10A • COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • MARCH 13, 2019
Offbeat Oregon: Old-time country doctors led colorful,interesting lives
By Finn J.D. John
for The Sentinel
O
ne of the most color-
ful and rewarding occu-
pations in human history
was that of a country doctor in
the first half of the 20th century.
By about 1900, breakthroughs in
medical science had put some
really powerful healing tools in
their hands, and the profession
had never been as personally or
socially rewarding.
A country doctor, once he or
she had settled into a practice,
could count on a prominent place
in society, the respect and admi-
ration of nearly everyone, and the
secure knowledge that he or she
was doing real good in the world.
Of course, it wasn’t an easy gig. Or
a safe one, as the fate of Dr. Rich-
ard Barber of Gardiner in 1904
demonstrates — Dr. Barber died
of hypothermia after swimming
his horse across the Siuslaw River
while trying to race to the assis-
tance of an injured patient, leav-
ing his wife, Dr. Jean Barber, to
carry on their practice alone.
But then, easy jobs tend to be
boring jobs — and country-doc-
toring was anything but a boring
job.
D
r.
E.R.
Huckleberry
first came to Tillamook
County in 1923. At the time, he
was fresh from medical school,
newly married, and he and his
wife had a new baby.
He started out helping a local
physician, Dr. Robert Boals,
who’d burned his hands with an
X-ray machine. After Boals’
hands were better, Huckleberry
launched his own practice in the
nearby town of Garibaldi.
Huckleberry had little time to
get settled in. Tillamook County
seemed to be waiting to pounce
on him. The day he arrived, it
started raining, and by the time it
stopped, two weeks and 40 inches
later, the whole valley was under
water, bridges were washed out,
telecom lines were down, and his
wife and child, who’d stayed in
Portland while he settled in and
procured a home for them, were
left to wonder if he’d washed out
to sea.
A day or two into the deluge, he
and Boals got a house call to help
a woman deliver a baby. They
piled into Boals’ Buick and set
out, driving through the pouring
rain, stopping to pick up the
grandmother-to-be on the way.
Just outside town, the road was
under a foot or two of water; and
Boals had to get out of the car to
guide Huckleberry, since he
couldn’t see where the road was
from the driver’s seat. As the two
of them sloshed along, the old
lady in the back seat tapped
Huckleberry on the shoulder.
“Young feller, how long you
been around these parts?” she
asked him.
He told her it was his third day.
“Then she looked at Dr. Boals,
splashing along ahead of us, and
said, ‘Ol’ Doc Boals, he’s been
froggin’ around in these here
parts for nigh onto 30 year,’”
Huckleberry recalled, 45 years
later. “I thought ‘frogging’ was the
correct verb!”
uckleberry would soon
learn that the flood with
which the county greeted him,
although extreme, was not out of
character. If there was a theme to
the career he was embarking on,
it would probably be “getting to
patients through knee-deep
standing water.” It was, at the
time, just part of life there. Over
the years he got very good at not
getting stuck in it.
He also soon got to where he
would have made a pretty fair
stock-car race driver. Members of
the community, he quickly
learned, expected their doctors to
drive like bats out of hell when on
their way to house calls.
“People who would condemn
speed in any other driver took
pride in how fast a doctor could
get over the road, especially if he
H
was their doctor,” Huckleberry
wrote. “Stories of quick trips were
told and retold, never losing any-
thing in the telling.”
Needless to say, over the years
he wore out quite a few automo-
biles.
“I soon found out that most
cars just wouldn’t hang together
under the punishment,” he wrote.
“After trying several makes, I
found the old Hudson. Those cars
could take it. … I wore out, or
wrecked, seven of them before
they went off the market. I could
never understand why they
weren’t more popular.”
Another nice thing about the
Hudson, he added, was that it
was away; could he help?
“I told him I’d never sewed on a
horse, but if he could persuade
the animal to hold still I was sure
I could do it,” Huckleberry
recalled. “The wound was a dilly,
18 or 20 inches long and very
deep, in the hip. John threw and
tied the horse and I sewed up the
hole in his muscle and hide. Just
as we finished, I got an emergen-
cy call to the best hotel on the
beach.”
Jumping back into his Hudson,
Huckleberry raced to the scene
and found one of the top execu-
tives of the Southern Pacific Rail-
road — a real V.I.P. — in great
agony, stricken with seafood-in-
“Doc, I’m sick,” Jorgenson
announced.
“How are you sick?” Huckle-
berry asked.
“I dunno, I’m just sick.”
“Where do you hurt?”
“Don’t hurt nowhere, I’m
just sick.”
would make it through surpris-
ingly deep water.
“In the Hudsons, I have gone
through water so deep I would be
wet halfway to the knees as I sat
with my feet on the pedals,” he
said.
He had the Hudsons modified
so that they were, essentially,
ambulances: the passenger seat
would lay down flat, and he kept a
folding stretcher in the trunk that
he rigged to fit on top of the flat-
tened seat; so if a patient needed
to be transported, he could get it
done. This was important,
because Tillamook County had
no ambulance service until years
later.
“The only ambulance service
we had was the Tillamook under-
taker with his hearse,” he wrote,
“and sometimes it took him a
long time to arrive. … Besides, for
some reason, some people just
didn’t want to ride in a hearse.”
ome of the jobs that fell to a
country doctor could make it
somewhat hard to put on airs. On
one occasion, Huckleberry recalls
a local man coming in to ask him
for help with a veterinary prob-
lem. His horse had gotten cut
during the night, and the local vet
S
duced food poisoning.
“We soon had him reasonably
comfortable,” Huckleberry con-
tinued, “and only then did I real-
ize I had not taken time to wash,
and saw my hands, arms, and
clothing were smeared with horse
blood. If he had noticed, he didn’t
say anything. I think he was too
sick to care.”
Country-doctoring some-
times called for some Mac-
Gyver-class problem solving.
Huckleberry recalls one incident
in the mid-1920s when his phone
rang.
“Doc, there has been a terrible
accident out in front of my house,”
shouted the voice on the other
end of the line. “Come out as
quick as you can!”
Click.
Of course, if this happened
today, the 911 dispatcher would
pull up the caller info, identify the
house, and dispatch the ambu-
lance. But this was the old days
— before dial telephones.
Huckleberry called the opera-
tor. Could she help him? Yes —
she remembered how agitated
the caller had been, and remem-
bered the party line it had come
in from. But, there were 12 sta-
Winter Heating
Tune-Up
Only
$99*
We’ll make sure your system is running eff ectively and effi ciently. Call
for details and an appointment today, and beat the winter rush!
Complete Heating & Cooling System Service
Reasonable Rates • All Work Guaranteed
tions on it. This didn’t help much,
since they were farm homes,
spread over a 20-square-mile
area. So, the operator called each
of the 12 farms. Eleven of them
didn’t know what she was talking
about; the 12th didn’t answer the
phone.
Huckleberry raced to the
address of the 12th home and
found two cars badly wrecked,
right in front of it.
here was another inci-
dent that, if Huckleberry had
written it up for a medical jour-
nal, might have brought him
some fame — if the journal edi-
tors believed him. It started on a
day when a local named John
Jorgenson came into the office
and sat down.
“Doc, I’m sick,” Jorgenson
announced.
“How are you sick?” Huckle-
berry asked.
“I dunno, I’m just sick.”
“Where do you hurt?”
“Don’t hurt nowhere, I’m just
sick.”
Huckleberry asked some more
specific questions, and got basi-
cally the same answer to all of
them: Jorgenson didn’t know
how or where he was sick or why,
but he just knew he was sick.
Finally, Huckleberry asked him
why he thought he was sick.
“My eatin’ tobakker don’t taste
good,” said Jorgenson. “I been
a-chawin’ Star for more’n 50 year,
ever since I was 12-year-old, an’
this is the first time it don’t taste
good. I gotta be sick.”
Huckleberry doesn’t say what
his response to this was. Chances
are, he was probably a little
ashamed of whatever it was a day
or two later, when Jorgenson
went down with pneumonia. It
almost killed him, but he pulled
through.
“I never saw anywhere in the
books that a change in the taste of
Star tobacco is one of the points
in the differential diagnosis of
broncho-pneumonia, but it is,”
Huckleberry added. “At least it
was.”
r. Huckleberry’s mem-
oir, published in 1970 by the
T
D
Oregon Historical Society, is
crammed with anecdotes like
this, and is a really fantastic way
to spend a rainy Saturday after-
noon. Be warned, though; by the
time you reach the last page, you
may be feeling a bit wistful. Huck-
leberry himself sums up the senti-
ment nicely in the last paragraph
of the article he wrote in 1970
for Oregon Historical Quarterly:
“Things are different now.
Changes in industrial techniques,
changes in agricultural tech-
niques, roads, automobiles,
improved communications … all
have had their effect, for good or
ill. Many of the good things of
that period have been lost. The
old way of life is gone forever, but
I hope this little record will help
to preserve its memory.”
(Sources: The Adventures of Dr.
Huckleberry, a book published in
1970 by OHS Press, and “In Those
Days: Tillamook County,” an arti-
cle published in the June 1970 issue
of Oregon Historical Quarterly,
both by E.R. Huckleberry; Port-
land Morning Oregonian, 6-12
Dec 1904)
Finn J.D. John teaches at Ore-
gon State University and writes
about odd tidbits of Oregon his-
tory. For details, see http://finn-
john.com. To contact him or
suggest a topic: finn2@off-
beatoregon.com or 541-357-
2222.
Handguns
Long Rifles
Concealed carry classes
Call for Schedules
EVERYONE
DESERVES
A GREAT
SMILE!
CALL TODAY TO SCHEDULE YOUR INITIAL CONSULTATION • 541.686.1732
EUGENE
CRESWELL
622 E. 22nd Ave Suite C
195 Melton Rd.
541.686.1732
541.686.1732
or visit us at www.thornton-ortho.com
SWITCH TO THE
Aut
o
CONVENIENCE OF AUTO PAY!
Pay
SAVE TIME & SAVE MONEY
Use your Credit or Debit Card account to renew your
subscription to the Cottage Grove Sentinel (includes online edition) by using
AUTO PAY. Complete the credit card information on the enclosed billing
notice and make your payment the easy way with Auto Pay.
Bring in or send this ad back with your payment and save $5 OFF
Yes, Sign me up for Auto Pay*!
✓
❏ 10 Weeks = $6.50, (Reg $11.60) ❏ Digital Only $30 (Reg$35)
BEST OFFER ❏ 1 Year = $38.50 ( Reg $43.50)
Address: _____________________________________________
City:__________________________State:_____Zip: _________
Telephone Number: ____________________________________
* Limited-time off er. Restrictions apply. Call for details.
Credit or Debit Card Exp. Date: __________________________
Security Number ______________________________________
Card Number: ________________________________________
Home Pride
Painting and Repair LLCC
Over 30 years of experience
Schedule Now
For Spring and Summer
Interior and Exterior Painting
Call us for a Free Quote!
“We do small remodels,
home repairs and decks!
Serving Lane & North Douglas Counties
541-735-0089
ccb# 217560
Name on Card: _______________________________________
Signature of Card holder: _______________________________
S entinel
C ottage G rove
116 N. 6th Street, PO Box 35
Cottage Grove, OR 97424
541-942-3325 • cgsentinel.com
*Auto Pay Subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled. Future renewals will be at the current subscription rate.
