Dr. Beare’s Daughter

In 1928, Ralph Beare, of Versailles, Ohio was in medical school at St. Louis, Missouri. At the same time, in the tiny village of Stewardson, Illinois, Lucinda Elliott, was suddenly left parentless and penniless without prospects. Not wanting to depend on her older siblings, she went to St. Louis to work in a hospital in…

At Marygrove, in mid-October of my junior year, Jeff asked me to wear his fraternity pin. I wore it with pride. Our relationship was still new, and it was an exhilarating time. ​Jeff was pledge master of his fraternity, and we had only been pinned a couple of weeks when it was hell weekend—initiation—for his…

Daddy’s patients often gifted him with food. Letha Steiner worked at the Stokley-Van Camp canning plant in Celina. Whenever I went with Daddy on a house call to Leitha’s, we came home with at a case of pickles. If we hadn’t been out to her house in a while, Leitha would come knock on our…

One Saturday after office hours, Daddy and I were in Shambaugh’s IGA. Daddy was talking to Jerry at the butcher counter, when a man came up to Daddy and slapped two five-dollar bills in his hand. “Here you go, Doc! If you were in a hurry for your money, you could have just asked me!”…

When David, Susie, and I were twelve, we came up with a new game to play after dark on Harbor Point. On Saturday nights, after dark, the parking lot at the state park was a make-out spot for local teens. My father had a powerful flashlight with a long chrome barrel that held eight C…