I was born in Ottumwa, Iowa, at St. Joseph's hospital where my mother was a nurse. She had received her nursing education at a nunnery from the age of 16 until 20, when she started working at the hospital. She also met my father there. He was recovering from a bad car wreck and wasn't eating his meals, which was crucial for the victim of a wreck as serious as my father's had been. Nutrition was really important in those days when they didn't have all the technology we have today to test the blood and other factors that contribute to healing. Basically, they penicillin to prevent infection, and that was about it. It happened Dad had a friend whose wife was a very good cook and lived across the street from the hospital. She brought over his breakfast, lunch and dinner, which were better than hospital food. When the doctor found out about it, my mother was chewed out because she was on the nutritional rotation and responsibility was to make sure everyone in the hospital ate the food prepared for them.

My mother was just gorgeous. Dad said Mom was not Homecoming Queen because her high school friend, who was chosen for the title, was the only Miss America to come from Iowa. My parents fell in love while Dad was in the hospital, and the only time I've ever seen my dad blush was at my graduation from medical school. We were sitting around a table at a Jewish deli and I was told that Sister Mary McClare, head nurse and a friend of the family, was the only one who knew I was conceived on call at St. Joseph's hospital where I was born. My father said, " Oh, be quiet!", as if someone we knew would hear, (in Chicago) but only my family and my in-laws were there.

I grew up in Albia, where my family has been for about 8 generations. We came here from Indiana about 1880. Before that we were in Kentucky and before that Maryland. In those days no one did much checking on the ancestry thing. When we needed information about where we came from, it sufficed to say we came from Indiana. However, when I was in medial school, which was hard for me, I spent a lot of time at the library, and I went to one near my school. They were open very early and very late. It happened to be a genealogical library, and as I was looking around, I found our name and some things about our history, but I hit a snag trying to check documentation across the ocean.

For years I could only go back four or five generations, but I got lucky and found records that went back to a Robert Spencer. Here customs of the times comes into play. In the chain of inheritance, the first brother got everything and the second brother got what the older brother wanted him to have. If the older brother liked him, he gave him half the estate. If he didn't like him, he got nothing, although usually they would take care of family, or at least give him a job.

It turns out Robert was the second brother. The first brother and George Washington's great-grandfather came over to America together. They were probably cousins of some count or royalty guy that actually owned a good chunk of Maryland. So when George Washington fought the Revolutionary War, he was probably only two or three generations away from being English royalty. Somehow Robert's older brother ended up owning half of Mount Vernon, just before George Washington's father bought if off of my ancestors' estate. At least, at one time my family owned half of the 5000 acres of Mt. Vernon.

Our family had a Crazy Aunt Lucille, who would have been my father's father's sister, so she was my great-aunt. We always called her Crazy Aunt Lucille, because we regarded her as a little nuts! She was very astute, business-wise. She had had seven husbands and put six in the ground. She always said we were to Diana, the Princess of Wales and Winston Churchill because his mother was a Spencer. Come to find out, we probably are, because the middle part of the family crest that comes down to us is exactly the same as the crest of the Prince of Wales who is getting married next month—May 2011. So, in fact, we are some relation, probably that same bunch that came over to America and we were descendants of one of the brothers that came over. The ones who stayed in England were her line, and in fact, it may well have been Crazy Aunt Lucille wasn't quite as nuts as we thought she was, in spite of her having buried six husbands. Most of them seemed to die in car wrecks. We don't know if she was some kind of mechanic. At any rate, the 7th, got out alive and died a natural death.

We ended up having come from a Knight in the year 1053, under William the Conqueror, who was a Norman—that part of the world (Normandy) where he crossed into France in World War II. It sort of flip-flopped between being run by the English or the French. There was a De Spencer, who was our relation. We have documentation to indicate it—not a lot about them because once again, I jumped the "pond", where nothing is quite as clear. But it appears we actually can trace our family back to William the Conqueror, the Norman, who took over the south of England in the year 1000; our family came from William's Knight and that name had come forward as Spencer.

I discovered the genealogy the Mormons have preserved is actually very good. They believe in baptism of the dead, because if you die and go to heaven, you wouldn't want to go there without your family. And they can't go there unless the Mormons baptize them. That is the reason they do the genealogy, so people can go back and find their ancestors. They have billions of names in their files going back maybe 15 generations. If someone becomes a Mormon, they baptize the ancestors and I have said it might upset a lot of Spencers because we come from a long line of Methodists. Crazy Aunt Lucille said we are related to some of the founders of the Methodist Church. I always thought she was nuts; maybe not, maybe so.

It is amazing how quickly someone can be found in the Mormon genealogy. Without that, I wouldn't have a clue about what happened to those two brothers, but apparently the older brother of the line, the richer part of the family, went on to stay in Maryland and be involved in politics, in the University of Maryland, and another of the colleges out there. In Indiana, we have a Spencer graveyard. We went first to Maryland, then Annapolis, Maryland, to Mt. Vernon, to Kentucky and the Tennessee area, right on the border, then Harpers Ferry, then we moved to Indiana.

We moved from Harpers Ferry in the 1780's or early 1800's, so it was way before the Emancipation Proclamation was even thought of. This means relatives of mine must have been slave owners. The slaves all moved to Indiana with us and we got them homesteaded. Like all generations, the kids married and moved out, some of them stayed but in the end, the majority of slaves probably moved to Kentucky and Indiana with us. Indiana was then a free state. Iowa was always a free state. And that is about the run-down as far as I went in the strain of Spencers. Apparently we were related to the Darby's and Pence's so that makes us even more English.

My mother's line is very short because it was hard to trace. Mother was about 3/4 Osage Indian, which is the tribe that lived in Iowa, and basically ran between two rivers. Osage, Iowa is where she was born. Her father was Italian. One reason it is hard to discover the genealogical line is because her grandmother (the Osage Indian) could pass for white, and if you could pass for white, you did. Being an Indian was worse than being a black slave. On the socio-economic level, it was worse because a slave had value. The Indians couldn't be sold as slaves. Her Grandma Smith married a number of times which complicates things even more. My mother would have been a great doctor, which was not possible because she was part Indian and from a poor family. However, as an industrial nurse, she made a great salary for that era. She was valuable to the companies she worked for because she was the emergency nurse for those companies; John Morrell, Chamberlains and Everco and she did all the insurance, disability and workman compensation paperwork. Along with being very well trained, she was gifted with intelligence. My dad says I got the looks from him and the brains from mom, or the other way around.

I grew up in Albia with one brother. He had two children. He stayed in Albia, and runs a truck crew for an asphalt construction company in Ottumwa. He also hauls the heavy equipment that has to be taken apart and moved—they weigh about 20 tons a piece. He moves them from location to location. He also is in charge of hiring and firing all the truck drivers. They want him to run the company but he won't because he loves to drive the trucks. He also farms my grandfather's farm. He lives on the old place which went from my grandfather to my father to him. He is a workaholic so he also owns a small tire shop on the weekends, when somebody needs a tire fixed, they can go to him. It was a part-time job but if he would stop driving big rigs, he could—but he won't—make a living doing that full-time.

Our parents gave him the farm and I got the house in town. The farm is right on the edge of town so his house is within the city limits There was a coal mine on our place and he took Grandfather's house, which was actually an old line shack, and built his house over the line shack. If you go up in his attic, you will see the old house sitting there. It's spooky to me. Every time Grandfather had a child, he added on a line shack. By the time, there were six or seven different line shacks; it looked more like a mouse trap than a house. My brother made them into a house—quite a feat of carpentry.

My nephew, my brother's son, lives a quarter mile down the road from our old homestead. Some day I'd like to see John buy the homestead. That was where Dad grew up. It is called Hawkin Hill just south of Albia on Highway 5. In the days when horses were our transportation, there was a little bitty town two hours from another little bitty town, a half day's ride to the county seat town.

I grew up fairly normal, went to high school in Albia, played football, basketball, baseball—all the American stuff; Homecoming, Prom---pretty much a great life. I did have to work a lot. Work was unbelievably important to my family. We still to this day, whenever we have a family get-together, are usually working on something. Every Saturday we would cut hedge for hedge posts.

I started milking cows by hand at age 5. I'd get up in the morning—my grandfather's place was about two blocks from us and Dad would run us over there. We'd milk a couple cows and go home to get ready for school. I was probably the last generation to milk by hand. We were old school. We put up hay with pitch forks, drug it over and did what we called tromping it, took it over to the barn and put it up loose in the barn.

In the 60's, the government came in and like everything else, when they found a fly in our milk, they said, "Here is what you have to do to fix it." but figuring the amount of milk my grandfather would have to sell to do that, we just got out of the business. Two days a week we'd get up at 5:00 and deliver milk until we got picked up on the way to school about 8:00 or 8:15.

My mother and dad were Sunday school teachers and so were Laurie and I. I would mostly sit there and give the kids a hard time. It was Laurie and my mom in her time, to teach the kids the Methodist stuff. My dad, in his time, and when I did it, would go out and get drinks or food for the kids half-way through class. I was an Eagle Scout and really enjoyed all that went with it. When Richard was in it, I was Cub Master. Because I liked it, I wanted him to like it, too; but he never took to it like I did. I had really good experiences and a high regard for the training. In medical school, when I trained medical students, if they were Eagle Scouts, I took them. I knew what was required to achieve that and if they could do those things for the rest of their lives, they had qualities for success. It was a different kind of success than doing something great on a football field one time and be considered a hero. I never had one young man who was an Eagle Scout disappoint me in his perfounance in med school. It was unusual.

My dad bought me a car. He really bought it because there were two girls who lived next to us and they were poor. They were probably never going to get one so Dad bought a car for them, but said it was to come and pick us up for school. That was my dad. He probably was and still is one of the nicest guys you'd ever know. I don't know that I ever saw him jealous of anybody. I had a friend whose dad made him shoot his own dog to punish him, and my dad went little bananas, when he heard about that. He went to the guy and straightened him out about that.

Dad, almost exactly 30 years before my car wreck, also was in a severe auto accident. There was some ice on the road and truck swung over and hit the van he and my brother were driving. He had similar injuries—an eye and an arm. He was disabled exactly the same as I was, almost to the day. I've told my son Richard; when you are about 50 years old, you'd better get some place where there is no snow or ice.

When I was a sophomore in college, my brother in high school, had to graduate early to take over the milk delivery business for my dad. If my dad had continued working, he wouldn't have lasted for more than 3 or 4 years. Delivering milk door-to-door was dying quickly; today we'd be delivering to the bigger places like the Hy-Vee's. My brother took Dad's 12 hour days of delivering milk and condensed it to about 45 minutes. But it's not usual for a 17 —year old kid to take over a growing business. It was very good for me because I got to stay in college.

I went to William Penn College in Oskaloosa. My uncle at that time was their athletic director and Women's Basketball Coach. I'd gotten accepted at a number of colleges, had an appointment at the Air Force Academy, and tentatively accepted at Harvard. I didn't go because the others didn't give me the kind of money I could get at William Penn. It was when the Vietnam War was at its height and starting to wind down, scholarships were left so we middleclass kids could stay in school and get college waivers. Usually scholarships are available to bright kids who could stay in college. I'd always thought I would go to college if I could.

In college, I coached basketball under my uncle a year, coached three years of track and coached a year of high school football. I was Student Body President for three years, and Vice President my first year; I was very active in my fraternity. At that time fraternities were just about everything, where today they may or may not be an intricate part of the institution. To this day I am on the Executive Committee and pretty active. I am called the "Green Reaper", instead of the Grim Reaper, because our colors are green and gold and I ask fraternity brothers to donate to the fraternity in their wills. About a month after I was appointed, I had the car wreck, and I got a note from my founding father saying, "Just because we appointed you to that position, you didn't have to be the first one to die". When I had my car wreck I was pretty close to dying.

I spent four years at William Penn and met Laurie there. She played basketball for my uncle. I said the first time I saw her she was really cute and I was going to marry her. I still think she's cute and we did marry. We dated most of her freshman year (my senior year) and then the next year I went onto Chicago to medical school. She stayed at William Penn for another semester, then we married and she finished up her college and graduated from DePaul University in Chicago. I knew she was the one for me when I first saw her and well, God always takes care of me. That is why I don't ask him for much, 'cause he seems to provide without my asking.

I just happened onto the field of Podiatry (foot doctor). From William Penn I went to the William Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine in Chicago. And I did my residency at a hospital in West Chicago. The first day of podiatry school I got the white jacket and the welcome to medical school speech and the talk about lots of money. I went out for pizza with a kid in my class and we became best friends. Later on I found out his dad was like the biggest guy in our profession. I didn't know him from Adam but I ended up in his wedding and he drove out to Iowa for mine. It is interesting how things happen. I probably wouldn't have gotten a residency if I hadn't just happened to be in his father's rotation. It's funny how somebody you happen to meet can change your life. I was successful mostly because his father is a very talented surgeon, a good doctor—just like his advice, 'you hire somebody or you hire your wife'. In his practice, his wife did his final books. This is your business and nobody, no matter how much you pay them, is going to take care of it like your wife.

These guys were good to me and I got to see a lot of things most people wouldn't have had the opportunity to see. Ron Hugar and his family lived in the neighborhood where all the Chicago mobsters lived. His wife was a Montelbano, which was a very fancy Italian furniture company that came from the old country. So I got to spend time around a lot of interesting people. The Italian mob people are very nice aside from the business and then they are nasty. Probably like the Irish mob and the Jewish mob are organized crime but on the family level they are nice people. Hugar was my best friend. He'd say, "My family's not in the mob. We just sell them real fancy Italian furniture." His sister's high school prom date was Tony Arcardo known as 'Tony the Tuna'. This was who they grew up with. Like you grew up next to the farm boy, he just happened to grow up next to the mobsters. Those were ethnic neighborhoods, and my patients were very ethnic. Dr. Hugar was very Catholic—the Montelbanos on the other side had a Cardinal in the Vatican. So we saw every side—my patients were very ethnic, a third were Catholic nuns and priests.

When we got out of school, we came back to Iowa. Carter was president and interest rates were 28-29 % or more. We came back and negotiated with a guy in Oskaloosa and a guy in Ottumwa and the day before I signed with Ottumwa, the guy changed his mind. I came back home and lived with Mom and Dad, because it was not feasible to buy something with interest rates at somewhere between 20 and 25 %. You can't buy a practice for that kind of money. The University in Des Moines had a position open with a grant to expand to rural practice, and I applied. I had very good credentials. About half my graduating class got residencies, and I got one of the best surgical residencies in the Midwest. I was very lucky to get that kind of a situation. That is really where doctors learn medicine. It is not in medical school. It is when they get to their residencies.

They made me an offer and basically it was a good enough offer that for the first time I could pay my bills. Then they expanded that program to include an office building, I got one in each town, Lamoni, Chariton, Corydon and Osceola. Every time you added an office, you'd add medical students—I started out with high school students, having them come in and find out what podiatry was. It was one of those grants that was perfect; 1) to introduce podiatry to southern Iowa, and 2) to get podiatrists into southern Iowa. When I applied here in Osceola, the Administrator at Clarke County Hospital couldn't understand why a baby doctor asked for all these surgical privileges on the foot. That was how little the local hospital administrator knew what a podiatrist was and what they did. He thought I was a pediatrician, a baby doctor.

Over the years we first went to high school students, then we went to medical students and had anywhere from two to ten at one time, the last 8 years at the University, I was in the largest Primary Care Residency program in my profession in the United States. I had a position here, one south of Minneapolis/St. Paul, and I had one on the Indian Reservation out by Omaha. I had three residents in each place so I had 9 at the time.

I loved teaching—I didn't get to see as much of my patients because I basically just supervised the students. My students had their patients and we had a huge practice. And then in 1996, we got a new University president—a Jewish Rabbi retired and they brought in a guy from Harvard who thought rural Iowa was West Des Moines. He had no desire to have these outreach points and they asked me to come in and take over the Dean's job at the college of Podiatry, I said, "No thanks, you know I'm not a lap dog. Presidents don't really want to deal with the students. Don't ask me a question if you don't want my answer. No, I would get in trouble real quick."

But I was triple boarded; I was boarded in orthopedics, which is shoes, arch supports and braces. I was Board certified in podiatric surgery and I was also boarded—in fact, I was one of the founders, who are people who start as Fellows of the American Board of Primary Podiatric Medicine—podiatrists that do everything. I was triple-boarded, and only one other guy at that time in our profession was triple-boarded. We did it because every time we got a promotion, got a 20% raise, by taking a test, which was very difficult—but every time we took a Board and got certified, we had 20% raise in our base salary. By the time we went to school—and that's the second reason the guy from Harvard got rid of us, we were triple-boarded and John and I were making more money than even the D.O.'s (Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine) at the university. The most productive and money-making guys being the foot doctors, didn't set well with the D.O. School.

We podiatrists are always going to be the 'second cousins'. Like dental school of University of Iowa, we're second cousins at the table. We've come a long way since then but the second cousins aren't making as much money as the first cousin.

We practiced here for exactly 25 years, 15 with the university and for the rest, I practiced here in 1) Osceola, 2) in Lamoni where I shared with an ophthalmologist, 3) in Chariton, with the hospital in the professional building and 4) in Corydon I shared office space in the doctor's professional building. I loved it. In southern Iowa, we have some really nice hospitals. I originally was inclined to take my patients away from the county because I was the new kid on the block, we had older surgeons in Des Moines, but once I left the university I wasn't so obligated in my teaching responsibilities. I used to, when I did surgeries, do surgery all morning and be with the kids in the afternoons. I really enjoyed it.

When my kids were all in school, Laurie came to run the office. She was the chairman of the podiatry insurance committee. She was marvelous, and it was great for me, because all I did was practice medicine. I never worried about the billings And I had the best staff in the world. Maryruth Jones, who recently passed away, worked for me 15 years. The only reason she left was because she had been with the university for so long she had built up several weeks of vacation and we just couldn't offer her that when we took over.

Emma Creveling started with us about 2 years after Maryruth did and stayed for 20 years. She finally had to retire because she was 72 years old and had some back problems. Sometimes, I told her, she thought more of my practice than I did. Once a young man I had trained moved back here and came into a facility where I practiced and began taking my patients. I thought Emma was going to take him down and beat him up. She thought the worst thing anybody could have done was step in somebody else's pumpkin patch. She was more like my mother than an employee.

We always kept our staff very small. We had two other ladies with us for 8 or 10 years and for one reason or another, they quit. Val had an offer from the local college to run the admissions and financial aid departments. She didn't have to travel to work that way. Most of my friends have 4 or 5 employees every year. I had 4 or 5 people in a 25 year period. I couldn't have asked for a nicer set of people to work with. The hospitals around here are basically like the nursing homes, high quality. I would never have had any hesitation about putting people in one of them. In fact, I put my parents in one.

Once I left due to the accident, it was pretty hard to get new podiatrists to come down here and live. I just basically couldn't get the office building to sell. I also had a slow recovery and didn't know for three years after the wreck that I wasn't going to be able to practice medicine any more. I had to deal with that. I can't physically do it and I don't have the mental capacity. I don't handle my own medicines well, how can I practice medicine? It is that simple. You have to be ambidextrous to practice surgery. To remove calluses, even grinding an arch support—I can't think of anything except maybe giving a prescription that doesn't require the use of both hands and podiatrists don't do dermatology.

My kids grew up here. They were all born in Des Moines, one at Mercy Hospital and 2 at Des Moines General Hospital. Cassie (Catherine) is the oldest. She is married now. She did her undergraduate at Iowa State, in Art. She is in the Master's degree program at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, which is like a PhD program in Art. It is a 3 year program and she has one more year left. Textile Arts doesn't have a doctorate program. A Master's degree is as high as you can go. She was married last summer (2010) to an engineer. He is from Cedar Rapids. He has a job at Honeywell in Kansas City working on government contracts for military projects.

Amy, the middle daughter, when in high school, participated in every sport. She is the only high school girl ever to letter in five athletic sports, and be captain of all five. She never felt she could give up the others and specialize like so many kids do these days, quit and just do one. Amy's college major is Elementary Education. The first 2 1/2 or 3 years of college she helped with Coach Bill Fennelly's Iowa State University Women's basketball team. Bill Fennelly and I attended William Penn College together where my Uncle Bob was the women's coach. Bill replaced me as coach for my uncle and was trained under my uncle. If I had known the kind of money coaches make now, I wouldn't have gone to medical school but I also wouldn't want to coach under the pressure he has. He is very, very good. Amy enjoyed being an ISU basketball manager but decided she needed time to do some other things during her college years.

Last fall she went to Ireland and studied a semester there. She met a young Irishman and it looks like my future grandchildren are going to be Irish! He, his sister and a best friend are coming over for the summer and we will get a chance to meet him. They 'skype' on the computer every day for an hour or more.

The youngest, son Richard, has just finished a year at DMACC (Des Moines Area Community College) and he will enter Iowa State this fall. He will be a psychology major and wants to be a psychologist.

So the kids have done real well. Laurie has been a God-send for me, especially since the accident. You don't really know how bad you are when you are hurt that badly. I got home, so I thought I was okay, and fell down the first day I was home. They had said, "Go home, go to your local hospital or go to our rehab hospital." I guess I was not ready to go home on my own. For about the first 6 months from December 6th on, I don't remember anything about the wreck at all. I've never seen the photos of it but they say they are horrid. I have no upper arm strength. I have had a couple experiences that prove that but the worst was when I tired to use my new tractor which has power everything but was on it all day with no breaks; I was so sore and tired and went to bed and woke up early with a migraine headache so bad I had to go to the emergency room. I'd never had one before and spent half a day at the ER before they got it under control and then I slept another day and a half at home before I was better. That was probably the first cold realization that I am not what I used to be and I'm never going to be. But the truth is, I can do most other things except work physically hard. That's not bad. You get to retire at 55. But there are some things—I wake up with post traumatic stress and certain things make me terribly nervous and anxious. I sometimes can't stay at an entire Iowa State football game. I didn't used to be so claustrophobic.

We are thinking of our retirement. Winters are really bad on me. I have real problems with my sinuses and headaches from the accident trauma. We are considering something down south. I was also thinking of getting a home in Hawaii, as we have been there a couple times but it may be we'll want to go to Ireland instead now. We are thinking about our options.

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Last Revised February 3, 2015