Harry J. Woehr, 95, veteran and psychologist

Harry J. Woehr was an Army Air Corps operations officer at what might have seemed a safe harbor from all the killing during World War II.

Though Japanese troops occupied pieces of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, Mr. Woehr was at a safer base there.

He experienced loss of life there, just not American.

As part of a wartime program that transferred American airplanes to the Soviet Union, "he was involved in helping to get the Russian pilots to take off" and head home over a narrow strip of the Bering Sea, daughter Leslie Tuttle said in a phone interview.

But when Mr. Woehr told his daughter of his time there, it was no less painful, though no Americans suffered.

"He said, 'You could walk to Russia on the planes that didn't make it across,' " she said.

The Soviet pilots, unfamiliar with English, "couldn't understand what was being said in English on take-off," and couldn't read the instrument panels very well once they were airborne, she said.

Though there was considerable loss of life, she said, "it was wartime and everyone accepted the sacrifice."

Later in life, and far more safely, Mr. Woehr owned small aircraft and flew his family on vacation jaunts across the country.

On Wednesday, Oct. 21, Mr. Woehr, 95, a psychologist who lived in Haddonfield from 1956 to 2013 and owned Woehr Associates, a management consulting firm there, died at a family home in Cherry Hill.

J.C. Henry, CEO of the paving firm E.P. Henry Corp. in Woodbury, recalled in a phone interview that Mr. Woehr's consulting services were vital "in the transition from one generation to another, when I took over the company in about 1994."

Born in West Berlin, N.J., Mr. Woehr earned bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology at Temple University before earning a doctorate there in that discipline in 1952. While at Temple, his daughter said, he was a psychology lecturer there and at the Ogontz campus of Penn State. From 1980 to 1986, he was an adjunct professor of psychology at Hahnemann University.

After working as an industrial psychologist for a Center City consulting firm, Mr. Woehr opened his own firm in 1956. He was always within two blocks of City Hall, until he moved the firm to Haddonfield in 1987. He was chairman and his wife, Mindell, was president of Woehr Associates until they retired in 2005 and Tuttle became president.

He was a former board director of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce; a chairman of its committee on federal expenditures in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, and a former chairman of the Regional Transportation Council for Penjerdel.

Besides his wife and daughter, Mr. Woehr is survived by son Jack, daughter Karen Thompson, a brother, eight grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

A memorial service was set from noon, Monday, Oct. 26, at the United Methodist Church, 29 Warwick Rd., Haddonfield, followed by a visitation. Interment is to be private.

Donations may be sent to www.robinsnestinc.org.

Condolences may be offered to the family at http://kainmurphy.com.

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