ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 15, 1997 TAG: 9702170032
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: The New York Times
John R. Bartels, a federal judge of the Eastern District of New York for 38 years, died Thursday at Long Island Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn.
Bartels, who lived in Brooklyn Heights, was the oldest sitting federal judge at age 99. He would have observed his 100th birthday Nov. 8.
An appointee of President Eisenhower in 1959, Bartels retired in 1973, when he was 76, saying he did so with regret, primarily to permit the appointment of another judge to address the increasingly busy calendar at the courthouse in Brooklyn. He then assumed the status of a senior judge and continued to hear cases until the end of his life.
``There's no job as good as a district judge,'' he once said. ``This job keeps me young, and I am very fond of it.''
As a judge, Bartels presided over a broad spectrum of cases, including labor racketeering, fraudulent promotion of diet pills, bank embezzlement, labor disputes on the Long Island Rail Road, murder, the environment and income tax evasion.
But his best known and longest-running case, which began in 1972, involved more than 5,000 retarded children and adults who were residents of the Willowbrook Developmental Center on Staten Island. The state-run center became the target of a U.S. District Court suit by parents and civil liberties lawyers, who termed it a place of horror where people ``deteriorated both mentally and physically.''
Under decisions and settlements made by Bartels, the population of Willowbrook was sharply reduced through the transfer of many patients to small group homes. The number of workers serving the remaining patients was increased, and Willowbrook was eventually closed, becoming a college of the City of New York.
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