I came back from Naval Air Station Lemoore in the summer of 1968. I was discharged in July and we traveled across the country and arrived in Lander.
I found that the place where I had my office in 1965-1966 across the street from the post office on Lincoln Street (see photo below) had been rented and I needed a place to practice and start seeing patients.
Dr. Luther Harmon Wilmoth (1900-1997) had moved his office from above the City Drugstore to a remodeled house on 296 Garfield Street. I don't remember how it happened, but I arranged with him to rent space in his building for my office. (photo below)
We shared the waiting room and I had a room where I put a desk there, it was for my secretary’s office. I hired Eloise Lesher (1920-2008) as my office girl and I had one examining room and we shared the laboratory and the x-ray facilities.
I had previously applied for privileges at the hospital and so when I came back I did not need to reapply so I could admit patients to the hospital.
I would cover Doctor Wilmoth’s patients when he was out of town and the arrangement was that he would cover my patients when I was out of town. Sometimes I had to use Doctor Mary Higdon to cover but I was not out of town very much.
The summer of 1969 I had to attend a scouting training session at the Philmont Scout Camp in New Mexico. I felt it important to have somebody who was up to date in pediatrics so I contacted the pediatrician who took my place at the hospital in Lemoore and he agreed to come out and work for the 10 days that I would be gone to New Mexico and Colorado.
I started to get quite a few patients and needed some extra space and so Dr. Wilmoth agreed to have an addition built on to his office space to allow me to have two examining rooms.
In 1974 Linda Quan, who was the wife Dr. Joe Knight came into the area. She was interested in practicing pediatrics and had finished her internship. Her husband was employed by the Public Health Service at Fort Washakie and she didn't have anything to do and did not have any children at the time, so we made an arrangement that she would work in my office. I don't remember exactly what the payment arrangements were, but we seem to have an agreeable relationship and she also started working at the Wyoming State Training School seeing patients there.
She was in my office for two years. When her husband Joe’s duty with the Public Health Service was complete they left for the state of Washington to continue their training, he in orthopedics and she in pediatrics.
There were a number of doctors who got their start with the Public Health Service at Fort Washakie and then came into practice in Lander after their service was complete.
Some of the doctors that I remember that came from the public health service were Dr. Leo McMahon, Dr. Don Gullickson, and Dr. Tim Fleming.
Dr. Tim Fleming had a daughter, Jennifer Lyn, who developed leukemia. I referred her to Dr. Eugene Lahey (1917-2001) in Salt Lake for treatment. She died in January 1976. During the time that they were in Salt Lake for treatment, they became acquainted with Dr. Gary Lang, who was doing a fellowship with Dr. Lahey in pediatric hematology. Dr. Fleming told Gary that they needed another pediatrician in Lander and that he should go in with me. The way that I remember it is that he called me and informed me that he was coming into practice with me. I was taken aback, because I had not expressed a desire to have an associate to anyone. I did go down to Salt Lake and met him. He had made up his mind to come into practice with me. I acquiesced and told him that we had to have separate financial arrangements. He was to hire his own staff and do his own billing. I told him that I did not agree with abortion and if he were to come into an association with me, that he could not counsel anyone to have an abortion. When he finished his fellowship in Salt Lake he moved to Lander in about July of 1976.
Dr. Lang and I began to have the need for more room. I owned a house with a partner of mine (Alan Anderson) at 175 Wyoming Street across from the hospital. It was an ideal location for an office. I got permission for that side of the street to be zoned for medical offices. The renters that were in the building did not pay their rent and left a dead deer in the basement. I remodeled the house and put in baseboard heating and used the one room for a waiting room and turned the bedrooms into exam rooms. The kitchen became the laboratory and the open living room became an office.(see below)
It was my intention to have an office building that was more than a remodeled house. I had a friend in Riverton, Dennis Tippets who was in the modular home business (Style Homes) and approached him about building a modular structure that could be put up quickly and not take the time for scratch construction. Their architect drew up the plans. I approached my friend Wayne Nelson(1929-2014), who was a pharmacist at City Drug and he decided that he would like to put in a professional pharmacy and just sell drugs and medical supplies and not the usual accessories that drugstores had at that time. Dr. Charles McMahon said that he would like to have a suite in the office for his neurology practice, so I went ahead with the project.
I wanted solid construction and high-grade paint and flooring. The walls were to be insulated between each room and double Sheetrock installed. I wanted hot water baseboard heat and two furnaces to heat the suites and separate hot water and gas and electric meters. Because of the possibility of groundwater coming into the full basement I required a drainage system to be put around the foundation and a full basement with concrete floors to be used as storage. I had a safe installed when they poured the concrete floor under the west suite and a sound system with speakers in both office suites, but not in the pharmacy.
With all the additions, Style Homes did not bid on the construction and I opened the bids after advertising and Strube Construction from Riverton was the low bidder.
105 Wyoming Street on the left was the pharmacy, 115 in the center was my office suite and 125 on the right was the one occupied by the renters. Over time there was a Neurologist (Charles McMahon), Urologist (Dr. Ralph Hopkins) and another Neurologist (Dr. Peter Crane) who rented the space.
As a member of the hospital staff, I was asked to serve on the abortion and sterilization committee. In order to make it appear to be somewhat above board, they had to get someone outside of the Lander Medical Clinic to be on the committee. Dr. Harry Tipton (1927-2004) was the one doing all the abortions at that time. He and Brian Miracle, a psychologist, (1930-2006) and I made up the committee. When Dr. Tipton had a patient that wanted to be sterilized or have an abortion, he would call the committee to meet and present the case. The Supreme Court ruling of Roe vs. Wade had been made in 1973 and the committee was put into place at that time. I was against all abortions except to save the mother’s life. They eventually were so frustrated with my position on the matter that they circumvented the committee.
I suppose that I was somewhat brash. I thought that the practice of medicine should be both an art and a science. I was concerned that there were too many unnecessary hysterectomies being performed. There was also a national concern at that time. I was assigned to do some quality control as a member of the medical staff and to review charts. I went over the charts of three or four years of operations. I entered the pre-op diagnosis and then compared it with the pathology. A greater percentage of the operations had a pre-operative diagnosis of enlarged uterus. I found no correlation between the pathology and the symptoms or the size of the uterus. There were two doctors who were doing the surgery. One was a board certified surgeon, Dr. Bill Erickson and the other was Dr. Tipton, who had one year of residency in obgyn. Dr. Tipton’s cases were more out of line than Dr. Erickson’s. When I pointed this out, it did not go over very well. I was later accused of “having it in” for Dr. Tipton.
I had “run ins” with two other doctors that I would like to document. Dr. Ralph Hopkins (1942- 2013) was a urologist. He was an aggressive personality. He was trained in urology in Colorado and came in town together with Dr. Charles Allen the first orthopedic surgeon to come to Lander in 1974. He operated on at least two of my patients and both became incontinent after the TURP procedure. There were a number of other inconsistencies, so I pulled all his cases for prostatecomies for one year. I got statistics from all of the urologists in the state of Wyoming and Dr. Hopkins performed more TURP procedures than all of the other urologists put together. When I mentioned this to him, he threatened to beat me up. He later moved his practice to Riverton.
Dr. John Whipp was an orthopedic surgeon who came from Jackson, Wyoming to join Dr. Allen. He would “dry lab” the admission physical exam and not take a careful history. The two eventually hired a physician’s assistant to take care of those tasks. Occasionally he would have one of the internists come in to do the history and physical on the patient. He ran cattle on an acreage and would come into the hospital with manure on his boots. One day in a staff meeting it was brought up that I had reviewed the chart of a patient of mine and pointed out that the history was deficient in mentioning a condition that the patient had that would potentially cause a problem. I had seen the patient previously in the ER and it was noted in the chart, but he had failed to be careful and probably not even looked at it. After the meeting, he came up to me and chest bumped me and threatened to beat me up.
I do not and never did claim to be perfect and without faults. I tried to take correction graciously and change to make me a better physician. I expected others would do that as well.
Physicians continued to come into Lander and the community of doctors far outstripped those in the neighboring city of Riverton. The doctors would hold outreach clinics in Rock Springs, Riverton, Farson, and Thermopolis and even into the Big Horn Basin.
At one time we had three anesthesiologists, two ENT specialists, two neurologists, one cardiologist, two OBGYN specialists, one cardiovascular surgeon, three orthopedic surgeons, two urologists, two ER doctors, a pathologist, two surgeons, two pediatricians, two radiologists, five general practitioners two physicians assistants and a child health associate.
The cardiovascular surgeon, Walter C. "Buzz" Ashcraft (1937-1994), came in and brought his heart lung machine technician and performed the first open heart surgery done in Wyoming. He left Lander later on and went to Missouri. He died in a plane crash reported in the Deseret News. As noted in the article he was not careful and paid little attention to details. Although he did not have any serious complications, he would often leave town and leave his patients unattended.
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