One of the first doctors I met when we moved to Prescott was Dr. John Oakley. By the time I met him in early 2013 at a local non-profit for end-of-life education, he’d been retired for a number of years. I didn’t notice the building I was sitting in was named the Oakley-Ritter building and had been his medical office until he retired in 2001 and donated it to Good Samaritan Society. Nor did I know the deep history he had in Prescott, serving the community as a physician and surgeon for over 50 years and working alongside two of his high school friends, Dr. Edward Ritter and Dr. Dennis Semkin.
I walked into that meeting at the request of a neighbor who was on the committee and heard I had some web design skills. What I didn’t know then was every person sitting around the table that day was going to become a part of my life over the next decade or that I’d be working as a hospice volunteer coordinator a few months later thanks to that meeting.
Prescott has a magical way of connecting people together at different times and places. Whether it’s a chance encounter with a former Minnesota classmate’s mom living at the senior apartments you work at in Arizona, or the way the same people you met in 2013 will pop up the over the next decade in different offices and residences around this community, I am now a true believer in the motto that Prescott is “Everybody’s Home Town.”
So I wasn’t entirely surprised when I walked into Willow Wind Assisted Living two years ago to bump into Dr. Oakley again. I remembered hearing he had moved there with his beloved wife of 65 years, Helen Oakley, and that she had passed away a few years later. It was great to see him again and get a chance to talk with him about some of the deep knowledge he has of Prescott’s history during my time working there.
His oldest daughter Annie visits him often and one day she told me he was the 14th doctor to join the local medical staff when the family moved to Prescott in 1961. The town was small and had just one operating room, one delivery room and 22 hospital beds. Doctors did their own rounds at the hospital, morning and evening, and made house calls, sometimes even in the middle of the night. But having a dad as a doctor didn’t mean she got special treatment. “You’d have to complain a lot before you got attention.” She remembers her dad being the doctor at the World’s Oldest Rodeo as well as a local turtle race.
I stopped in the other day to see Dr. Oakley and ask him a few questions about his life. He’s 90 now, still sharp and full of great stories. He grew up in St. Louis and developed a love of music from his early days working at the municipal opera, where he rented seat cushions to patrons and later was promoted to selling soda at performances. Interestingly, the opera house held around 11,000 people, about the same size as Prescott when he moved his family here.
He became an avid ping-pong player during his early med school days and continued to play it in Prescott. He shared a funny story about being teamed up in doubles at a city tournament with a guy who had a wandering eye. They ended up winning the match because their opponents were never really sure where his partner was looking when he returned the ball.
I asked him what got him interested in medicine. He said he had a bad experience as a teenager while repairing a bike. He was underneath, working on a bracket when his older brother accidentally dropped a screwdriver and it hit him in the eye. It hurt and kept watering, so when his dad got home from work he took him to the doctor. Turned out he had a corneal abrasion. “The doctor put a few drops of something in my eye and numbed it right up. The pain was gone instantly. It made me think that was something I’d like to do–to help people.”
I’m back to working in hospice again after my stint in assisted living. The other day as I drove into the parking lot at the Oakley-Ritter building to go to work, I thought about how the seeds Dr. Oakley planted in 1961 continue to bloom, not only in the medical community he helped grow but in the six children he and Helen raised here in Prescott. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!
Prescott-area resident Kelly Paradis is a community liaison for Good Samaritan Home Health and Hospice and Prescott Evening Lions president. She loves listening to and writing stories about life.