The Columbus chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart honored Robert Walton, a chemist who helped work on the mass production of penicillin during World War II, in a ceremony Wednesday at the National Veterans Memorial and Museum, 300 W. Broad St.
Walton’s daughter, Worthington resident Wendy Walton Reichenbach, joined two members of the Columbus group in laying a wreath on a monument to veterans that the Purple Heart group installed in 2018 in Memorial Grove, located outside the museum.
Reichenbach said Walton, 103, was recovering from a recent illness and could not attend the ceremony.
Reichenbach wrote about her father, a former chemist for the Merck company in New Jersey during the war, in a Dispatch story in July. That article attracted the attention of the Purple Heart group.
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