BIOGRAPHY
My wife Sara, a public school teacher, taught for nearly ten years until our children came along. We raised our children—who attended public schools—in Rockingham County, where we had a solid arrangement: she held down the fort at home while I cared for my patients. The look in her eyes many evenings when I arrived home always let me know who had the toughest job.
Our daughter, Melinda, started teaching her dolls school when she was just three years old. She entered the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2011 as a Teaching Fellow, the final year before our misguided legislators first abolished the Teaching Fellows program. (I actually had several young patients decide not to become teachers after that sorry legislative decision.) She now has her masters in reading (earned years after the same legislators abolished additional pay for masters), and has used those additional skills to become a crackerjack Title 1 reading specialist at a public school in Buncombe County. We are proud that she intentionally sought out a school at high risk, in order to maximize her impact.
Our son Forrest and I fished together hundreds of times in his childhood, and then in 2013 we had a great high school graduation fishing trip to Alaska. He then told Sara and me that he knew exactly what he was doing with his life—fishing in Alaska. (I was in the doghouse for six months.) He drove his pickup one way to Alaska, and the rest is history. We insisted on a college degree, and he earned one in Oil Processing Technology. The past ten years he has been a halibut and salmon fisherman (with a few scary winters pulling crab pots out of the ocean off the coast of Oregon), and he runs a successful charter business out of Homer, Alaska.
My roots extend between rural Georgia and rural Ohio, so I split the difference and settled into rural North Carolina. My mother grew up a sharecropper in rural Georgia, the first of only two out of eleven siblings to earn a high school degree. She earned it despite no electricity and no plumbing and picking cotton at night under the moonlight during school; she earned it after watching all of her older sisters head to the mills or the fields at age thirteen or fourteen; she earned it after sleeping each night for years as a young child across the foot of the bed as her older sisters crowded onto the rest of the mattress. I am more proud of her high school degree than if she had earned an Ivy League professional degree. My father, still smart as a whip at 92, farmed corn in Ohio until, at age 25, he left the farm and enlisted in the Army during the Korean War. He later earned a two year business degree (at night school while working and raising a family), and worked his life in concrete and steel. We were born and raised in Ohio, then all three of us kids headed south after our formal education.
VALUE OF HARD WORK AND SMALL BUSINESS OWNER
I am no stranger to hard work, and I know its value. I lived at home my undergraduate years, commuting to college in Ohio. For four years I loaded trucks at UPS five nights a week to pay my way. The last two years of undergrad, I also volunteered each Saturday in the local pediatric emergency room. I was the first on either side of my family to obtain a four year degree. Medical school was actually easier.
For twenty years my brother and I ran a business, in what must be one of the most regulated small businesses there is: an independent medical practice. We kept payroll, and saw all the challenges that come with it. Although our practice provided job opportunities in our community, I never, ever, considered myself a “job creator.” That term I reserve for teachers. Every LPN and RN we hired graduated from the local public school system and received their medical training at RCC; all their teachers through the years helped create their skills, not me.
Thought for the Day:
Why is it that some of us with working class roots never forget them, while others seem eager to pull the ladder up behind themselves as they climb higher?
MEMBERSHIPS/POSITIONS/HOBBIES
My family belongs to Main Street United Methodist Church in Reidsville. I have served as Chief of Staff, Chief of Medicine, Chair of the Medical Ethics Committee, and Hospital Board Chairperson, for Annie Penn Hospital. I served on the Rockingham County Board of Health, Cone Health’s Medical Executive Committee, and on the steering committee to establish the Triad Health Network. I’m a longtime member of the Sierra Club. I’m board certified in Family Medicine since 1987. I was a Teamsters Union member 1976-1980. I’ve belonged to the American Academy of Family Physicians for forty years, but never joined the AMA (which is too pro-doctor in my opinion.) My hobbies include fishing, boating, gardening, exploring nature, reading, camping, writing, playing banjo and guitar, and fishing. Did I mention fishing?
My kids knew what they wanted to do in life before Kindergarten.
Cute kids, huh?
