GUEST COLUMN: Rome medical community loses giant of a man
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| 1 | | “I cried my eyes out when he retired,” my friend Charlotte Jones told me. “He was always there for you, and insisted you call him even at night and on weekends if you needed him. My husband Larry heard him jokingly answer a stranger who had asked him if he was a doctor, ‘Yes, and a damned good one, too!’
And he really was!!”
Many of these patients didn’t realize that he could also be a real character.
Much of everyone’s life is, of course, shaped by the heredity and environment of their family. Undoubtedly Sam inherited many of his father’s traits. Also a physician in Rome, his father was also noted as a great and good man, but one you didn’t cross.
His office was above Enloe’s drug store on the corner of Broad Street and Second Avenue. During a renovation the entrance door got hung backwards, resulting in the door being locked from the outside.
“Mr. Bradford, this damn door is locked, and I can’t get out,” he phoned to the pharmacist downstairs. “Send Willie up with the key.” Things got real busy about then, and Mr. Bradford forgot to send Willie.
“No need to send Willie,” Dr. Garner phoned an hour later. “I took a 2 X 4 and knocked the damn door down!” And he had!
SAM EVIDENTLY also inherited some of his deviltry and toughness from his father. His nephew, local CPA Ben Whittington, says Sam was the “enforcer” at Neely school when he was a child. “If any kid needed a whoopin’, Sam was the one delegated to do it.”
This and his sense of fairness and justice later got him in trouble when he was attending Wake Forest U. A large, tough, and strong football player often bullied other students. He made the mistake of jamming Sam’s face down into a drinking fountain from which Sam was drinking, breaking a couple of teeth.
Sam went seeking him to retaliate. When he found him, he broke a stick across his jaw. For this he was kicked out of Wake Forest, and then transferred to the University of Georgia.
Other stories related to me by Whittington about Dr. Garner include:
When Sam was a young boy, the family had a cow who always followed Sam like a pet dog. He would get the cow to follow him into the house and follow him upstairs. From an upstairs window, Sam would leap out the window onto the roof of an outbuilding, and from there to the garden below to soften the landing. Trustingly, the cow would follow.
His father came home one evening, and was dumbfounded to see his cow hurtling through space and into his garden. His only comment was, “No damn wonder my canna lilies don’t grow!”
YOU HAD TO BE CAREFUL playing tricks on Sam, because he was good at getting even. As a joke a female friend turned two rabbits loose in his office one weekend. Later the lady brought her 16- year-old daughter to Sam for examination.
After the exam, he returned to the reception area and announced to her mother that the girl was pregnant. The momma about had a heart attack, until Sam said, “April fool.”
And I found he was quick on the comeback as well. He and dentist Dr. Bob Woodruff were good friends and always played golf together. They were fierce competitors, and hated to lose, despite the fact they were both lousy golfers and their betting stakes were a Coke.
One day I was in the group waiting as he and Bob teed off on the first hole.
Sam hooked his drive so badly, it ended up on the parallel 10th hole on the back nine, which was closed for repairs.
“Hey, Sam,” I gleefully shouted. “The back nine is closed.”
“I know it and I wish your mouth was, too,” he one-upped me.
SAM IDOLIZED his older brother Geston. Like Sam he also never lost a fight, and was very intelligent and clever, and thus Sam was very disappointed over the fact that when Geston was about 13 years old, he would always lose in wrestling matches with a gal named Marjorie. The girl was well developed, but not all that strong. Yet she always won.
“Why do you let that girl beat you like that?” a disappointed Sam asked his brother.
“Because,” replied Geston with a sly grin, “if I beat her she won’t agree to wrestle me any more.”
Sam first “prescribed” medication when he was about 10 years old. He found some Ex-Lax among his father’s drug samples, and after removing the wrappers gave it all to a friend as chocolate candy. The boy got five demerits for hiding in the school basement all day.
“I see lots of doctors every day,” a security guard at Floyd Hospital once told me. “Some of them act mighty biggety, like they think they’re better than anyone else.”
The exact opposite of Sam!!
MORE THAN anything else I will remember Sam as a great and highly successful person and physician with a marvelous sense of humor, who was a really nice guy, and never conceited or “biggety.”
Jack Runninger of Rome is a retired optometrist and state and national award-winning humor columnist and co-author of “Fixing Stupid—Two Curmudgeons’ Pet Peeves.” Readers may contact him at runningerj@comcast.net
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