We Remember
SWANSON WAS ONE IN A MILLION
—
A
lumni will remember Dr. Thor David Swanson ’83 as a classmate and treasured friend. He was a true warrior, a pleasant and kind man and one in a million.
Swanson, 49, died March 7 in Sioux City, Iowa, after a four-year battle with osteosarcoma cancer. Swanson enjoyed playing tennis, attending family music events and vacationing at Lake Okoboji. He studied theology at various seminaries and schools of divinity around the country before becoming a pastor. He was the associate pastor at Friendship Community Church in Sergeant Bluff at the time of his passing. In addition, he was also a staff physician and HIV director at Siouxland Community Health Center in Sioux City and the chairman of the ethics committees at both Mercy Medical Center and Unity Point-St. Luke’s Hospital in Sioux City. Swanson attended medical school in Milwaukee and completed his residency in Sioux City. He also pursued bio-ethical studies at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill., and Loyola University in Chicago. He was a family physician, but later
MAY THEY REST IN PEACE We extend our sincere sympathies to the families of the following alumni who have passed away.
32 | prairieschool.com/alumni
John T. Bruton ‘71 Andrea Kristi Keland ’71 Bruce H. Mitchell ’71 Frederick H. Bultman ’72 Ilene F. Levin ’72 Andrew Harcus ’74 Matthew Lamphear ’74 Timothy Hielscher ’75
became board-certified in HIV medicine, tropical medicine, travel medicine, pain medicine, and addiction medicine. Besides spending two years as a medical missionary in Kijabe Kenya, where he lived with Karin, his wife of 22 years and their daughters, Trina (17), Kari (15), and Johanna (11), Swanson also did shorter overseas medical mission stints in Nepal, Tanzania, and Honduras. Over his career, Swanson had a special interest in training residents and medical trainees of all types, relishing the chance to introduce them to the medical care of the marginalized. Swanson was a former collegiate tennis player, a lifelong genealogy enthusiast, a proud stockowner of the Green Bay Packers, and a committed reader and book collector. For the last two decades, his life’s mission statement was the early anonymous Quaker proverb, “As we go through life, let us do as much good as we can, for we pass this way but once.”
Dorothy Feest ’76 Mary Jane Schell ’78 Jay Porter ’79 Ed Heck ’80 Michael Quicker ’80 Thomas Wood Moll ’82 Ann Carter Vos ’82 Richard C. Dow ’83
Dr. Thor D. Swanson ’83 Maria Windh-Lind ’85 Derek Schultz ’89 Jeni Waldron ’90 Heather L. Webster ’97 Jessica Chapman ’02 Aleksas J. Trotter ’04 Brandon Zimmerman ’04