“All the babies were delivered in the homes in the old days. I got out of the baby business. You would get $15, if you got anything. You might sit up half the night by an oil lamp, as there was no electricity. Dr. Lose was a hotshot baby doctor and I thought it was a good time to get out of that part. I would make calls all over the country. I would go out to those oil camps. When I first came here, I bought a 1923 Ford Coupe. Later I had a Model A and an Essex. I would get stuck on some of those roads and then I would have to get a farmer to pull me out with his horses. I would give them a dollar or two for their help. In those days I would get 50 cents a mile one-way and $3 for a house call. Later we got 50 cents both ways. We got $3 for an office call. The house calls continued into the 1940s.
“One of the Sundays a few years ago I went driving out west of Madison looking at a lot of places I would make calls at. A lot of the houses are not there now. There used to be a house every quarter or half section. I came in just this side of Hamilton and it brought back a lot of memories. I remember one time going to Kenbro and while I was there Leona called and said they wanted me over at Thrall. I cut across during the daytime on those little oil field tracks. I drove about an hour and did not see any lights or anything, as it was getting dark. I finally saw some lights and I had driven right back to Kenbro. I finally made it to Thrall.
“When I started, I borrowed $300 from Waymire at the bank to get started. I got a treating table that you could raise or lower. I went to Emporia to see if I could just buy a straight table, as I did not have much money. At that time there were three Osteopathic doctors in Emporia. One was Doctor Armor and she was a lady. She was kind of crippled. I ask her if she had a table and she said she had one that was almost new. She did not like it and cannot use it, so she would sell it for $100; it had cost her $300. It is worth about $3,000 today. I still have it today. I said that was too much and she said I could pay for it when I could. I told her no; I did not want to be in debt and I came back home. I was getting my office ready and this guy comes in and asks me what I wanted to do with this table he had in his wagon. I said “what table?” Doctor Armor had sent the table to me. That was how I got that table. I paid her $5 or $10 every once in a while.
“We had two doctors in Olpe when I came here. Doctor Brimmer and Patton and one in Hartford named Ninestead. Doctor Green and Roberts were in Gridley. One in Virgil, I do not remember his name, and Doctor Pusie in Quincy. In Hamilton, there were Doctors Lewis and Winegar. There were nine doctors in Eureka. Of all those doctors, I am the only one still alive. There are four doctors now in Eureka. Dr. Skaer is the only surgeon between El Dorado and Iola. I graduated from Kirksville Missouri College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1923. Doctor Lose was the first graduate of the four-year medical school at the University of Kansas.
“You had to quarantine for a lot of things like scarlet fever and measles. You had to report to the county health doctor if you did quarantine someone. You had to put a sign on the house and only the doctor could go into the house. The people in the house would put a pan on the porch and then you would put milk in the pan. You could not take containers in and out of the house. The wage earner could not go into the house. He would either stay home and not go to work or stay on the job and not go home or stay with neighbors. Today, penicillin is used to treat scarlet fever. Penicillin was around in the 1920s and 30s, but was not really used until the Second World War. The first penicillin was given by shot every three hours because you could not get the penicillin by the acid in the stomach. The one and only tetanus case I had, I had about that time. They brought a girl in from a big family. They had 17 kids. They brought her in during the summer and thought she had polio or infantile paralysis and she had a temperature of 104 and I thought she had polio. I opened her mouth to check her throat and she went into convulsions. I asked if this girl had stepped on a nail, as I was now thinking it could be lockjaw. That is what we called it back then. Her mother said she had stepped on some glass about three weeks ago. I asked what did you do for it and they said they chewed up some tobacco and put on it. I sent her into the hospital at Emporia to Doctor Underwood and that was when penicillin was first being used. He gave her a penicillin shot every three hours around the clock and she lived. I also worked with Doctor Butcher up in Emporia. Before penicillin came along, they would have all died. I had one patient die of typhoid, as we did not have anything to treat them with in the early years. You got typhoid from drinking contaminated water. I never thought about getting scarlet fever when I went into the homes. I know of a couple of doctors that caught it, but never died.
“When I was at school in Kirksville, we had a smallpox epidemic. I had been vaccinated for it when I was in high school. We had to go out and see these people. Every week they would call me in and scratch my arm and give me a vaccination and it would not take because I had already been vaccinated. They did that about a half dozen times. There was no scar. I saw a lot of patients and did not get smallpox. We had some epidemics here when I went into practice and I would scratch my own arm. Finally, I had one take as I had lost my immunity to smallpox. Doctor Fairbrother would do tonsillectomies about once a month in his office on Saturdays. My office was in the back of the bank where the director’s room is now. Doctor Fairbrother’s office was across the alley from mine and he would do six or seven on those Saturdays. They would lie on the floor and he would send them home about five o’clock. He got $25 for the operation.
“It took 40 minutes to ride a train from Emporia to Madison. It cost 42 cents for a ticket. To Eureka it would be a few cents more. The passenger train would have three cars. One was a regular passenger car; one was a smoking car and the third car was a baggage and mail car. The city put in gas lines in 1929. About that time, I lived on Mulberry Street and was adding a bed and breakfast room. I put a basement under it and put in a gas furnace. Gas was pretty cheap in those days.
“C.J. McCoy Construction Company out of Emporia had the job to put bricks down on the streets in Madison. He was having trouble getting bricklayers and so one day he brought down some blacks to lay bricks. Some of the oil field people went down and told them to get the blacks out or there was going to be a lynching.
“When I had my office over the Green Lantern, there was a pool hall downstairs. There were a lot of fights and people would get cut up. I learned a lot about sewing people up by taking care of those people. Most were knife wounds and some got shot. This was a pretty wild town during the oil days. It was a quiet town before the oil boom.
“These oil people that came in were gangsters, bootleggers, even bank robbers. The Gridley bank was robbed at one time. There was even some Ku Klux Klan activity here also. They met up above the grocery store. They had about thirty members. This would have been in the 1920s and 30s. I remember one time about a dozen of the Klan members dressed in white came to the Methodist Church and walked down front while the sermon was going on and said they wanted to make a donation to the church. They might have done that to all the churches. They were pretty docile around Madison. Some members were probably oil people who had come in from other parts of the country. They were anti- black, anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic. The man who owned the pool hall was Jewish. There was a men’s store called Goldstein’s and he was Jewish also. That store was only here about four or five years. The man who ran the movie theater was Jewish. His father was Jewish, but his mother was not.
“The opera house was quite a place. Some cattlemen and businessmen formed a company and built that around 1900. It had a stage and balcony and could seat around 300 people. They had road shows where a group would put on a different show every night for a week. This was before the movies started. They would stay at the Stolpe Hotel (Madison Hotel), which was down by the depot. They would rehearse for a few weeks and then put on a show every night for a week. Their scenery and trunks came in by railroad so my dad had to handle them. They would give him complimentary tickets and I got to go to the shows free. Oscar Graham Company was one of the groups. There were about six times a year this would happen. Some groups would only be here a few nights and not all week. The stage was up above the drug store. There was a stairway in the drug store and I had my office up there for sixteen years. Most of the shows were comedy. The townsfolk would put on a musical and this included some high school students. When I graduated from high school, they had graduation exercise up there in the opera house. We were on the stage. The old high school up on the west hill had a little stage upstairs. When they had national elections all the results would come in by telegraph, as there was no radio or telephone yet. My dad would write the results down and then I would take them down to the opera house. The people would gather there and someone would read the results. The telephone was not used for long distance calls in the beginning. Radio was beginning to come in around 1920 when I was at Kirksville going to college. They had crystal sets and you had to listen to them with earphones. I would sit up at night and listen to bands playing at the Meuhlebach Hotel in Kansas City.
“I started practice in 1923 and my folks were living in town, so I lived with them in a two-story house. Mother always rented out a room. There was this guy who had rented the room and I was down at the picture show one night. This guy called me out and I thought he wanted me to go to my office. At that time, city hall was down under the Madison Bank. At that time, we had two-night marshals. The town was pretty rough at that time. He took me down to the city hall and there were a couple of marshals there. He told the marshals that he wanted them to arrest me as I had been poisoning his drinking water at the house he had been staying at. One of the marshals told me to go back to the show. They had been looking for this guy as he had a mental problem and he had been in Osawatomie State Hospital. He had been living in Peabody and caused a disturbance and they had called over here to Madison to tell us he might be heading this way. After the show, I went back down there to see what they did with the man. I asked about him and the marshal said he was dead. They were getting ready to arrest him and he ran. He got over by where the Buckeye Store is now and he got one of the marshals down between the cars and the marshal shot him. He got up and ran down the alley by the bank, down by where my building is, and that was a garage at that time, and he dropped dead. He did not have a gun, but he had the marshal down and was beating him. The oil field people were going to lynch the marshal who shot the man. The marshal left town for a few days. They had a number of bootleggers at that time. They would go to Kansas City and buy liquor. It was legal in Kansas City. If they got caught on the way back, they would confiscate the car and liquor.”
