Life

Longtime docs talk about old times

Drs. George Dysart, Bill Lampley, Marion Ross and Joe Carpenter enjoy lunch and talking old times once a month.

By Bill Moss, Published: November 7, 2012

They still joke around, as if they're still in their 30s, running into one another in the Pardee Hospital halls, then new and modern.

They're sons of the South and sound like it, in traces of South Carolina and the Blue Ridge and in their choice of phrases. Someone's not fired as hospital CEO, he's run off. Ask one if the profession was more collegial 50 years ago, and you'll hear, "I don't know what that means."
Was doctoring in the last half of the 20th century friendlier, freer and more fun? All agree it was. Medicine ain't what it used to be. They know something needs to be done about health care but they don't think much of the reform that President Obama pushed through Congress.
They're the Old Guard of Medicine, now in their 70s, 80s and 90s, comfortably retired, still engaged, still having fun, enjoying grandchildren, looking back. They delivered, mended, nursed, repaired, cured and sometimes pronounced dead tens of thousands of Henderson County folks, from the newest to the oldest.
They meet at Honeybaked Ham for lunch on the fourth Thursday to talk about old times, gardening, what their grandchildren are up to.
When the Lightning joined them last week, turnout was light: Dr. Bill Lampley, a surgeon; Dr. George Dysart, a family practitioner in Etowah, Dr. Marion Ross, an ob-gyn physician, and Dr. Joe Carpenter, a dentist.
Others who attend are Drs. Phil Sellers, Sam Faldo, Bucky Norton, Colin Thomas, Pete Hill, Gene Dennison, Bob Dowdswell and Gene and Anne Kirkley.

'Ran out of money and quit'
If they'd lost a step, night vision or a name here and there, they still had firm recall of little details and a quick sense of humor.
"I quit delivering babies probably in '90-something and I quit doing surgeries about the first of '00 and I ran out of money in '07 so I quit," said Dr. Ross. "It cost me more to pay to use the operating room than there was pay out of it."
He doesn't know how many babies he delivered. "I never have counted 'em up. But I had a good deal going for a good many years. I was basically by myself for the first five years I was here and then I got Gene Dennison to come join me and he and I were 18 years together. Then the ladies decided they were put out with Pardee Hospital so they went over with Park Ridge."
A native of Columbia, S.C., Ross "walked that way to high school and that way to college." He got his M.D. at the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston.
All four men served in the military.
"I did it for money," Ross said. "By the time I was finished in medical school my wife got pregnant, and you can't eat very well off of $50 a month, and that's what interns were paid, so I joined the Air Force, spent three years delivering babies, and by the time I finished that, I didn't know what else to do so I went to residency."
The Air Force sent him to a base hospital in Savannah.
"I walked in the hospital and the commander said, What are you interested in doing? And I knew I couldn't read EKGs so I said delivering babies and he said that's fine."
Ross had an aunt who lived in Hendersonville.
"I had been a long time visitor so I decided I'd come up here and see if anybody wanted any obstetrician work done," he said. He found his way to Dr. Gus Chidester's ob-gyn clinic.
"So I walked in the office and said I was looking for a place to practice. I said are you interested? And he said when do you want to start."

$5 office visits
Pricing was simple 10 years after World War II ended.
"When I came here everybody was getting $5 for office calls except Joe Bailey and Joe was charging 4," Lampley said. "I said, Joe, everybody else is charging $5 and he said some patients can't pay it. And I said, Joe, you can always discount it for 'em but you can't mark it up."
The doctors talked about the close-knit corps of practitioners who arrived here in the 1950s and '60s. Dr. Lampley is the oldest hand among them, one of the founding doctors at Pardee.
"He did a little bit of everything, real well," Dysart said.
Dysart, a native of Greenville and another Air Force veteran, was in family practice.
"I was by far and away the finest physician in Etowah and also the worst, chiefly because I was the only one," he said. "I was in Brevard for nine years, and then moved to Etowah in 1969. I've always liked the mountains."
The number of doctors was small then.
"There were 22 here when I came, and it was not much more than that when Marion came," Lampley said. "And we were all covering the emergency room on a rotation basis at that time."
So they covered everything from broken arms to gunshot wounds?
"If I got that, he got a phone call," Ross said, pointing at Doc Lampley. "Only place they'd get me is if somebody came in in labor."
Dr. Lampley confirmed that.
"If they came in with pregnancy, problems with pregnancy, we called him," he said.

SUBHED: A hands-on administrator
William E. Jamison, they agreed, was the administrator they liked best.
"Jamieson was an asset. I liked him," Ross said.
"The hospital hadn't been the same since Jamie left," Lampley said. Then he clicked off his biography, as if reading from a book. "Jamison graduated Hendersonville High School in '36, then went to Georgia Tech, then went to the military and lost an eye in the military. Came back here and he was working down at the V.A. They hired him from there."
Why did the docs like him?
"He was fair, honest," Lampley said.
"He made rounds every morning," Ross added, "and (visited) every nurses station and asked how are you getting along and anything to worry about, and that was the last one that did that. He was anxious for us to succeed, and obviously I liked him."
When Joe Carpenter arrived, the docs asked what he was up to. Finishing up gardening, splitting wood and working on an old Volkswagen, he said.
"It looked like I was going to have to get a computer and I didn't want to do that," he said of his decision to retire. "From what folks tell me, it's awfully expensive to get your teeth fixed anymore, or to get your body worked on either."

Health care reform
As for health care reform, Dysart says Congress ought to try again.
"My feelings about health care reform is something needs to be done but I don't think what they're doing is what needs to be done," he said. "I think it's something that needs to be worked out. Surely what they got now is not going to work. The country's already going broke, and that is going to really break it. No question about that in my mind."
Government interference in his final years finally made Dysart happy to quit. Is he glad he had a career in medicine? "Yes, I certainly am. But I could not really suggest in all fairness that anybody go into it now." Why? "It's just no fun. You try to do something you get stepped on, told you can't do it, controlled in what you can do, when you can do it, seems like."
It was more fun then? "It was depressing at times, sad, (yet) always interesting and you wanted to keep on doing it, and I certainly did not when I retired."
Dr. Ross agreed that things have gotten more complicated.
"I think it was simpler," he said. "I delivered the baby and hoped somebody would pay me."