Meet Ed Jones
You don’t have to be a math major to
figure out what Ed Jones has done for the City of Harrisonville, Mo. But it
might help.
When he and Jean moved to the Cass County town southeast of Kansas City in
1947 the population was hovering around 4,000. When he closed his practice
there in 1976 he had delivered 3,700 babies. The population today is about
8,000.
Now don’t let logic get in the way of a good story; Ed Jones delivered a
sizable portion of the town whether the babies stayed there or not.
And Harrisonville was, until not too long ago, a very Southern small town.
That means that Dr. Jones delivered many black babies in their parents’
homes because their mothers were not allowed in the local hospital.
Three of them were born at the same time and the grateful parents named all
three…Edward, Edwin and Esther… after their doctor.
Today at 91, Ed remembers all about being a small town doctor and how much
he loved it.
“I never had so much fun in my life,” he said recently as he sat with Jean
in their comfortable Grand Court suite. “It was fun seeing people all the
time. I love people. You never knew what you’d run into the next time. It
was great sport.”
As a family practitioner he did it all and saw it all. $5 for house calls.
$10 if it was out of town. No such thing as normal clinical hours. Knowing
your patients and everyone in their families intimately. Wins and losses
were personal.
Ask him how medicine has changed, and you get a big Ed Jones smile.
“For one, nobody makes house calls any more. It’s too complicated to be too
much fun. You don’t have time for your patients because you’re on the time
clock. There’s just so much more to it now. Attend so many meetings. You
have to have a specialty in family practice now and that takes a lot of
work.”
Ironically, that doesn’t translate to anywhere near the amount of time small
town doctors like Ed used to put into actually practicing medicine.
“Doctors today are spoiled,” he smiles. “They do work much shorter hours and
rarely on weekends…”
Ed recalls a partner he had for a short time. And not fondly.
“He thought he was doing the patients a favor by treating them. That’s not
the way.”
Both Ed and Jean knew going into a life of doctoring what it would entail.
His father, his grandfather and her father were all small town doctors. He
was born and raised in Gipson and Canton, KS, she in Baxter Springs, KS. Ed
got his undergraduate degree from McPherson College and his medical degree
from the University of Kansas in 1944.
It was at KU where he met Jean at a prom. (Your correspondent pauses here to
proudly admit to a conflict-of-interest: his mother and Jean were sorority
sisters at KU.) After they were married the Army Medical Corps sent Ed to Le
Havre, in France where he was the commandant of a POW hospital.
Ed returned to an internal medicine residency at Kansas City’s Research
Hospital.
“I was getting along on $50 a month when a friend made me a deal I couldn’t
refuse, a partnership in Harrisonville. I jumped at it, thinking I wouldn’t
have to deliver any more babies. Boy, was I wrong!”
Ed did more than practice medicine in the small town.
“We were both Kansans and neither of us had never lived with black people so
we had no prejudices,” recalled Jean. “We were shocked when people called us
‘N-----lovers” because we weren’t bigots and Ed took care of black
patients.”
“I heard things called to their (African-American) faces that I couldn’t
believe,” says Ed. “I still can’t.”
Ed served on the Harrisonville school board when the district was
integrated. Jean is proud to say that Ed was instrumental in the change.
Both Ed and Jean served as senior wardens for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
in Harrisonville.
Like many people of science and of Christian faith, Ed sees no potential for
conflict. But he is not about to launch on any theological dissertation.
“I probably didn’t push God into (medical) situations enough,” he says
quietly. “It (potential conflict) doesn’t bother me at all. I’m too dumb to
worry about those kinds of things. I have my own faith and that’s it. I
don’t try and push it on anybody.”
And what’s it like when you’ve delivered all those babies, cured all those
maladies and made all those house calls, you’re comfortably retired and
someone comes up to you and says, “Doc, I got this pain over here…”?
“Easy,” Doc replies with a big smile. “I tell them to see their doctor.”
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