Walter J. Vierling died during a church conference at Roanoke College

Walter J. Vierling came to Kay Witt's class at Macy McClaugherty Elementary/Middle School in Pearisburg nearly every Thursday. About 1:30 p.m., Witt and a delegation of second-graders would meet Vierling at the school office and escort him to a special chair in their classroom.

The white-haired man walked with a cane and wore a cross that hung halfway down his chest on a leather strap. The cross was a gift from his parents.

At Christmas, he wore a Santa hat, too.

Vierling knew his last name could be hard for young tongues to wrap around, so he and Witt's class decided they would call him Mr. Walter.

And they did, often. In school. In stores. Even when he was a county or two away. It seemed that every time Vierling left his house, a little voice would call, "Mr. Walter, do you remember me?"

He remembered.

He read the children stories, told them about far-off places he'd visited, sang them songs.

He greeted them in a different language almost every time he came.

"They will be very sad," Witt said.

Vierling, 91, died Thursday night, the possible victim of a carbon monoxide leak in a Roanoke College dorm. He was there for Power in the Spirit, a three-day conference of Bible study, worship, music and Christian fellowship.

Corbin Vierling, his daughter, talked to him on the phone about 8 p.m. Thursday. Her father had just had Communion, she said, and he probably went to sleep dreaming of a new piano he was about to have moved into his house.

"I know he was really happy to be where he was," she said. "As a Christian, he was getting ready to meet God all his life. And he was looking forward to it and to being reunited with our mother."

Dorothy Corbin Vierling died in 2001.

Walter Vierling was a Lutheran preacher. No longer pastor of any particular church, he preached whenever he was invited -- and he was invited often. He preached his last sermon last Sunday.

"I think as he grew older, he almost spoke with more authority because he was getting closer and closer to God," Vierling's daughter said.

A Navy chaplain for 22 years, Vierling was at Iwo Jima. He was in Korea, too, where a sniper took a special interest in him, but never hit him, Corbin Vierling said.

"He seemed to have picked my father out in particular," she said.

But whenever Walter Vierling told the story, he would say of the man who tried so hard to kill him, "You have to remember, he was in a very bad situation."

That summed her father up, Corbin Vierling said.

"No matter what happened, he was always looking for the reason that was forgivable."