Quiz: Why was the namesake of KU Medical Center’s Battenfeld Auditorium in the news recently?

A: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported July 23 that the remains of Jesse R. Battenfeld Jr., a flight surgeon stationed at Sand Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, and his pilot, Ensign Matthew R. McFarland, were being recovered from a site in the Cascades near Cle Elum, Wash. Their plane crashed Feb. 15, 1945; the site was not discovered until September 1945. A Navy recovery team and U.S. Forest Service rangers found the site and buried the remains there. The men were declared dead Oct. 30, 1945.

Over the decades residents of the isolated area forgot that small stainless-steel crosses near the wreckage were grave markers, not memorials. After an amateur historian verified the facts, forensic experts from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii agreed to try to identify the remains.

Battenfeld was the elder son of Jesse R. Sr. and Margaret Battenfeld of Kansas City, Mo. Their younger son, John Curry Battenfeld, had been killed in a car accident in December 1939 while a student, and in his memory they donated funds for the first men’s scholarship hall built at KU. Battenfeld Hall opened in fall 1940 in the new Alumni Place.

After Jesse Jr.’s death, the Battenfelds created a memorial fund at the KU School of Medicine, where he had earned his degree. In April 1954 the Student Center there opened, and its auditorium is named for him.

In 1952 the widowed Margaret Battenfeld had married Dr. Edward Hashinger, a longtime medical school faculty member. She continued her philanthropies to the university, and in 1962 a new residence hall on Daisy Hill was named in her honor.