August 17, 1913 – August 21, 2003. Fred's paternal grandfather. One of his aspirational figures.
Born two months before his father, Fred Laurence Powers, died — a tractor accident, then a fistula in the hospital. Raised by a tough, talented, complicated mother who never came to his games or plays. Couldn’t afford Stanford in 1931 so enrolled in junior college and, as he put it, “I guess to show everybody I pulled straight A’s in all subjects.” Got there eventually. Drove his $50 Ford coupe between Palo Alto and Berkeley at 4 AM to see Gram. Married her in 1935. Their honeymoon was the trip back to a $32.50 apartment on Fillmore Street.
Two years after returning to El Centro to practice medicine, WWII called him up. A year stateside, two years in India alongside the British, then eighteen months recovering from tuberculosis. He came back with Anglophilia. One was cured.
A $5,000 loan from Howard P. Meyer let him restart his practice in El Centro. He was a general surgeon — the kind of doctor who did everything a small-town community in the Imperial Valley needed. He also flew a V-tail Bonanza 35, which pilots call “the doctor killer” for its fatality statistics among overconfident physician-pilots. He was not one of those cases.
After retiring from medicine, he spent years at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits doing paleopathological research on Smilodon and other Pleistocene megafauna. His key finding: saber-toothed cats were social animals — many specimens showed severe long-healed injuries, proving injured individuals were cared for by the group. The research was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The curator at the Alf Museum at Webb School confirmed his work is one of her major sources.
He wrote his mother’s memoir in 1991. The final sentence about her — “a tough, highly productive, talented and demanding woman asking no more from others than she asked of herself” — is also, word for word, a description of himself.
He stopped going to dialysis after his 90th birthday celebration. Faded in a couple of days. On his own terms.