STILL GOING STRONG
Six decades and Dr. Joe still remains Jasper health authority
By SHARON KERR

Dr. Joe Dickerson still sees patients on a regular basis, as he has for almost six decades since he began his practice in 1948.

At 93, he practices just as he wants, without worrying about political correctness.

"I think abortion is murder," Dickerson said without equivocating. "One of my regular patients called me and wanted a 'morningafter' pill. I told her I'm not a hit man and I won't prescribe it. She told me 'then you're not my doctor any more,' and that's fine with me."

Dickerson says he still practices, "seven days a week." His philosophy for caring for patients is, "You just gotta doctor them and love 'em... If you can't doctor them then get them in the hands of someone who can."

Dickerson might have started practicing medicine sooner if World War II hadn't intervened. He graduated medical school in 1941 but did not tell the Army he was a doctor because he wanted to fly.

"They put us in a room and asked us what kind of plane we wanted to fly. Then they sent us down the hall alphabetically, A-C down there, D-F this way, and put us in another room and said now all you boys here will fly P-38's, so that's what I flew."

The plane wasn't really designed to be a combat fighter- it was supposed to be a bomber interceptor, but they flew their P-38's in combat all over North Africa, then Sicily, then New Guinea, and he was at Clark Field in the Philippines the day the bomb was dropped on Japan.

If not for his parents' wishes, he might have made a career of the Air Force, but they wanted him to come back home. Dickerson was born in Rockland in 1914 and went to high school in Woodville.

In the years leading up to what would become World War II, Dickerson was a medical student staying at the Belle Jim Hotel, as medical students still do today.

Generals and future presidents were secretly training troops in this area because the terrain, rivers and bridges were like what they expected to encounter in Europe.

Dickerson reports he saw Generals George Patton and Mark Clark dining at the Belle Jim, and that Dwight Eisenhower stayed at the Swann.

His contacts from those days led him back to Jasper to open his practice. As far as changes he's seen, Dickerson says it's mostly been for the worse ever since the 60's.

"We never used to lock our cars or houses," he recalled. Recently he had equipment stolen from his home in spite of locked gates. "That never went on in my day," he said.

One good thing that did happen in 1964 was the opening of Mary Dickerson Hospital, named for his wife who died in 1961.

"The hospital is primarily for short-term acute care," he said, "but we have access to all the specialties.

"We do refer some patients to Lufkin or Beaumont ... and we lost our obstetrician- he got rich and moved to Panama."

In the field of medicine, the two biggest improvements, according to Dickerson, are the ability to bend light, and the copy machine.

"It's absolutely unbelievable what bending light has done." Dickerson said endoscopic exams that allow physicians to see inside the living body have revolutionized medicine.

"You know all this (technology) is fallout from the space program- three of my babies work there."

Dickerson explains that the babies he is referring to are ones he has delivered, not his own three children whom he adopted and raised. He's now up to 11 great-grandkids, the oldest of them 14.

OPENING MARY DICKERSON HOSPITAL was front page news for a local paper in December 1964. Far left, Dr. Dickerson in a photo taken at his new desk, and above, the nurses' station.

The mother of that 14- year-old, Tracy Wolfford who trained as a nurse, acts as Dickerson's office manager and strong right arm.

Wolfford took lessons from Mary Dickerson. "Granny was the only person who could stand up to a Dickerson fit. She would just stand there and say 'Now, Joe Wesley' and he would shut up," Wolfford said.

"I've worked for him most of my life. I started as a teenager for $1.50 an hour; it wasn't minimum wage, it was 'grandpa's wage'," Wolfford said.

"People say he's hard to work for, but not as long as you do your job. If you're a slacker or don't like to be corrected, then yes, it's difficult to work for Dr. Dickerson. But if he sees a person willing to learn, he'll bend over backwards to see they get what they want."

Wolfford drove Dr. Joe to the 50th reunion of his medical class in Galveston. He was the only one from that class who was still practicing, and that was 1991, 16 years ago.

"I was proud of him and proud to be his granddaughter," Wolfford said.

In his office recently, Dickerson was treating a man from Newton, another veteran pilot from WWII, who complained that his prescription was not working out.

"Well, if it doesn't do you any good, don't take it," Dickerson advised, "but we've got to find you something that works."

While a nurse looked for Lipitor samples, the two veteran pilots discussed the war.

"This man is a real local hero," Dickerson said. "He was a tail gunner, sleeping in his bunk when a dive bomber hit his ship and knocked his leg off."

Their elders (which pushes time back to the 1800's) were some of the ones who "swam the Sabine." Dickerson explains that outlaws in the old days knew if they could swim the river and get to Texas, they were safe from the law.

"We're all descended from outlaws," these residents of Jasper and Newton counties agreed.

While seemingly proud of that fact, Dickerson decries current social ills and what he sees as a total decline in Christian values that built this country.

He doesn't like gays in the clergy ("abomination"), the left-wing liberal press, pedophiles in Congress, or all those social experiments that create people who whine the government is not doing enough. "That just creates more dope addicts," he asserts.

Abortion, as mentioned earlier, is high on his list of things he thinks wrong, but he is not opposed to stem cell research. "Stem cell research doesn't bother me as long as they don't destroy embryos to do it." (Current research is rapidly finding other means to create stem cell lines.)

He thinks specialists shouldn't charge so much. "We pay hot shots big prices, but the people who deal with the everyday grunts and groans don't get so much."

"I don't have any solutions to health care problems," Dickerson said, "I don't know what the answers are except to get back to the Christian values in the Bible. God was absolutely clear in the Bible when he gave us the 10 commandments, and remember, those are not the 10 suggestions."