Gardner, an eminent surgeon and professor of medicine, died of cancer at his Deer Isle, Maine, home Oct. 5, 2006.
He prepared at Andover, majored in chemistry at Princeton, and took his meals at Campus. Although he had never played football before, he became a “hard-nosed” lineman on the lightweight freshman football team, Don Harris, a roommate, recalls. He left Princeton at the end of junior year to enroll at Harvard Medical School.
After graduating from Harvard, he was at Johns Hopkins Hospital when he married Susan Whiteford in 1958. He then went to the University of Virginia School of Medicine for his residency in surgery.
He returned to Baltimore in 1970 as professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins. During the Vietnam War, he traveled to Saigon to train Vietnamese physicians. He was a pilot of note and flew his own plane to most medical meetings. Later, he settled in Maine and served as chairman of Blue Hill Memorial Hospital.
Heartfelt feelings to Susan, who said, “Gardner is now nowhere and everywhere”; his sister, Nancy, wife of our classmate Herb Hudnut; daughters Elizabeth and Tremain; and son George Van Siclen Smith II, whose godfather, Ned Slaughter, spoke at the celebration of the life of our caring and talented classmate.