Cardiologist who died in plane crash touched a lot of lives

But Dr. Timothy Hickerson said those hands were as good “opening a clogged fuel line as a clogged artery.”

Others who knew Kalweit outside his practice saw the boy who grew up on a New York farm use them to graft fruit trees, plant flower gardens, build deer blinds and run bulldozers.

Said his wife, Suzanne Kalweit, “There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do if he had the time to do it.”

A funeral service for Dr. Wilhelm Kalweit will begin at 2 p.m. today, Nov. 16, at the Littleton & Rue Funeral Home. He was killed Nov. 7, when the airplane he was piloting crashed in Hardin County. Kalweit was 56.

Colleen Walters, who as a physician recruiter helped bring Kalweit to Springfield in 1989, said he had a personality as big as the outdoors he loved and “a zest for living.”

Hickerson said Kalweit’s big laugh, self-deprecating humor, and storehouse of jokes made him fun to be around.

Brought to the United States from Germany by his parents when he was 3, Kalweit was not by nature an emotional man, his friends said. Walters called him “very direct and straighforward.”

But the arrival of son Christopher 12 years ago, brought out a new dimension.

“His son really was a highlight of his life and really broadened his love for people,” Hickerson said.

His wife of nearly 30 years said her husband was such an avid deer hunter that “when we first got married, I had to take a hunter safety course.”

“You can take the boy off the farm,” she said, “but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.”

In Springfield, the Kalweits developed 200 acres of land into a haven for deer — corn, fruit trees and gardens were planted with deer in mind.

Sam Ridder, who hunted with Kalweit, said, “Bill was one to give back to plants and nature. Bill wasn’t a taker, he was a giver.”

“He operated bulldozers, scrapers, dump trucks,” said Ridder, a retired teacher. “It was amazing we meshed the way we did.”

Himself a pilot and flight instructor, Hickerson described Kalweit as “smooth” in an airplane.

Walters said, “Folks who have been treated by him and connected with him are really struggling.”

The man with the dextrous hands touched a lot of lives.