Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

As I sit here at the kitchen table in the morning, drinking my coffee, I’m trying to write a column. Normally I do these a couple of months before publication, so I don’t feel much of a deadline looming. Today, however, I feel a little pressured, because I have an appointment with the doctor in two hours.

I’m hoping to get a column done before I leave, but that can be a challenge as I don’t even have a topic yet. With doctors on my mind, I’m inclined to go in that direction—I’m not sure I’ve ever done a column on local doctors before. So let’s do that. I’m going to do this one early, and then wait around a while, which does sound like doctors.

Francis P. Ball was a local doctor. The son of Seymour Durrell Ball, a prominent Lock Haven mayor, Dr. Ball became the head of the Lock Haven Hospital, which, at the time, was very near his home, making the commute convenient.

Dr. William Welliver was from Bloomsburg, moving to Lock Haven after graduating medical school in 1910. He was a good doctor, but had a habit of throwing people out of his office if they disagreed with him.

Do dentists count? You know what, this is my column, so I’m saying they do. And one of the coolest dentists in Lock Haven was Dr. Thomas Brown Stewart, a local dentist with an office on Water Street. Oddly, he was better known for his archaeology work; Stewart spent a lot of time digging up Native American artifacts. He had the first car in Lock Haven, purchased around 1908. People on the street said,”Doc Stewart’s gone crazy.”

Ted Blackburn was another dentist. He was a member of the Lock Haven Rotary, and once, he was at a Rotary convention in the Poconos. Discussing fishing with another member, they decided to skip the Rotary meetings that day and go out fishing instead. Blackburn volunteered to go find some bait, as one of the other members had the equipment in the car.

When he went downstairs and gave the bellboy some money to tell him where to find nightcrawlers, the boy was offended. He told Blackburn that it wasn’t that kind of hotel, and there didn’t cater to women like that.

Dr. John Davies was another dentist with an office on Grove Street and an unusual method. He would hypnotize his patients before doing a filling. At one point, when he hypnotized a ten-year-old boy named Bobby, he told the kid to dream that he was playing baseball—Bobby was a little league star. When he had some difficulty waking the kid up, Bobby said that he had to wait for his turn at bat.

Dr. Frank Dwyer had a practice in Renovo. He was an excellent doctor, but he was best known for an incident in December of 1951. This was actually one of my earliest columns for the Record—“Dr. Dwyer’s Christmas,” in 2010, if I recall correctly. Two hunters had tried to sleep in their truck overnight, and had almost frozen to death. When they were found and rushed to the Renovo Hospital, Dwyer leaped into action and saved both their lives.

Dr. Graydon Mervine was a prominent doctor from Milton, who moved into Lock Haven at 204 West Main Street. He had a stuffed hawk in his office, which interested a lot of his patients. Mervine served in the Medical Corps during World War I, and died in 1954, buried in Highland Cemetery.

There are plenty of others, but this article seems long enough now. And I still have time to have one more cup of coffee before I go to the doctor and he tells me why I shouldn’t. Read two columns and call me in the morning.