James Townsend, 86, helped regionalize hospital
James Townsend Sr., a pediatrician who played a key role in the 1970s and 1980s turning Wolfson Children’s Hospital into a consolidated center of excellence to serve the region’s children and families, died Thursday. He was 86.
Wolfson had been founded in 1955 as a wing of what was then called Baptist Memorial Hospital. Beginning in about 1971, a group of local pediatricians began working to make Wolfson a regional pediatric medical center. Dr. Townsend was a major influence in that long and successful project. That was part of a larger goal of the physicians of that era, to make Jacksonville a center of excellence in all areas of medicine, said his son, James J. Townsend Jr.
“Dr. Townsend was a real ‘gentleman’ pediatrician,” said Thomas Chiu, past chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Florida College of Medicine-Jacksonville. “He was instrumental with other senior pediatricians in uniting pediatric health care in this community and always worked for what was the best for children and Wolfson Children’s Hospital.
The success of the neonatal, cardiac and critical care programs would not have been accomplished without his leadership and support.”
Dr. Townsend served for years on Wolfson’s Board of Trustees and as Wolfson’s chief of pediatrics. Wolfson named him Physician of the Year in 1989.
Growing up in Jacksonville, Dr. Townsend was fascinated by the water, said his son. He played in the marshes on the Westside and spent summers at the beach, where he worked as a lifeguard and taught himself to surf on a board he found on the beach. During World War II, when German submarines lurked just off coast, he was one of the teenagers who worked as spotters, looking for flares that would show some vessel was in trouble. That love of the water stayed with him all his life.
“His last days were spent looking at the creek, Fishweir Creek, looking at the river, feeling the breeze,” his son said.
Dr. Townsend attended Lee High School, where he starred on the track team and served as president of his senior class. Then he went to Duke University, as an undergraduate and a medical student. He met his wife of 61 years, Kitty, while riding the train to Duke.
After an internship at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, he served in the U.S. Navy as the only doctor at the Naval Ammunition Depot in Charleston, S.C.
Following military service, he completed his residency at Wake Forest, and then, in 1961, moved back to Jacksonville where he joined the growing pediatrics practice of Hayes McCain and Moss.
He is survived by his wife, Catherine Brittain Townsend, and four children, James Joye Townsend Jr. of Washington, D.C., Thomas Kingman Townsend of St. Louis, Mo., Catherine London Townsend of Dallas, Texas, and Amanda McConnell Townsend of Colorado Springs, Col. He is also survived by 12 grandchildren.