Dr. Lewis F. Boddie, 94; an L.A. medical pioneer

Dr. Lewis F. Boddie, a pioneering physician in South Los Angeles who outside the office facilitated the placement of children as the first president of the Los Angeles County Bureau of Adoption’s Auxiliary Board for Youngsters, has died. He was 94.

Boddie, believed to be the first black man to be board certified in obstetrics and gynecology on the West Coast, died of natural causes Sept. 11 at a hospital in Los Angeles, family members said.

“He wanted to truly help children,” said Geri M. Humphry, a former regional director of the Children’s Home Society, where Boddie volunteered for decades. “He was so much more knowledgeable -- from his practice and his family life -- about children and the needs of children.”

For Boddie, the goal was a healthy individual and a healthy community. In his practice, which ran from 1949 until 1993, he delivered generations of babies. He also delivered healthcare to patients who had no money to pay him or had to pay him over time.

As did his parents before him, Boddie viewed his work through a spiritual prism. In the Boddie family, medicine was an act of service.

Born April 4, 1913, in Forsyth, Ga., Boddie was the grandson of a former slave who became a teacher and a minister. Boddie’s father, William T. Boddie, was a physician, as was his mother, Luetta T. Boddie, and his brother.

Years later Boddie was still amused by memories of patients who called on the phone asking for “the doctor,” not realizing that in the Boddie household four people fit that description. As a boy Boddie was often awakened to join his mother on late-night house calls. His job was to push the car when it became stuck in the thick mud of Georgia’s country roads.

He was “humbled by, but proud” of his family’s unique history, said his daughter Dr. Bernice Boddie Jackson, who, along with her brother Dr. Kenneth Boddie, helps carry on the family tradition of medicine. Jackson is a physician with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Communicable Disease Control and Prevention Division.

In 1929 Boddie graduated from a state college in Georgia, and in 1933 he earned a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta. Boddie taught college chemistry for a year before joining his parents and brother in the family profession. He earned a medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1938 and three years later married Marian Bernice Claytor, whose father was a doctor, as were her two brothers and sister.

“At the time we married, we counted over 40 doctors in both families, with the uncles and the cousins” and others, said Marian Boddie.

In 1949 Boddie moved to Los Angeles and soon after received certification from the American Board of Gynecology and Obstetrics. The city’s black-owned newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, hailed him as “the first physician of his race on the Pacific Coast to be thus honored.” But most major hospitals would not allow him or others of his race on their staffs, a practice that hurt not only doctors but residents, such as those of South Los Angeles who had few resources or places to go for quality care.

Boddie’s response was to join with other doctors and build a medical facility in the heart of South Los Angeles.

They built Vernbro Medical Center on Vernon and Broadway, at which each doctor practiced a specialty but also belonged to a cooperative. Those doctors later helped integrate the staffs of major hospitals.

Long before he entered medical school, Boddie learned from his parents what it meant to work in a community where the need was high and resources were few. Boddie saw the despair of young mothers and the dismal futures facing babies, and he began volunteering with child welfare and adoption agencies.

“My dad, being raised in such a loving household . . . felt that was something every child deserved,” said another of Boddie’s daughters, Margaret Boddie Lewis of San Francisco. “It was much harder for a black child to find that happiness.”

In 1955, he became the first president of the Los Angeles County Bureau of Adoptions Auxiliary Board for Youngsters, an organization created to find adoptive homes for children.

During his three-year tenure as president, the board succeeded in finding homes for 490 minority children.

In 1958, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution praising Boddie for his “warm humanitarianism and unflagging devotion to the task of finding homes, parents, love and security for these our future citizens.”

Also in the early 1950s, Boddie began volunteering with Children’s Home Society of California. In those early years the public was not aware of the difficulty involved in finding homes for minority children and those with disabilities. Boddie was part of a movement that was committed to “finding and developing adoptive families for these children,” Humphry said.

The organization’s peak year for adoptions was 1968, during Boddie’s tenure as board president. That year the organization placed 2,000 children in foster homes.

While practicing, volunteering, and serving on the Board of Stewards of Second AME Church, Boddie maintained an active career as a professor of medicine. From 1953 to 1979, he served as a clinical assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the USC School of Medicine, according to family records.

For more than 40 years he was on the attending staff of Queen of Angels Hospital, now known as Hollywood-Presbyterian Medical Center. From 1952 to 1979 he was also on the staff of what is now the Los Angeles County USC Medical Center. Boddie “ate, drank, and lived medicine,” said Marian Boddie.

By the time he retired in 1993, a few days before his 80th birthday, the makeup of South Los Angeles had changed. Boddie had taken to carrying a Spanish language dictionary because he wanted to be able to communicate with the community’s newest patients.

“He was like a country doctor in a big city,” said Margaret Boddie Lewis.

In addition to his wife and daughters Margaret and Bernice, Boddie is survived by five other children, Roberta Miles of Fort Jones, Calif.; Lewis Boddie Jr. of Eureka; Pamela Boddie and Dr. Kenneth Boddie, both of Los Angeles; Fredda Boddie of San Jose; and his brother, Dr. Arthur W. Boddie of Detroit.

A memorial service will be held today at 11 a.m. at Second African Methodist Episcopal Church, 5500 S. Hoover St., Los Angeles.

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jocelyn.stewart@latimes.com