1965

In late April I was hoping to join Ted Atkinson, Dick Lockridge,Mike Orr, and BillWebster for three days of golf in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., area. Unfortunately a business development prevented me from attending. My spies tell me that those four plus three other non-Dartmouth attendees had a wonderful time.

Apparently they played four different, difficult but beautiful courses, all organized and arranged by Mike Orr. The same spies tell me that none of the group would be mistaken for Fred Couples or Greg Norman but that the golf was respectable if not spectacular. Dick Lockridge was seen between holes doing mega finance deals by cell phone while Ted Atkinson artfully utilized all of the available real estate to systematically bring each course to its knees. According to Bill Webster they were all too tired at night to do anything but watch TV. But a great time was had by all.

I have no idea how many golfers we have in the class but if any of you have an interest in organizing some informal regional Dartmouth "golf mini-reunions," as class secretary I would be happy to act as the coordinating point to help set them up. This would be a great way to catch up with classmates and to have a lot of fun. All handicaps welcome, with the longerterm objective of making it an annual event in each geographic area. Those of you who are interested, please drop me a line.

An interesting article about Tony Garland appeared in the Sunday, October IS, 1995, edition of the Boston Globe Magazine. Tony, a physician, became affiliated with the Island" Medical Center in Deer Isle, Maine, in 1976 after serving in the Peace Corps in Thailand. The Island Medical Center, a functional onestory brown clapboard structure, was built by the citizens of remote and rural Deer Isle in 1967 in hopes that a fully equipped medical office would entice doctors to their island. It took them nearly a decade to recruit Tony as the first one. For emergency medical situations, other hospitals such as Blue Hill Memorial were simply too far away to provide adequate emergency care.

The article states that Tony looking back "might never have taken the job if he had known what he was getting into. The first year, he put 30,000 miles on his car, hardly saw his family, and still felt he had barely scratched the surface of the islanders' medical needs." In such a rural area, the costs of caring for the relatively few patients so geographically scattered became a real serious issue in the 1980s. The nearby hospitals, which had tried to help ease the burden for Deer Isle were experiencing their own severe financial problems. National health reform came and went. Finally they agreed on a radical solution, with the nine widely scattered family practice doctors, including Tony, agreeing to pool their incomes, which ranged from $50,000-$100,000, to insure that they could continue to serve their patients.

What Tony and his colleagues have created is now a national model receiving recognition and grants from all over the country. Most importantly, the residents of Deer Isle and surrounding communities are now receiving first-rate medical care with no talk of PPOs or HMOs, but rather proud reference to the tiny group of doctors including Tony who cared enough to respond creatively to their own medicalcare crisis.

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