HIS FINEST HOUR

It was one of those scenes that I could not immediately process. While it was not unusual to step out of Walker’s Cafe on a Friday night and run into my friends, it was unusual to run into my father, who was helping a woman, who was not my mother, into the back seat of his new Cadillac. I could also see the Rigby Police car parked nearby. The officer found the woman passed out on the sidewalk and called the doctor. I recognized her and knew that this was not her first experience with public inebriation. I also knew why she drank. Years before, her husband had ended his life with a gun in front of his wife and two children. One of those children was my classmate. I helped him briefly get her into the car and then turned around to see the wide-eyed looks of amazement from my friends who were not accustomed to seeing medical events or women tanked out on the sidewalk. 

My father was the Jefferson County Physician and accustomed to being called to emergencies. Long before paramedics, excited and frightened callers would tell him to hurry to some dramatic medical event. Sometimes there were no survivors and there would be nothing for him to do but render an opinion. One afternoon he was called to quickly go to Ucon to help someone who had tangled with a big grain auger. The caller’s triage skills were not fine tuned and he failed to mention that the victim had actually gone through the equipment, leaving nothing to rescue or put back together. When he arrived at the gory scene, he walked over to the group of men gathered around the shredded remains. The farmer who owned the auger asked, “Doctor Tall, what do you think? What should we do?” In a quiet voice, he calmly said,”This man is dead. You should probably clean the auger before you use it again.” 

Before modern ambulances and EMS, the local hearse morphed into an ambulance by simply putting a large flashing red light on the roof. Bruce Eckersell, the local mortician, became the ambulance driver and went to all sorts of tragic events. His triage skills were fine tuned from years of first aid, rescue and transport. He helped the survivors and took them to the hospital. Those who did not survive went to the funeral home. At my father’s funeral, Bruce handed me a note, describing my father’s reaction long ago to a nasty car wreck on the Yellowstone Highway near Riverside Gardens. The dead and injured passengers were trapped in a twisted mass of wreckage. Four or five men could not get the door open, but could see the injured and the bodies of those who did not survive. The car was on its side and the bent door simply would not budge. The note said that my father arrived, quickly assessed the situation and yelled out, "Move aside!" Then he jumped up onto the car and tore the door off. My father was not a big, burly man who was used to tearing metal apart, but on that day his surgeon’s arms and hands became the Jaws of Life. His first responder activity was not always this dramatic — sometimes it just involved taking a drunk woman home after she passed out on Main Street right across from Eckersell Funeral Home.

Sometimes the ambulance of the day was my father's car. He and his identical twin brother, Aldon, practiced together and drove identical Cadillacs, usually some flamboyant shade of shocking pink, chosen by his brother’s wife. From what I observed, cars were his only indulgence. My brother and I were allowed to drive the Jeep, or mother's Fairlane 500 Thunderbird Special, but not the pink Cadillac. That car was pampered, usually hand-washed and spotless. The morning after helping him move the woman from the sidewalk to the back seat of his car, I found my father in the garage cleaning up the back seat from the remnants of his Friday night adventure. It turns out that when the woman sat down in the seat, she decided all that Schlitz she had been drinking at the Cozy Club was no longer agreeing with her, so she chose to barf it up into the back seat as a memento. It was dark and my father was so distracted that he only thought that she had thrown up on herself. Then she felt much better and was grateful for his assistance as he helped her to her apartment. He did not discover her offering until the next morning. 

Lest my mother would overhear him, his web of surgical and military expletives was quietly spun inside the car as I came into the garage the next day. He had towels and buckets of suds and was down on his knees, scrubbing and mumbling to himself. I asked him if he was ok and offered to help. He quietly said that he was sorry to have me see him like this. I think he was upset with the whole mess and wanted time to heal  with some good old fashioned, albeit quiet, swearing.

As the years passed, I was able get a senior year medical school rotation with him in Idaho and watched him care for others first hand at Tall Clinic. He was a community pillar for decades in Rigby, where he was loyal to all that mattered — God, family, country, community, church, and friends. His personal history of sacrifice and service was not all that uncommon for the time. Those of that era are referred to as The Greatest Generation. He had survived college and medical school during the Great Depression. He served as a surgeon in field hospitals in battles from Algeria to Italy for four years during WWII, where he became a major in the US Army. One of my favorite pictures is of him proudly serving as flag bearer, with the VFW Honor Guard on Memorial Day. He had done many courageous and heroic things in this life, but when I had a front row seat to his kindness and caring for a helpless woman in Rigby, I came to know and understand my father. When he told me that he was sorry to have me see him like this, I admired him and knew that he had done this sort of thing before, thousands of times. From my perspective, this was his finest hour -- even if it was in a flamboyant pink Cadillac picked out by Aunt Deione.