Customers inside Corvallis restaurants and bars can’t light up cigarettes anymore, and one of the main reason is longtime resident and retired doctor David Kliewer, 90, who died Wednesday at his home.

Kliewer (pronounced “cleaver”) helped create Corvallis’ smoking ban, donated land for a city park and low-income housing, was a City Council member, and frequently advocated on health care issues and other matters in public and in the pages of the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

“I think he’d like to be remembered not only as a good doctor … but as a good friend of the community,” said his widow, Jean Kliewer, 78.

And it was a community he loved for being progressive, for its college-town spirit, for being bike-friendly, and for its proximity to the ocean and mountains, family said.

Kliewer was born March 14, 1917, on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana. His parents were Mennonite missionaries, and he was the fifth of six children.

He graduated high school in Blufftown, Ohio, and went to Wheaton College, graduating in 1939. He and a younger brother both thought of becoming doctors, but they were poor. So they hatched a plan. One would help the other pay for medical school.

The brother won a coin toss, and Kliewer entered the U.S. Marine Corps with hopes of learning to fly and becoming a commercial pilot, to support his sibling’s ambitions.

The world had other ideas, though.

As a Marine pilot, Kliewer helped sink a Japanese submarine and bombers in the early days of World War II, said family. He also fought in hand-to-hand combat on Wake Island, killing two men, according to a copy of a speech he gave. He was captured just 14 days after Pearl Harbor.

He was a prisoner of war for 4 years, and essentially tortured. In recent years, those experiences caused him to speak out against United States policies regarding enemy captives.

During his imprisonment, he bartered for three books n the Bible, which helped reinforce an already strong faith, a calculus book and a copy of the medical tome Gray’s Anatomy, which solidified his desire to become a doctor.

Kliewer helped out the camp medic, a fellow POW. “The doctor said, ‘You should do this,” said Kliewer’s son Pete Kliewer of Portland.

The elder Kliewer applied to Harvard Medical School, via one of the few letters he was able to send home from the Japanese war camp, and was accepted.

After the war, he came to Benton County for the first time to recover at Camp Adair, where he stayed for six months, taking courses at nearby Oregon State College.

He graduated from Harvard in 1951, and did his internship, residency and chief residency at New York Hospital, where he met nurse Jean Dulin. The 23-year-old, more then 10 years younger than Kliewer, would become his wife eight months later.

Kliewer was trim, about 6 feet tall, with brown hair, but his most noticeable feature was “extremely beautiful blue eyes.”

The young nurse was attracted more to his personality, impressed by his maturity and kind way.

“He swept you off your feet, mom,” teased Pete Kliewer.

“He did, kind of,” she acknowledged.

Kliewer moved to Seattle thanks to a University of Washington fellowship in 1956. In 1958, it was on to Hawaii, then still a territory, to serve as a doctor for a sugar plantation. The company had a clinic and hospital and what amounted to universal health care for all its workers.

In 1961, the Kliewer family, which now included three children, moved back to the mainland and Corvallis, where the doctor had taken a position with the Corvallis Clinic.

Kliewer retired in 1984, but remained active in the community. “He’s been on the board of so many things,” Jean Kliewer said.

While in Corvallis, he helped create the Benton County Hospice, of which he later became a patient; was the campaign director for the Heartland Humane Society’s new shelter; and was active in the Greenbelt Land Trust, Planned Parenthood programs and Community Outreach.

He also protested against the Vietnam War, and sent back his medals, including a Silver Star. Those awards were later returned.

Though he was a pacifist, he also was proud of being a Marine. His wartime experiences, though, and knowing that he had killed men, were a great burden.

One of his greatest disappointments was his two-year stint on the City Council, which ended in controversy in 1992.

He and then-city manager Gerald Seals clashed on important issues, and Seals, who is black, called Kliewer a racist. Kliewer decided not to seek reelection. Seals resigned at the request of the council shortly before the November 1992 election.

Kliewer believed strongly in social justice and belonged to civil-rights groups, and the accusations were extremely hurtful, family members said.

He was also disappointed in the way health care had become more of a business, and less of a humanitarian effort.

Kliewer is survived by his wife, daughter Jody Davis of San Antonio, son Dave Kliewer of Battleground, Wash., son Pete and five grandchildren.

Medicine runs in the blood. Pete is a physician for Multnomah County’s homeless clinic and Jody is a nurse practitioner.

A public celebration of life event will be held soon, probably sometime near the end of April, family said.

Kyle Odegard can be contacted at kyle.odegard@lee.net or 758-9523.




From the GT archives:

David Kliewer remembers the end of World War II “as we piled out of the doors and windows of the train that had brought us to Yokahama from the POW camps in the Japanese Alps. Then began the extensive debriefing; first with a shower, a dusting of DDT for lice, and clean clothes.

“There I stood stark naked, just out of the shower. The bugles blew, officers shouted attention (and) in strode a tall impressive Army general with gold decorations on the visor of his cap and a corncob pipe.

“‘Son,’ he said as he shook my hand. “‘What can I do for you?’

“In the excitement of my new freedom, I wished wildly — an American newspaper, a cigar and an American toilet, recalling the slit in the floor that served as a toilet in POW camps.

“Only later on the Battleship Iowa as I smoked cigar did I realize that I had the unique distinction of having shaken hands with Gen. Douglas McArthur while in the buff.”

— From a March 26, 1995, article on brushes with fame

“As a physician who has specialized in the care of cancer patients and witnessed the pain, debilitation and death of smokers, it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can grow, advertise and sell this terrible, addicting carcinogen.”

— David Kliewer, As I See It, July 11, 1996

“I was burdened with the memory of my fellow Marines, dead and wounded, and by the fate of a good friend who had been captured at Iwo and bayoneted to death.

Fifteen years later, I stayed up all night talking with my friend David Kliewer about our wartime experiences. Captured at Wake Island in 1941, Dave had survived nearly four years of imprisonment; I knew that he had personally suffered far more than I from Japanese brutality.

He pointed out that he owed his own life to the help of individual Japanese, that there were good Japanese, just as there were good Americans, and that we needed to protest war crimes, even when they were committed by our side.”

— Craig Leman, Letters to the Editor, Aug. 19, 2005

David and Jean Kliewer raised their family on a 15-acre hilltop north of Corvallis.

The natural woodland is filled with memories of where they built trails and tree forts with their three children. They kept sheep, donkeys and cows as 4-H projects. And on snowy days, it seemed that every kid in town came out to go sledding down the Kliewers’ hill before trudging back to the house to warm up with hot chocolate.

The phone would ring and a parent would say, “Tell Johnny to come home,” David Kliewer recalled.

— Article on the Kliewer-Forest Dell Park Annexation, which Corvallis voters approved that November