Dr. William Mason Dickens, chief medical director of the Veterans Administration Regional Office in Waco, Texas, died of a coronary occlusion in a Brownwood hospital on July 28, 1955. He had started on a short business trip and had to stop at Brownwood after suffering a heart attack.
Dr. Dickens was born January 11, 1888 in Merit, Texas, the son of Samuel Marshall and Virginia Dee (Wilcoxon) Dickens. He attended North Texas State Normal College in Denton, and Grayson College, Whitewright, before entering the University of Tennessee School of Medicine, from which he was graduated in 1911. He interned in Roosevelt Hospital in New York for a year and a half, then began his practice in Greenville, where he remained until 1941.
At that time, he entered the Army Medical Corps and served at Camp Bowie, Camp Claiborne (in Louisiana) and at the induction center in Houston. At the close of the war, when he was retired as a lieutenant colonel, he was named a medical officer for the Veterans Administration and had been assigned to the regional office in Waco for several years at the time of his death. He also served overseas in the Medical Corps during World War I.
Dr. Dickens was a member of the Texas Medical Association through the Hunt County Medical Society, of which he was president in 1941. He served as city health officer of Greenville for four years, and in 1937 he was appointed to the State Board of Health. He belonged to the Baptist Church.
He was interested in military affairs, and while practicing in Greenville he organized Company M, 14th Infantry of the National Guard, and served as captain of the company. He was active in the American Legion and served as first vice-state commander and a member of the board of trustees. He enjoyed fishing and spent leisure time on a farm recently purchased in Arkansas.
Dr. Dickens and Miss Vera Estelle Davis were married on June 30, 1914 in Farmersville; Mrs. Dickens died on September 30, 1942. Two children, Miss Betty J. Dickens of Waco and Dr. William R. Dickens of Cincinnati, Ohio and three grandchildren survive.
=== published in the Texas State Journal of Medicine, November 1955. Transcriber is not a relative and has no further information regarding this family.
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