Beall Dozier Gary Jr.

Beall Dozier Gary, Jr., died suddenly at age 56 on Sunday morning, May 10, while on his weekly thirteen-mile run at his home in White Hall, Virginia. He was an avid runner his entire adult life, and those who loved him find a measure of consolation in the knowledge that he died, to borrow the title of one of his favorite books, “at play in the fields of the Lord.” His too-short life ended doing something he loved, and in the middle of majestic scenery that stirred his soul: The rolling hills of western Albemarle County. A horse farm with a small pond. A rustic barn in the middle of a field frequented by red-shouldered hawks and enclosed by a post-and-barbed-wire fence festooned with flowering blackberry bushes. The Blue Ridge Mountains in the background, and the Shenandoah beyond them. “Nap,” as he was known to friends and family alike, had lived with his family in White Hall since August of 2012. At time of his death, he was the chief operating officer of Regent Surgical Health, responsible for all aspects of operations for the company’s nationwide network of surgery centers. At its most recent meeting, Regent Surgical’s board had promoted him to president of the company, as part of his transition to CEO by year’s end. The oldest of the four children of Beall Dozier Gary, Sr., and Florence Foy Strang, Nap was born on July 19, 1958 in Birmingham, Alabama. When he was several months old, his family moved to a house in then-unincorporated Jefferson County (now part of the suburb of Vestavia), where Nap lived until he went off to college and then law school. In this setting—a quarter-mile from a working farm, with a hundred acres of woods behind it, a wooded parcel of land on one side of it, and perhaps a hundred acres more of sparsely inhabited woods nearby—the wildness of nature became third parent, teaching him the virtues of awe, attentiveness, curiosity, patience, and serenity. From countless boyhood hours spent exploring the creek below his house, backtracking in Barbour County, and climbing in Horse Pens 40 and Providence Canyon in Lumpkin Georgia, to adulthood passions for trail running, hiking along the Appalachian Trail and in national parks out west, summiting Timpanogos in Utah and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and designing adventures for visitors to his vacation home at Lake Martin, the love of the outdoors defined him, annealed him, sustained him. So, too, did his interest in the history and culture of the first inhabitants of the American southeast. He studied Creek grammar, searched for lost Yuchi villages, visited ancient Mound Builder sites, and collected portraits of Eufaula micos, and researched the history of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1831 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia decision. Native Americans’ reverence for and symbiotic relationship with the earth profoundly shaped his religious sensibilities. Nap received his elementary education at All Saints Episcopal School, Cahaba Heights Elementary School, and the Highlands School. In 1975, he graduated from Indian Springs School in Helena, Alabama, where he served as mayor and sang in the glee club. He received his B.A., cum laude, in 1979 from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he continued his study of French literature and majored in history, was named to the dean’s list for three years, and served as president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. He earned a J.D. in 1982 from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where he was associate managing editor of the Washington University Law Quarterly. He then returned to the Birmingham area and became a member of the Alabama State Bar later that same year. From that time until he and his family moved to Virginia, 2012, Nap lived in Birmingham’s Southside, in Columbiana (Shelby County), and in Birmingham’s Forest Park neighborhood. From 1982 until 1996, Nap was an associate and then a partner at the law firm of Haskell Slaughter Young & Rediker, where he concentrated in corporate, securities, and healthcare law, with a focus on mergers and acquisitions, registered and exempt offerings, and general representation of closely held and public corporations. From 1996 until 2005, he worked at HealthSouth Corporation in Birmingham, Alabama. There he served as lead counsel for the company’s network of more than 125 surgery centers and president and supervisory principal of the company’s NASD-registered broker-dealer subsidiary. He later served HealthSouth as senior vice president of corporate development, heading up the department responsible for acquisitions and de novo development of all the company’s inpatient rehabilitation facilities and surgery centers (2004–05). He joined Regent Surgical in 2006. Among his professional activities, Nap was the immediate past president of the board of directors of the Ambulatory Surgery Center Association (ASCA) and the Ambulatory Surgery Foundation, two associated organizations that collectively constitute the trade association for the ambulatory surgery center industry and its 3,000 surgery center members. He was also a regular speaker at ASCA, state surgery associations, and other surgery center and hospital industry conferences. At its general meeting this past week, ASCA created the Nap Gary Lifetime Achievement Award in honor of him. Nap’s civic activities included serving as chairman of the board of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Greater Birmingham, and president of the Shelby County Humane Society. He was also a member of the Birmingham Track Club’s 1200 Mile Club. Of all his volunteer work, Nap was proudest of the partnership he helped forge among ASCA, Regent, and Partners in Health (a nonprofit cofounded by one of his fraternity brothers at Duke) to donate equipment no longer needed by surgery centers to PIH facilities in Haiti and other developing countries. His favorite authors included Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Reynolds Price, John Muir, and fellow Alabamian E. O. Wilson. His playlists featured the folk music of Stan Rogers, the ballads of Sarah McLachlan, the country music of Billie Joe Shaver, the blues of Nina Simone, the bawdy tunes of Clarence Carter, and the beach music of the 1960s. Other enthusiasms included bonsai, growing heirloom tomatoes and apples, kitsch postcards and collectibles, trivia related to the cartoons and sitcoms of the ’60s, Auburn Tigers football, Duke Blue Devils basketball, and a decades-long, Grail-like quest for a 45-rpm recording of Fess Parker singing “The Ballad of John Coulter.” His combination of curiosity, sidesplitting sense of humor—a gift for physical comedy, an impish ability to find hilarious (but unintended) meanings in what others said, and a fondness for teasing and verbal repartee that included the knowledge of when to stop— whip-smart intelligence, deep loyalty, and boundless generosity of spirit endeared him to a wide array of family, friends, and colleagues. Nap is survived by his wife of 30 years, Amy Little Gary; daughter, Emily Ann; sons, Beall Dozier Gary III (Britt) and David Loren; mother, Foy; brother, Loren; sisters, Kirven and Emily; mother-in-law, Jaqueline Little and father-in-law, Dyke Little; sister-in-law, Kelley; brothers-in-law, David and Jonathan; nephews, Drew, Sam, Will, Corey, Ian, and Jonathan; and nieces, Mercer, Heather, Leigh Ann, Karsyn, and Cassie. A celebration of Nap’s life will be held at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham (2017 Sixth Avenue North) on Wednesday afternoon, May 20, with the visitation beginning at 1:00, the service at 2:00, and a reception at THE Club (1 Robert S. Smith Drive) immediately following. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to either the scholarship fund at Indian Springs School (www.indiansprings.org/napgary) or to Partners in Health.