Ada News
Ada, Pontotoc County, Oklahoma
August 28, 2008
Services for Billy Lenard DePrater, 72, Konawa, are 10 a.m. Friday, Aug. 29,
2008, at Swearingen Funeral Home Chapel in Konawa. Ed Bray will officiate.
Burial will follow at 2 p.m. at South
Heights Cemetery, 1815 S. Ridgeway Street in Sapulpa.
Mr. DePrater died Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008, at an Ada hospital. He was born Oct.
4, 1935, in Sapulpa to William J. and Maude DePrater.
He lived in Keifer until he was 12 when his family moved to Konawa. He attended
Vamoosa schools and graduated in 1953. He then attended Bethany Penile (now
known as Bethany Nazarene) in Bethany. He graduated with a bachelor of science
in chemistry from East Central University in 1958, and was employed by Oklahoma
State Department of Health. He received a Public Health Service Grant to attend
the University of Oklahoma where he received a masters degree in Sanitary
Science and Public Health (Industrial Hygiene). He continued his career with the
Bureau of Mines at the Helium plant in Keys, Okla., and later he transferred to
the Bartlesville Petroleum Research division where he worked in Physical
Chemistry in the development of rocket fuels and propellants. He was co-author
on several scientific papers out of this facility.
He transferred to the
Public Health Service and was the chief chemist on the Delaware Estuary Study
working to clean up the Delaware and Raritan Rivers in New Jersey and
Pennsylvania. He developed several tests to study estuary waters. He also taught
mini classes in Mass-Spectroscopy at Rutgers University and CC&Y.; He
transferred to the Robert S. Kerr Regional Laboratory in Ada., in 1965, and
worked there until 1982.
He married Ann Brewer in 1956.
Survivors include two sons, William DePrater and wife, Shawna of Ada, and Bruce
DePrater of Fresno, Calif., three daughters, Cindy DePrater of The Colony,
Texas, Cheryl Gurley and husband, Gary of Redondo Beach, Calif., and Stacy
Shelton and husband, Douglas of Norman; two grandchildren, Brealyn Brashier and
Oliver Shelton; two sisters, Vera Bland and Margaret Paxton, and several nieces
and nephews.
He was preceded in death by his father, William J. DePrater, who died in 1963,
and his mother, Maude Stephens DePrater who died in 1996. Swearingen Funeral
Home, Konawa.
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