My father and uncle not only doctored their patients, but they also appreciated them and took an interest in their lives. And the patients took care of their doctors. Often, they gifted us 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 a case of pickles. If we hadn’t been out to her house in a while, Leitha would come knock on our door and deliver another case. We ate them at lunch every day to keep up with her generosity.
Another patient, who worked as a picker at the Grand Lake Mushroom Farm, often brought us fresh mushrooms. Whenever Daddy popped into the house with a box of mushrooms, Mother changed her dinner menu to somehow include them.
Every Easter, the nuns baked us a cake in the shape of a lamb. It had white, sticky frosting, covered in coconut, and a single red hot for its eye. It was a beautiful cake, but since I didn’t like coconut, the candy eye was my favorite part.
At Christmas time, one patient always brought German Springerle. These were white, anise-flavored cookies—square with stamped designs. They were so hard that you could chip a tooth if you bit into one, but they excellent for dunking.
Then there was the lady who baked the gooseberry pies. My father was on a house call to her farm when she had been picking gooseberries. He made the remark that he hadn’t eaten a gooseberry pie since he was a boy. The next day, she proudly brought him a huge gooseberry pie—enough for a big family. When Daddy carried it into the house from the office, he said that his mouth was watering, and he would be thinking about that pie until office hours were over, and we could have dinner.
That night for dessert, we dug in. It was so sour it could make you cry! When the lady stopped by the office to ask Daddy how he liked his pie, he had no choice, but to cross his fingers behind his back and say it was delicious. Because he said he enjoyed it so much, there followed, a series of gooseberry pies, each one sourer than all the ones before it. Daddy wanted to dump them right off, but his curiosity always got the better of him, and he tasted each one to see if it was an improvement over the last one. It never was. “Hasn’t she ever heard of sugar?” he wondered aloud.
Margaret Menchhofer was never stingy with sugar. She baked birthday cakes every year for me and my three cousins. These cakes were delicious and beautiful, decorated with white icing and pink rosettes. It was her own idea to do this for Dr. Ralph’s and Dr. Paul’s kids.