Efforts to identify veterans at risk of dementia intensifying locally
DAYTON Willie Norman Walker was a Korean War veteran who regularly read the newspaper, loved to do crossword puzzles everyday that challenged his thinking, and as his wife Edna Walker said, “was the smartest person I know.”
An Army weapons specialist from Georgia, Walker ended his military service in the 1950s. But during retirement, he started forgetting where he was putting things and “just to look at his face and see the disorientation I knew something was wrong,” Edna Walker said.
She took him to a Veterans Administration Medical Center to get checked. The diagnosis was vascular dementia. Walker was in his early 70s.