John M. Walker

John Mercer Walker Sr. (January 15, 1909 – August 16, 1990) was an American medical doctor and investment banker. A member of the prominent Bush-Walker family, he was a maternal uncle of US President George H. W. Bush.

Biography Walker was the fifth of six children of banker and businessman George Herbert Walker and his wife Lucretia Wear, daughter of James H. Wear. (Walker's older sister Dorothy married President Bush's father Senator Prescott Bush.) Walker attended The Hill School and later Yale University, where he lettered in football, baseball and squash, was a member of Skull and Bones, and graduated in 1931. In 1936, Walker graduated from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and went on to his residency at Roosevelt Hospital. They had three sons and four daughters. One daughter died of polio in 1955 Walker had a private practice until he was diagnosed with polio in 1950. She lived another six months and died shortly before her fourth birthday.

Walker had a second career as an investment banker. He became a managing partner in G. H. Walker & Co., founded by his father in 1900, and a limited partner in Alex. Brown & Sons. In 1971, he retired to a farm in Easton, Maryland which for two decades he ran profitably for a third career. He spent summers with his extended family in Kennebunkport, Maine.

In 1989, President Bush appointed Walker's eldest son District Judge John M. Walker Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Bush told a White House lawyer "It's the least I can do for someone whose father did so much for me. Besides, Johnny's as well qualified as anyone else for the position."

Walker died in 1990 of an aneurysm, in a hospital in Biddeford, Maine.