Rosemary Waldron Tucker, 93, was hospital volunteer who had pioneering heart surgery
After heart surgery in 1962, she raised her children, overcame breast cancer and became one of the most valued volunteers at Chester County Hospital.
- Rosemary W. Tucker
- 93 years old
- Lived in West Chester
- She earned a degree in chemistry from Immaculata College
Rosemary Fitzmaurice Waldron Tucker will be remembered to those closest to her as a loving mother and grandmother. She also made important contributions to scores of other lives through her volunteer work at a local hospital and being a patient in a revolutionary heart procedure.
Mrs. Tucker had recently turned 93 when she died from COVID-19 complications on Wednesday, April 22.
She was born and raised in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia, attended West Catholic High School, and graduated with a degree in chemistry from Immaculata College in 1949.
Not many women were chem grads in those days. One of her projects involved how chemistry was used to develop atomic bombs.
Rosemary Fitzmaurice married Ray Waldron and moved to West Chester in 1951. He died in 1987. She married Edward Tucker in 1992; he died in 2007.
Mrs. Tucker had rheumatic fever as a child that led to the heart condition mitral stenosis when she became an adult.
“It caused her to have trouble walking up steps when she was a young woman,” said son Peter Waldron. In 1962, at age 35, she underwent cardiac surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania that her son described as both incredibly risky and pioneering.
Peter Waldron, a retired pediatric hematologist and oncologist, said his mother had a “commissurotomy, in which the heart is stopped briefly, cut open, and the stenosed [narrowed] mitral valve is made to move more like its normal extent.”
Mrs. Tucker would live 58 more years, in which she raised her children, overcame breast cancer and became one of the most valued volunteers at Chester County Hospital before retiring in 2015.
“She just kept on chugging.”
She was a founding member of the hospital’s Auxiliary May Festival, which has grown into a gala at Longwood Gardens.
In 1953, Mrs. Tucker had an extended stay at the hospital after falling down steps while she was pregnant with Peter. He said he thinks that led to a bond between his mother and the hospital.
“She had been through a lot,” Waldron said. “She just kept on chugging.”
In addition to her son, Mrs. Tucker is survived by sons R. Anthony, Mark, and Gerard; 10 grandchildren; and one great-grandson. A daughter, Mary Louise, predeceased her.
— Ed Barkowitz, ebarkowitz@inquirer.com