of University United Methodist Church and a UNLV booster who has a reading room named in his honor at the new school library.

In addition to his son, Boyer is survived by his second wife, Judy Boyer; his daughter, Mary Elizabeth Boyer Martinez; a brother, Bill Boyer of Dallas; a grandson, Brian Michael Boyer, and a granddaughter, Blake Boyer, both of Las Vegas.

Donations can be made in his memory to the Arkansas Country Doctor Museum, 107 N. Starr Ave., Lincoln, Ark., 72744.