Dale Everett Minner

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It is rumored that I was born on August 8, 1934, in the Boulder Sanitarium and Hospital, Boulder, Colorado.

From an early age I was determined to be some kind of professional. Living in Fairplay, Colorado, a town of 300, until the age of nine, the only professions modeled for me were teacher, lawyer, and doctor. My parents were teachers and I certainly didn’t want to be an attorney, so I decided to become a doctor beginning in the first grade.

My pre-med education began in Wainwright, Alaska, another village of 300, where my mother was the village health worker in addition to being the teacher for grades one through three. I accompanied her on igloo visits to people with open tuberculosis and to watch her deliver babies. I took the seventh and eighth grades from the Calvert Correspondence School. For college pre-med, I started out with a major in zoology, but, in those days before DNA, I soon tired of Latin names and changed to chemistry. In chemistry, one could think as well as memorize. I married Audrey Allen in 1954 and received a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry from Walla Walla College in 1956.

I interned at the Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle where Alaskans went to be taken apart and put back together for practice. To gain a license to practice medicine in Washington State, one had to deliver six babies, four of which I had to steal by asking the nurses to call me instead of the intern on call.

I applied to join the U.S. Public Health Service instead of applying for residency, thinking to return to Alaska. I failed the physical examination because my uncorrected vision (less than 20/800) was apparently insufficient. I applied to the U.S. Navy, but my application was lost, so I entered family practice in Forks, Washington, where I delivered 150 babies in the 18 months we were there. That was more than enough to make me determined never to deliver another baby as long as I lived if I could help it. I was drafted twice, every six months, but was deferred by congressional influence (Senator Henry M. Jackson), and then joined the U.S. Army before they could do it a third time.

I served as a U.S. Army Reserve aviation medical officer and flight surgeon in Bien Hoa, Vietnam, in 1964-1965. I returned to the Seattle area with an orphan, LaDeane Anh, in 1965 where she joined Denise (born in College Place in 1956) and Allen (almost born in the hall at the White Memorial Hospital in 1959).

I served as a flight surgeon at the Boeing Company medical department where I was hired to help man-rate the space simulation chamber in Kent, Washington. Later, I did research on physical examination theory, and developed computer programs to support physical examinations. When I served on a special team to identify some of the 30,000 Boeing employees to lay off in 1970, I identified myself as surplus. However, Boeing supported a three-year senior fellowship in environmental health at the University of Washington’s school of public health, where I went instead. Subsequently, I became the Western Electric medical director for Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, then the associate medical director of the Indianapolis Works of AT&A Consumer Products, and, after that plant was closed, I became medical director for AT&A for Southern California. In 1984 I became a plant physician at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where I was promoted to medical director of the site and the region for the department of energy. Later I was the medical director of the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Institute for Science and Education, part of the Oak Ridge Associated Universities. In 1995 I was the first medical director of the occupational health program at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City, Iowa. I retired in Creston, Iowa, in 2002.

Audrey Anita Allen and I were married on September 11, 1954, and divorced in 1970. Afterwards I met and married Patricia Ann (Tricia) Hines, RN, who had just returned from Vietnam where she had been a U.S. Air Force nurse. She was a pre-medical student at the University of Washington. We married in 1970 and, after she said that, “God told me there was a ration of one doctor per family,” she studied business and photography at Evergreen State College during the time I was medical director of the student health program there. Later she developed a stock photo and advertising agency, “West Stock” in Seattle. Jennifer Suzanne (Jenni) was born to us in October of 1973.

My son, Allen, has a degree in business from the University of Puget Sound, is married to Kristin Kerns, and has two children, Dean Thomas and Laura Hope. LaDeane lives and works in Longview, Washington. Her daughter, Rachel Anderson, lives near Redmond, Washington, and does computer programming and systems development work. Denise is a registered nurse at the Monroe Hospital in Monroe, Washington, and Jenni is a PhD candidate in regional planning and historic preservation at UT in Austin. She is married to Erik Amos and they have Julia, my fourth grandchild.

Tricia died of a heart attack as a complication of Lyme disease in 1999, and her life-size memorial statue is outside of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Creston, Iowa. It was sculpted by Rich Beyer, a well-known sculptor in the Northwest. I have been an active Episcopalian since 1970, and am currently the parish administrator, service leader and lay preacher at St. Paul’s.