Russell Beavers Jr., doctor, dies

Russell Beavers Jr., a traveling emergency-room doctor who filled his life with passions from playing the flute and guitar to baking gourmet apple pie, died suddenly last week while on an assignment in the U.S. Virgin Islands, his wife said.

Beavers, 61, of Huntington, apparently drowned in a swimming pool in St. Croix, his wife said. She said it is not known whether there was an underlying medical reason for the accident.

"This was not just a wonderful man, this was an extraordinary man," said Jaqueline Leonard, Beavers' wife. "I feel really robbed of the next 20 years, because I should have had more time with him."

Beavers was born Aug. 1, 1950, to Mabel and Russell Beavers Sr. of Danville, Va.

Beavers graduated from Southampton College, Rutgers University Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., and completed his surgical residency at Stony Brook University Medical Center.

While he was a surgical resident, Beavers met Leonard, and the two were married in a ceremony in the back yard of the Huntington home where they still live, Leonard said.

"It was so joyful and happy," she said. "It really was magical."

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The two had their daughter, Katherine, in 1990, and from then on she was the "light of his life," Leonard said. Beavers practiced surgery and was an emergency medical specialist at St. John's Episcopal Hospital in Rockaway, Leonard said. He also worked at the former Hempstead Hospital, Long Beach Memorial Hospital and Huntington Hospital, she said.

"He just loved taking care of people," she said.

Leonard said her husband was a true renaissance man, who loved to scuba dive, travel, play chess and fence. He put himself through medical school playing gigs on his guitar. She said St. Croix, where he was when he died, was a very special place for both of them, since they had traveled there together when she was pregnant two decades earlier.

He is survived by his wife and his daughter.

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The family will have a celebration of Beavers' life at the M.A. Funeral Home, 934 New York Ave., Huntington Station, Wednesday from 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m., with a service at 8 p.m., Leonard said.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Doctors Without Borders, doctorswithoutborders.org.