Dyer J. Taylor, retired judge, dies

In 1942 after the United States had entered World War II, Dyer Justice "Dick" Taylor was weeks away from graduation as a Navy pilot in Corpus Christi, Texas.

One day while he was flying in formation, someone clipped his plane's wing, said a daughter, Janet Savia of Fredericksburg. His plane plummeted and burned.

Struggling to escape the conflagration, he got caught in the door of his plane and caught fire.

At the base hospital, doctors found he had been burned over 99 percent of his body. The only normal skin left on his body was on his shoulders, where his parachute had rested. They saw no point in setting his broken leg and broken foot.

"They packed his bags to be sent home to his mother because they didn't think he'd make it," Savia said.

However, their patient pulled through, just as he had doggedly helped his widowed mother pull through the Depression. He had worked a night job parking cars during his senior year in high school so they could eat, Savia said.

Mr. Taylor, who retired in 1982 as an associate judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, died Friday of complications following hip surgery. The 86-year-old Weems resident was undergoing rehabilitation at a Gloucester County convalescent center.

A memorial service will be held Sunday at 2 p.m. at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Kilmarnock, where he and his wife attended services.

Mr. Taylor spent 2½ years recuperating in hospitals in Texas and Bethesda, Md., but suffered problems related to the crash for the rest of his life.

"If you looked at his skin, it looked like a patchwork quilt. This was during the nascent stages of plastic surgery. It was blatantly apparent he'd been in a fire," Savia said.

Mr. Taylor, a Columbia, S.C., native who grew up in Richmond and Washington, earned a bachelor's degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Before earning his law degree at George Washington University in 1951, he attended a dance, where he cut in on a man dancing with model and legal secretary Helen Patricia Owens. He married Owens six months later.

He was a trial lawyer in Washington, shared an office with future U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and served as a hearing examiner for the Interstate Commerce and the Federal Power commissions.

President Richard M. Nixon appointed him as a federal judge in 1970.

"My father was honest to a fault, and I believe that's want got him to the bench. Oliver Gasch, the district attorney for D.C., called him 'The Lion,'" Savia said.

In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife of 59 years, Helen Patricia Owens Taylor; another daughter, Kathleen Johanna Huntsinger of Edmore, Mich.; and four grandchildren and three great-grandsons.