Beloved Columbia physician dies at 87

Dr. Charles Rembert Sloan, longtime Columbia surgeon, civic leader and humanitarian, died Wednesday at Palmetto Health Baptist hospital at the age of 87.

Along with a long list of accomplishments that ranged from being a University of South Carolina track star and senior class president to master rose gardener to philanthropist to Sunday school teacher to Korean War veteran to Columbia Rotary Club president, Sloan was also known for a kind of accomplishment not easily recorded in any book:

'You were enriched just being near him. He always had a smile, and was as cheerful a man as there is," said Bob Ford, fellow Rotarian, writer and former captain in the Lexington County Sheriff's Department.

"A giant of a man," said Jack Van Loan, Five Points businessman and former prisoner of war in Vietnam. "He was a great listener, and he listened with his eyes, and his whole body."

Sloan - known to many as "Dr. Charlie" - grew up in lower Richland County and graduated from the Medical University of South Carolina in 1948. With a break as a U.S. Army medical officer in Korea in the Korean War, he spent more than 40 years in private practice in Columbia and was on the surgical staffs of all Columbia-area hospitals.