Donald K. Webster

Source: Find A Grave

Donald K. Webster, 89, of Philadelphia, a former special-education teacher in city public schools, died of congestive heart failure last Friday at home.

Mr. Webster taught reading and mathematics at Robert Fulton Elementary School in East Germantown from 1961 to 1965 and at Germantown High School from 1965 until he retired in 1978, his daughter Paula Webster-Grant said.

Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Webster dropped out of Germantown High School when he was 17 and served in the Army from 1942 to 1945.

After training in an Army meteorology school to handle barrage balloons along the West Coast, he was working on a supply ship in the Philippines when a kamikaze attack cost him his left leg.

After being discharged and earning a general equivalency diploma, Mr. Webster earned a bachelor's degree in business in 1950 from what is now Virginia State University in Petersburg, his daughter said.

Mr. Webster worked for the U.S. Postal Service from 1951 to 1961, she said, and after summer courses at Pennsylvania State University earned his teaching certificate in 1961.

He earned a master's degree in education from Antioch University in Ohio in 1974, Webster-Grant said, and after summer courses earned a doctorate in education in 1979 from the former University of Sarasota.

While teaching in the 1970s, Mr. Webster worked a second job, helping accredit high schools for the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and the Commission on Secondary Schools of the Middle States Association, his daughter said.

A board member of the Wissahickon Boys Club from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

Besides his daughter, Mr. Webster is survived by his wife of 59 years, Catherine; another daughter, Patricia; and three grandchildren.