Walter Franklin Hughes

Walter Franklin Hughes died on April 26th 2020 in Keaa’u, Hawaii, at the age of 98 years. He is survived by sons Robert (Joann) Hughes of Boise, Idaho, Thomas (Vicki) Hughes of Pasco, Washington; daughter, Patricia (Eddie) Macomber of Keaau, Hawaii; brother Leroy Hughes of San Diego, California; four grandchildren and numerous nieces, nephews, and extended family. The family requests that you do not send flowers or other monetary donations. Comments or thoughts can be shared on this website. Walter F. Hughes was born on January 27th 1922 at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, CA to Willis Merwin Hughes and Minnie Ellen Doty Hughes. Walt’s early years were spent on a small Southern California farm, near Goleta, surrounded by family. He was the second oldest of 5, with one older brother, two younger brothers and a baby sister completing the group. His early years were filled with hard work and scarcity due to the great depression. However, being a farm family, there was always food on the table and things to keep him busy. Because of the reliance of the family diet on local produce and forage, he did develop a lifetime aversion to mustard greens. The family always had animals and Walt and his brothers established a dairy herd at the Elwood Ranch in Goleta. The dairy herd provided a consistent source of income for the family, and was intended to fund the brothers’ college educations. Walt had a favorite story about the trials and tribulations of dairy farming. It turns out the herd got into silage that had gotten wet and fermented. The cows drank the fermented corn liquor. Walt loved telling the story about drunken cows stumbling all over the farm, bellowing all night long. However getting drunken cows back into the parlor to be milked was a whole different story, and their milk production was off for several days. His work with the dairy eventually led to him becoming one of the first four Diamond All-Stars in California 4-H. His father brought home a retired Forest Service work horse named Napoleon who hauled a whole cabin; one load at a time into the Los Padres National Forest, where it was erected on a site next to the Santa Cruz Creek on a 99 year lease. The Santa Cruz cabin would become Walt’s favorite spot in the world, and he continued hiking into it with family members well into his 90s. Napoleon also would play a major part in Walt’s life in another very important way. He had an infection that spread from his mouth along the side of his face that ended up creating a large abscess. Walt helped his dad clean and treat the wound rather than put down the horse. It took months, but Napoleon recovered and left Walt with a vocation for his life, as this is when he decided to become a Veterinarian. The money from the dairy provided Walt with the means to get into UC Davis in 1940. He was in his dormitory room the following December, when he heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Shortly thereafter, a Japanese submarine shelled the on-shore oil field west of Goleta. Some of the shells landed within a hundred yards of the pasture where his dairy cows were grazing. He was already a member of ROTC and he knew he wanted to fly. So he went to the Navy recruiting office and they told him that since his front teeth didn’t close perfectly together, he couldn’t use them to pinch off an oxygen tube. So he wouldn’t be eligible to become a Navy pilot. Not letting that sway his ambition, he went down to the Army and they had no such standard, so the Army Air Corps it was. He passed all his flight training and was assigned to pilot multi engine bombers, and was trained to Fly B-24s. He was sent to England and completed his 35 required missions in the 8th Air Force, the unit that had the highest casualty rate of any American force in the war. He was wounded once, and his copilot and best friend was killed alongside him, but he always brought the plane back to base. After the War, Walt returned to California, and married the sweetheart he met at March Field, California, a beautiful east coast extroverted urbanite WAC named Violet Sasso. Evidently opposites do attract. Returning to Davis after the war, Walt graduated with bachelor’s degrees in Animal Husbandry and Agronomy with enough credits for a third degree in Chemistry, while Violet took classes but did not graduate. Violet got busy with a family while Walt enrolled in the first class of the new Veterinary College at UCD when it opened in 1948. Walt made extra money working as a tech in the Poultry Science department. While in vet school, Walt collaborated on studies of viral diseases in poultry after being inspired by his advising professor. After graduating at the top of the class as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, DVM, Walt started to practice, first doing a general veterinary medical residency in Lancaster CA, and then moving to Petaluma, CA, to take on his first professional job working with poultry. Petaluma, at the time, was known as the egg capital of the world. After two years in Petaluma, his research at Davis and his reputation at flock management caught the attention of Kimber Farms, one of the nation’s largest breeders of laying chickens, which was located in Niles, CA. They offered him a position as chief epidemiologist, pathologist, and research director. He packed up the family and moved to Niles. His career there included many highlights including creating special eggs that were used in the space program to test moon rock samples. He was one of the first scientists in any discipline to show a correlation between certain cancers and viruses. He was the first to develop a vaccine that prevented Marek’s Lymphoma, a devastating form of lymph cell cancer that was a serious threat to the world’s egg supply in the 1960’s. That vaccine has been used worldwide to prevent Marek’s. He refined vaccines and developed treatment protocols for Newcastle disease and viral velogenic Newcastle disease, two neurological viruses that were serious threats to the flocks worldwide. He also developed the protocols for producing the germ-free eggs that most vaccines are grown in. Everyone whose life has been extended because of being vaccinated for anything over the last 50 years carries his work with them. After Kimber’s he worked for a nationwide egg producer/distributor out of Southern CA until his retirement. In Niles, Walt was active in the community. He was a member of the Rotary club that met weekly at the International Kitchen, a five star restaurant that has unfortunately given way to urban development. He was a member of the Niles Elementary School Board, and from that position, helped create the Fremont Unified School District that combined five elementary districts and the regional high school district into a city-wide unified K-12 school district. He served for several years as president of the Fremont Unified School Board. He was so respected that he almost never faced opposition at the polls. Even though many people disagreed with him on policy, even those who did, acknowledged that he was fair, and genuinely listened to all sides. He once said that the hardest decision he had to make as a Board member was to uphold the expulsion of a young man from MSJ High School. He knew that the Principal who demanded the expulsion was an incompetent, tenured, petty tyrant. And he knew that the young man who had mooned the Principal from a car was expressing what 95% of the students felt. He felt bound by the rules to uphold the expulsion. But, he was very gratified in later years to learn that the young man involved had gone on to graduate from college, lead a successful life, and become a pillar of the community. He cared about every student in the system, and took pains to follow that one student, among many others. Walt always gardened wherever he lived. One house included a half-acre vegetable garden and over 20 varieties of fruit trees. In his Cuenca Ct. home, where he and the family moved in 1966, he planted a large garden, and trees that included plums, peaches, apricots, figs, oranges, lemons and avocados. The redwoods he planted out front as seedlings are now over 50 feet tall. He accidentally developed a hybrid form of zucchini in his compost pile that he planted year after year. It was delicious, but there was such an abundance of squash in the summer, that the neighbors grew quite wary when his kids pulled wagon loads of the stuff through the neighborhood to give away. Walt, together with Violet, were active supporters of the Children’s Hospital of the East Bay. Vi twisted his arm into being her partner in a Bridge league that raised funds for the hospital. Walt was an extremely competent card player, but Vi was an absolute terror at the tables. On more than one occasion, they played in the annual championship final tournament, and they won it at least once. They had a psychic connection… they always knew almost precisely what the other held. It probably wasn’t fair, but no one would have believed in psychic connections anyway. Walt’s great love was the outdoors. He took his family camping and backpacking at least once a summer, and took as many other kids as his own would invite. Many people got their first taste of camping by going on one of Walt’s excursions into the mountains. As a scientist of international reputation, Walt drew people from many other countries to Niles. Whenever possible, Walt had them stay in the family home. One scientist from Chile lived with the family for a year, and another from Spain stayed with them for several months. Visitors came from Japan, Poland, the Netherlands, England, Brazil and Mexico to learn flock management and disease control techniques. He took great pride in connecting those visitors with life in his small town. Although he was a world-renowned poultry scientist, he was first and foremost a veterinarian. If an animal was hurt, the neighborhood kids always brought it to Doc Walt, and he never turned them away. Taking care of animals, and caring for their owners, was a lifelong avocation. Well into his 60s, he would do pregnancy checks on a friend’s cattle ranch in exchange for hiking and hunting privileges. Many people in the Bay Area first met Walt as a guest docent for the Collings Foundation, which brought some of the last flying B-24 and B-17 aircraft to several sites around the Bay each spring. He did that for 27 years. From 2004 until 2018, he flew from Hawaii to Livermore to take part in the annual Memorial Day visit by the bombers. It was a delight for him to dress in his original dress uniform (which still fit), and tour people through the planes, telling them about his experiences, and selling his memoir of the war. He made many friends over the 25 or so years that he and Vi supported the tour. After Walt retired in stages, beginning about 1986, he and Vi lived in Niles until 2003, when it became difficult to maintain the large family home. They moved to Hawaii to be close to their daughter Trish, and to enjoy a little bit more laid back lifestyle. His beloved Violet passed away surrounded by family on March 28th 2008, which left a hole that was patched but never filled. He spent his time showing friends and family around the island, maintained a large tropical garden, a hydroponic garden, was a tai chi devotee and writer of scientific papers concerning physics and cosmology. He was also famous with friends for his tropical fruit jams and home grown banana bread. He never lost his interest in the way things work, and lived his life until the very end. He said once that the reason he was never lost and could see things others couldn’t was because “I Can Fly”. He literally could - in his mind, no need for an airplane or drone. He’s flying now with Violet by his side, soaring free in the universe at last.

Walter Franklin Hughes

January 27, 1922 - April 26, 2020