Published: April 04, 2008 11:55 am      

Hometown heroes advancing their fields

KEYSER - A retired executive with a $4 billion dollar service company, a doctor who serves as director of a medical research unit in Kenya, and an Air Force colonel who serves as chief of a team of 42 attorneys have all been named as inductees into the Keyser High School Legion of Honor.

Ron Kuykendall of Keyser, Dr. Douglas Shaffer of Kericho, Kenya, and Col. Neil Whiteman, stationed in Arlington, Va., will be honored for their accomplishments April 16 at the annual Legion of Honor Banquet.

Kuykendall, a 1959 graduate of Keyser High who won the J. Edward Kelley Award that year, went on to earn an associate degree at Potomac State College and a bachelor's degree in history at Wheaton (Ill.) College.

He began his career in 1964 with ServiceMaster, a management company that provides housekeeping services to hospitals, school districts, industrial plants, colleges and universities.

Kuykendall quickly moved up, progressing to manager of housekeeping at three different hospitals, then to regional manager and as Pittsburgh area manager.

After earning a master's degree from the ServiceMaster graduate program, he moved up through divisional manager, divisional vice president, group president, president, executive vice president for new business, and eventually executive advisor to the board of directors in 1986.

When Kuykendall retired in 1996, ServiceMaster was serving thousands of facilities around the country, and was rated by Forbes Magazine as the Best Service Company in the United States for a period of 10 years.

He has been active in Promise Keepers, as well as choir director, Sunday school teacher, lay leader and member of the board of trustees at Fountain United Brethren Church in Christ.

He also coached Little League for eight years and is auxiliary coach for the Keyser High girls tennis team and coach for his church basketball team.

Shaffer, a 1984 graduate of Keyser High, was a Heskitt Scholar at Potomac State and graduated cum laude from the West Virginia University School of Pharmacy in 1988. He entered the WVU School of Medicine and was inducted into Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical honor society.

Shaffer, the son of Dr. Dallas and Jennie Shaffer, completed his internship at the University of North Carolina Hospitals and his internal medicine residency at the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

He was the first graduate of the combined National Institutes of Health-Duke University Training Program in Clinical Research, after having received a master's degree in health sciences in clinical research from Duke University School of Medicine.

He joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and in 2001 was invited by the Indiana University-Moi University Schools of Medicine in Eldoret, Kenya, to teach medical students.

While there, he witnessed the devastation of HIV/AIDS on the Kenyans, and took a year off without pay to work with medical students and help establish the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital's Institutional Research and Ethics Committee.

In 2004, he transferred from the FDA to the U.S. Department of Defense as a civilian and returned to Kenya.

He serves as director of the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit-Kenya HIV program in Kericho and oversees the HIV treatment services, with approximately 15,000 Kenyans enrolled and nearly half of them receiving HIV/AIDS antiretroviral therapy.

His family is sponsoring a Kenyan student who is attending WVU in the computer engineering program.

Whiteman graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1984, with a bachelor of science in civil engineering. He earned a master's degree in engineering management in 1988 from the Air Force Institute of Technology, a juris doctor degree in 1993 from the WVU College of Law, a master of laws in government contracting in 2000 from George Washington University Law School, and a master of science in national security studies in 2005 from National Defense University.

Before becoming a judge advocate, he served for six years as a civil engineer in the Air Force. As judge advocate, Whiteman served in a variety of positions.

He now serves as chief of the Air Force Commercial Litigation Division in Arlington, Va., where his team of attorneys and paralegals defends the Air Force and the entire country in contract claims and disputes, bankruptcy, bid protests, intellectual property and surety cases.

His team handles more than 250 cases with over $2.4 billion at stake.

Whiteman is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and is admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

He is the son of the late Edna Whiteman of Keyser.

The Legion of Honor Banquet will be held April 16 at American Legion Post 155 with a social hour scheduled at 6 p.m. and dinner at 6:30 p.m.

Tickets may be purchased by calling (304) 788-3520 or (304) 788-0384 by April 13.

Contact Liz Beavers at lbeavers@times-news.com.