Engracio Balita, hospital medical director

When the Japanese army invaded the Philippines in December 1941, Engracio Celis Balita was 17 and, as a member of his high school's ROTC, endangered.

Not long after the invasion, the Japanese hanged the husband of one of his sisters.

So, to protect Engracio, the Balita family sent him and his brother, Julian, to hide in the Luzon Island city of Baguio.

"He didn't graduate from high school until he was 22," his wife, Virginia, said.

And when he entered the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, she said, "he wanted to study law, but his mother said, medicine, because in that culture you did what your parents wanted."

After graduating from the medical school at Santo Tomas in 1953, Dr. Balita came to the United States to begin his career in 1954.

On Sunday, May 15, Dr. Balita, 91, of Hammonton, N.J., medical director at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, died at home.

During his medical residencies at three hospitals in Brooklyn, N.Y., he studied to become an obstetrician/gynecologist and, his wife said, "delivered many babies in Brooklyn."

But after marrying a New York City woman in 1957, and with their first child born in 1959, he was enticed when, his wife said, "Ancora was offering him a residency in psychiatry," and a house there, too.

And so his career changed.

As a staff physician at Ancora from the early 1960s, he worked for four years to complete his residency in psychiatry and then, his wife said, "rose through the ranks" to become Ancora's medical director in the late 1960s.

While at Ancora until the late 1980s, his wife said, Dr. Balita was in the 1970s and 1980s a consultant at the former Kessler Memorial Hospital in Hammonton.

"He was a very busy man," his wife said.

And after leaving Ancora and Kessler, she said, he was a staff psychiatrist at the Cumberland County Guidance Center in Vineland into the 2000s.

"He worked until he was 84," she said.

After becoming a U.S. citizen in 1962, she said, "he had flags all over the house" for years.

Besides his wife, Dr. Balita is survived by daughters Susan Fox and Catherine, a sister, and six grandchildren.

A visitation was set from 11 a.m. Friday, May 20, at St. Joseph Church, Third and French Streets, Hammonton, before a 12:30 p.m. Funeral Mass there. Burial is to be private.

Donations may be sent to AtlantiCare Hospice, Box 1626, Pleasantville, N.J. 08232.

Condolences may be offered to the family at marinellafuneralhome.com.

wnaedele@phillynews.com

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