Geoffrey Kemp Booth – 50th Reunion Essay

Geoffrey Kemp Booth

Date of Death: 19-Jan-1997

College: Jonathan Edwards

(From the October 1998 Class Notes.)

Myron Thompson (chief judge of the United States District Court for Middle District of Alabama, and President Carter’s last judicial appointment), notes sadly the 1997 death in Tiburon, California, of his college roommate, Geoffrey Kemp Booth. Myron writes that Geoff graduated from Georgetown Medical after leaving Yale, and had a distinguished career at the VA Medical Center in San Francisco since 1986 as chief of psychiatric outpatient services. Myron says that Geoff’s most satisfying work was teaching students at the University of California, San Francisco. Myron and Geoff had just reconnected after years of not being in contact, and the irony was that Geoff expressed the wish to get back in touch with his Yale friends after all these years.

From the San Francisco Examiner: Dr. Geoffrey K. Booth, chief of psychiatric outpatient services at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UC-San Francisco, died of heart failure January 19, 1997. Dr. Booth, a Tiburon resident, grew up in Boston and Westport, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale University and Georgetown Medical School. He joined the Navy in 1971 and completed his residency training in psychology at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, where he became chief resident in 1975. He later served there as director of residency training.

After being honorably discharged, he began his career with the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco, working as assistant medical director of the substance abuse treatment unit. He was later promoted to assistant chief of the mental hygiene clinic before becoming chief of psychiatric outpatient services in 1986. In 1981, Dr. Booth started teaching at UCSF as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, and was promoted to associate professor in 1992. In 1984, he received the Teaching Award from the graduating class at UCSF.