Walter Edmund Uffenheimer, D.D.S.

Born in his mother’s hometown of Boston, Walter was the second of three boys. Catharine married Louis Uffenheimer after his job brought him there from Philadelphia, where his father had emigrated from Germany.

It appears the family enjoyed some degree of wealth, originating on Catharine’s side. At least two of the boys, perhaps all three, attended private college-preparatory schools. The oldest son, Joseph, was at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and Walter graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, two of the oldest high schools in the country.

After about a dozen years in Concord, New Hampshire, the family moved to Philadelphia when Joseph went to the University of Pennsylvania. Walter and his younger brother, Frank, graduated from UPenn’s dentistry school. They both had their own private practice but neither of them married until they were around 40 years old.

Some other family characteristics were that none of the sons had children, and each of them, along with their wives, are in the same burial plot with their parents. There was no job listed for Louis after they moved to Philadelphia and he was apparently an invalid while Catharine ran a boarding house. She had a specific will and a moderate estate which was left to the youngest son, Frank, in order to care for his father. After she died in 1912, he did so until Louis died ten years later.

The notable aspect of Walter’s life was his local reputation as an expert billiards player, a passion he developed as a teenager. He played intercollegiate billiards before graduating in 1900, and frequently won the amateur billiards championship in Philadelphia. This photograph (with Walter at far left) illustrates the kind of game he played, on a table without pockets.

His category was carom billiards, or the French style, specifically the 18.2 Balkline game which is played with only three balls, two white and one red, as shown above. Walter lost the first game in the national amateur 18.2 billiard championship in New York In 1910, but would go on to win on other occasions. This undated clipping illustrates the complexities of the game.

His athletic interest shifted as he got older, being voted to the board of directors of the Yachtsmen’s Club of Philadelphia in 1922. The athletic one in the family was Joseph, the star left tackle for the UPenn football team in 1896. He became an Army private for a few months in 1898 during the Spanish-American war. 

During his service he contracted typhoid, from which he never fully recovered. He died in 1929 at age 54. Walter only lived to 55, spending the last two years of his life in Asheville, North Carolina trying to regain his health after an apparent bout with tuberculosis.

Doctors there performed a laparotomy, an exploratory surgery of the abdomen. They found a perforated intestine from a tuberculous ulceration, but he died on the operating table. 

In contrast, Frank lived 30 years longer than his brothers and that’s where the Uffenheimer family tree would end. Walter’s wife shares this stone in the family plot.