Arthur Renfrew Roberts

My father was Arthur Renfrew Roberts. He was born in 1927 and died in 1978. He suffered from multiple sclerosis and heart disease. Until a few years before his death, he was a well known pediatrician and neonatology researcher.

He worked very hard and died very young.

I've done a web search for his name and found nothing. There should be something about this man, so I am posting here.

He was born in Oakland, California, and grew up in Berkeley. He joined the navy right after high school, and was stationed in Chicago during the last months of WWII. He was trained as a radio technician. The war ended soon after he joined, and he entered U.C. Berkeley. He told me that he wanted to study astronomy, however in his third year at Cal he was accepted to USC medical school and he went directly to medical school without graduating from the undergraduate program.

In medical school he met my mother, Mary Nell Boone. My mother was the daughter of a school teacher and principal in Pasadena, who died when she was 16. My mother married my father when she was 19.

My brother Joe was born when my father was still in medical school or internship. I was born when my father was an intern in the U.S. Navy at Camp Pendleton, right after the Korean war. I was born in 1954. After that we moved to 29 Palms, and then to Hollywood where my brother Danny was born. My father did residency there and at Children's Hospital, Orange. In the late '50's we moved to Fullerton, and my brother Tim was born in 1959 and my sister Emily in 1962.

My father loved his family, but he worked hard, and we never saw much of him until he got sick.

He was awarded "Humanitarian of the Year" once, and received many other awards for his work.

Just one story. When I was a high school student I went into a restaurant with him. The young waitress, a very pretty girl indeed, who was one of his patients when she was younger, said to him: "Dr. Roberts! Don't you remember me?" To which her replied: "Not with your clothes on."