W.A. Booth, former official at U.Va., dies

William Arthur "Bill" Booth was a magnet who drew people to him.

As the executive director of the University of Virginia Medical Alumni Association, he was instrumental in creating the U.Va. Medical School Foundation. Mr. Booth was "widely recognized and praised for his ability to successfully cultivate the good will of the graduates and friends of the medical school, resulting in contributions, which significantly enhanced the foundation's endowment," said his stepson, Jesse B. Wilson III of Purcellville.

As director of the foundation, which he directed in tandem with the alumni group, Mr. Booth also "is credited with having secured substantial contributions directly to the medical school," Wilson said.

"He had a unique personality. He attracted people to him in a way that. . . . I haven't seen anything like it before. He was widely respected and held with great affection."

Mr. Booth died in a Charlottesville hospital on Christmas Eve at the age of 86.

A funeral will be held Tuesday at 11 a.m. at Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville. Burial will be in the cemetery of Mount Moriah United Methodist Church in White Hall, next to his wife of 50 years, Cornelia "Dee" Winston Clark Wilson Booth, who died in 2005.

Named executive director of a newlyfounded U.Va. Medical Alumni Association in 1960, Mr. Booth was responsible for the association's organization and development.

In 1992, the year he retired, he was instrumental in organizing the U.Va. Medical School Foundation as a fundraising arm of the medical school.

Successive deans of the medical school retained him as a consultant on medical alumni affairs, a post he still held at his death.

A native of Wappingers Falls, N.Y., Mr. Booth grew up in Baltimore and graduated from the University of Maryland.

As an Army pilot during World War II, he flew large cargo planes "over the hump" of the Himalaya Mountains between India and China.

After the war, work as a publicist and fundraiser in New York for the American Cancer Society eventually brought him to Virginia.

In addition to his stepson, include a stepdaughter, Joyce Wilson Sielewicz of Newport, N.H.; and a stepgrandson.