Community Corner

Glory Days Recalled by Retired Grossmont Hospital Physicians

Luncheon meetings of former colleagues in 70s and 80s include videotaping for oral history project.

Updated at 9:40 p.m. Wednesday

Forty years ago, Chargers quarterback John Hadl came to Grossmont Hospital with a serious problem: He couldn’t close his mouth.

As retired Dr. Dan Smith recalled Monday, Hadl had fallen off a horse and suffered facial injuries. So after rebuffing a team doctor who wanted to wait five days, Smith and fellow Grossmont surgeon Jay Hoyt scheduled an immediate operation.

When time came to repair Hadl, eight Chargers doctors were in the operating room—“a coffee klatch,” Smith said. They just watched. But the procedure went well.

“I just popped it, and everything came out perfectly,” he said. “Jay and I closed up.”

But when the three-member surgery team (with Jack Passmore) went out to meet the expected horde of waiting reporters, they were shocked to find an empty room.

The Chargers doctors had already met the press—and taken credit for the surgery.

“They all gave their names to the reporters and said he’ll be fine,” said Smith, a Del Cerro resident, smiling at the 1971 display of ego.

Ten other retired Grossmont Hospital physicians smiled in recognition of those days Monday after a luncheon meeting of RODEO (Retired Old Doctors Eat Out), which has been meeting for three decades—lately at Continental Catering on Parkway Drive.

Their current project: videotaping several doctors at a time for an oral history of Grossmont Hospital.

Dr. Ralph Ocampo, a downtown San Diego resident who worked at Grossmont from 1966 to 2003, used three small video cameras to record the conversation, which also included Drs. Glenn Kellogg of Normal Heights and Bill Pogue of La Mesa. Ocampo is 80, Kellogg 87 and Pogue 79.

But their memories were fresh as they talked shop for nearly an hour in a quiet room of the restaurant, where Dr. Rosemary Johnson—the only woman in the group Monday—nodded in recognition of old familiar names.

Johnson, 71, was the third female president of the San Diego County Medical Society, several of her colleagues gallantly pointed out.

Contrasts were drawn between the old Grossmont Hospital—which started out of a convalescent facility on La Mesa Boulevard—and the current Sharp Grossmont Hospital. 

The doctors said they once had a lounge where colleagues would compare notes on patients and cases. But that ended, Smith said, when HMOs came in during the mid-1980s, and one colleague asked: “What insurance do they have?  I can’t look at [the patient] until I know their insurance.”

Said Kellogg: “Now there’s so many doctors (at Grossmont Hospital), you don’t get to know people.”

The doctors recalled annual picnics at Singing Hills Country Club (now Sycuan Resort), which “got the Grossmont people together.” They told of volleyball matches and poker games that went “well into the night.”

Another difference from the olden days—doctors would volunteer their time at free medical clinics. That mostly ended with the advent of Medi-Cal—although Johnson is now involved in Project Access San Diego through the San Diego County Medical Society Foundation.

About 17 retired physicans—all veterans of Grossmont Hospital—make up RODEO. Their video is titled History of the Medical Staff of the Grossmont District Hospital, “since there is no existing history of that,” Pogue said.

RODEO meets for lunch the first Monday of most months, and the recordings follow the meal.

“This is an attempt to catch the mood, the tempo, the interactions ... with the town and people, of the medical staff from the inception of Grossmont District Hospital in August of 1955,” Pogue said.

“For instance, did you know that there was only one employer who had medical insurance before Medicare was introduced?”

Another reason for creating the DVD: Sharp Grossmont Hospital’s history archives have virtually no mention of the medical staff—not even of who was chief of staff each year, Pogue said. 

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The archives are newspaper articles submitted by administration and focus on administration and public relations, he said, with no stories about the relationships of the doctors to the community, patients and each other, they said Monday.

The DVDs eventually will be given to the doctors, Medical Society, Sharp Grossmont Hospital archives and the William Herrick Medical Library on Wakarusa Street.
 
It was a different time in other ways, and RODEO will record as much of it as it can—before the voices grow silent.

Pogue recalled being tasked with picking out the wallpaper for a waiting room. He chose one that featured snow covered mountains and bare birch trees, recalling his New England training days. 

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The laborer even papered the door knob with the design. Upon returning, his older partner, Dr. Gladden Elliott said “Bill, this is terrible wallpaper;  I can’t even find the door knob.”

Grossmont’s pioneering ventures were recalled as well. It was the first hospital south of Los Angeles to buy (for $300,000) a CAT scan machine to look inside people’s brains, Pogue said.

But some things haven’t changed.

Pogue recalls asking one thoracic surgeon why he and other specialists made the arduous half-hour journey through the Mission Valley dairy farms to work at Grossmont Hospital.

“He said ‘the nursing care.’ Grossmont had the best nursing care in town,” Pogue said. “And they still do.”

And the Chargers doctors who stole glory from Grossmont surgeons in the Hadl surgery?

Three or four days later, an angry Hadl showed his gratitude by collecting Grossmont doctors for a media show

“Hadl said: I want you guys to be on TV,” Smith recalled. “He was furious I didn’t get my name in the papers.”


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