FATHER'S DAY TRIBUTE

I recently read Richard Ford’s memoir of his parents Between Them and it got me thinking about my parents and remembering events from my childhood.  I enlisted my sister, Sandy, in this project and we have had some great discussions of those times.  In trying to put together dates, in my archives I came across this talk that I gave to a couple of Historical Societies in the towns near where we grew up and where I was living before I moved to Maine.  I share the notes here as I believe they capture the essence of my Dad.

Imagine an ad for a job which read:

Berlin, NY - Need a board certified physician to practice in a small town in a rural setting. Hours – 24 a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, no vacation, no benefits, low pay.  Would you apply for this job??? Well that is just what my father did in 1948.  Although I don’t know if there was an actual ad – maybe some of you can tell me.

Since the Berlin Historical Society asked me to do this, I have been thinking about things. It's hard to remember my childhood as one cohesive story, but I do remember lots of little things about it and general impressions that I had, and although that's not as easy to do as a talk in front of people, I’ll give it a try.

My Father's Background

            Son of Presbyterian minister

            Wesleyan – Cornell – summers in Labrador

Residency in Rochester NY – met my mother – first couple in hospital to be married and both allowed to still work. (You can guess who would “go” in this one (1939)!

Sister born in Rochester - Me – born War College, Carlisle PA - brother in Troy, NY

            3 years in China

            Johnson & Johnson Research

            Berlin, New York

Life was very hectic.   My father made house calls in the morning, had office hours from 1-3 and 7-9. I would often hear the phone ring in the night and then hear my father get up and go out.  And he did this is all types of weather.  One time he was called to a car accident on a bitterly cold night and his ears got frostbitten and the morphine in his bag froze in the vial.

We never sat down to a meal that the phone or door bell did not ring.  One time we were sitting at the dinner table and the phone had wrung about three times.  Half kiddingly, my father said to my brother, who answered the phone, “Tell them your father is not here”  So Jim got on the phone and said “My father says he is not here” which I am sure went over very well on the other end.  To this day, none of us like the telephone and often if I must make a call, I make sure it is not around a mealtime. At that time the local switchboard was our “answering machine” and if it was an emergency the operator, Norma, would track my father down. (I also remember leaving messages with her when I was away at school if unable to get through to my parents.)

My father’s practice demanded some sacrifices on the family in terms of privacy, financial burdens, family time, and solitude.  I only remember my parents taking a vacation once when they went to my father’s college reunion.  We never went on vacation as a family.  It was a treat just to take a small ride in the car together and often we would be in the car ready to go and someone would drive up needing attention and the trip would be aborted.

Being a small town doctor was a little like being in political office.  Your life was very public and you were either loved or hated.  My sister remembers kids telling her that her father was a “horse doctor” and being deeply hurt.  My brother tells of being beaten up because he was the “doctor’s son”, but I never remember anything happening to me.

Since the practice was in our house, the whole family became involved.  They had regrettably taken out a back stairway to make the kitchen larger which left the only means of getting to the downstairs was the front hallway. If you were not fully clothed you would stand at the top of the stairs and listen carefully to see if you could hear anyone in the waiting room and then make a mad dash for it.  Often you would then get stuck downstairs. 

This lack of privacy has affected us throughout our lives.  If we got into an argument and were shouting at each other, we were told “What will people think if they hear you”, which has probably contributed a great deal to our personalities as far as keeping things inside and also the theory of “what will other people think”.  We all love to be alone and have things be very peaceful. 

My mother was very much a part of the practice and personally I don’t know how they would have managed if they had not worked as a team. She was nurse, secretary, maid, wife, and mother. We didn’t have any outside help.  She was very good at screening calls and often taking care of things without involving my father.  She had to do all the laundry involved with making sure the office linens were sterilized, as well as the instruments.  Although one of the familiar smells in our house was that of burning rubber when my father would take over this task and forget he had left the sterilizer on and the syringes would burn.  She had to remind him to remind people that they owed him money.

Of course you knew all the town hypochondriacs and various other eccentrics. And somehow we knew that what we saw or knew was confidential, although I never remember being told this.  As many of you probably know, you could tell my mother something and she would never repeat it.   My sister tells of being in the upstairs hallway when one patient, a schizophrenic, would come and talk to my father about people being after her and how she could feel the blood dripping from her heart.  My sister heard all this and when the woman left she said to my father “Daddy, she just needs someone to talk to” and he said “Well, next time she comes I will call you”.  Which I can hear him saying.  

I remember 3 babies that he delivered, although I am sure there were many more.  One day when we came home from school the kitchen was closed up and the windows all steamy.  There was a newborn, all cheesy in the kitchen with my mother who had the oven going.  Apparently a school girl came home from school not feeling well and delivered the baby.  The parents demanded that my father take it out of the house immediately.  The baby stayed with a local family until she was adopted. Another time, in the middle of the night, a man came to the door and said his wife was sick.  My mother leaned out the window and told him to wait and my father would drive him home, but he left instead.  It was up on the Plank Road and when my father got there he realized that the woman was having a baby and he did not have the right instruments, so said that he would have to go home.  As he was going out the door the grandmother said “He is going home to get something to cut the biblical cord”. And then he did deliver one when he had already retired.

And it is little tales like this, of slips of words, that I remember.  One time a patient was in the hospital and the family called to see how he was doing and were told that he had expired.  They went to visit him the next day.

I remember at one point being very curious about death and what a dead person looked like.  I was probably about 12 when this happened.  I had avoided a corpse for years as I would never visit the undertaker’s girls next door if they had someone laid out in the living room as they too did not have a back stairway!  Anyway, one time there was a corpse in the waiting room – a road worker who had died of a heart attack and I begged my mother to show him to me.  He was huge and his face was all purple and believe me it cured me of my corpse obsession for quite a while. My brother claims that my father would take him on calls all the time (probably to get him out of my mother’s hair!) and that he witnessed the aftermath of 3 suicides.

It was a great treat to ride with my father on calls as that was really the only time we had one on one with him.  Although he was always home, he was not always there for us. We all remember being jealous that others got most of our father’s attention.  My sister remembers faking an illness to get attention.  I do remember that there was a little girl who had been bitten by a rabid dog and had to come everyday for two weeks to get shots which at that time were very painful.  My father would get a little something for her each day to ease the process a bit and I remember being insanely jealous of her getting the gifts, especially one gift which was a tiny tea set that he had purchased from the corner store.

My father was a great putterer and had many hobbies, painting, woodworking, music, reading (he especially loved reading about the Civil War) and would often be off in his workshop or the barn working.* One day I was in the house alone and some people came to the door and said that they had their sick mother in the car and could they bring her in and I told them to bring her in while I looked for my father.  They opened the car door and the poor woman fell out onto the sidewalk, foaming at the mouth.  I said “Oh don’t bother to bring her in, she’s dead”, which set everyone hysterically crying.  Fortunately at that moment my father came around the corner and had them bring her in while he calmed everyone down (and she was indeed dead).

*He also jogged before jogging was the rage, and much to my horrification, often during class I would see him running in his shorts around the school track. 

Often one thinks that because you are a doctor that you are rich.  We were far from rich, in fact we were quite poor.  My mother made all our clothes and could stretch a pound of hamburger many ways.  I can remember my father recording a patient’s fee for an office visit in a little book -- $3.00.  And he was a terrible bookkeeper and often would forget to bill someone because he forgot their name or he would just not charge them if he thought they were too poor.   He worked on the barter system with many patients – a dozen eggs or whatever.    My mother told me that the year I lived in France my father made only $6,000! There was no Medicare or Medicaid back then, but there was welfare. Frankly he would never have been able to deal with all that paper work.

In 1965 I think my father realized that in order to have some money for retirement he would have to change, so when the opportunity came up to be a school physician at a prep school (Northfield Mt. Hermon) in Massachusetts, he took it.  There was no social security for doctors and working at the school allowed him to have some sort of pension.  He was at the school 10 years. 

They always loved Berlin and kept their house, planning to return here which they did in 1975.  My father died in 1976 at the age of 64.

The type of practice that my father had rarely exists anymore and is so different from medicine today.  Very few doctors today would have their office in the home and the family would not be involved like we were. Most physicians would be in a group practice that allowed them coverage and time off.

I truly believe that my father loved what he did and loved Berlin.  He was a tremendous influence on my life and I have missed him these past 41 years and rarely does a day go by that I don’t think about him.