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Dr. Howard Shelly remembers – Dr. Rodabaugh and Dr. Travis, the two general practitioners in Bluffton, were both were good to us. Dr. Rodabaugh took me under his wing and I took my internship at Memorial Hospital in Lima.

You don’t always do these things perfect. In Illinois you had to take your internship before you got your license. I assumed that was the way it was in Ohio, but it wasn’t. I could have gotten my license at the beginning of my internship, but I didn’t realize that so, I found out that I had to take my license and wait three months and get it approved.

So my internship ended at the end of July and I didn’t get my license until August 27, 1957. We bought a house at 564 South Main right across from Garau Street and moved in there in May of 1957.

 I was going to do things the modern way. I was the new doctor in town. Many of the doctors had taught me to keep their records on four by five cards and I was going to be more modern and I kept my records on eight by ten cards.

Another thing I was going to do differently was that no other doctors in town made appointments for patients.

You see, up until then, if you needed a doctor you just walked into the office if you were willing to wait. So as a result of that innovation, the first day I was in practice I had three salesmen and one patient. And that patient came without an appointment and I’m glad he came.

I can’t remember his name now, but he was a good patient and we had a long, long relationship. My office was in our home. It was a big house. There was a large living room with an opening into the dining room. We put in a wall and cut the living room off from the dining room and put another wall down on the side of that and made a waiting room.

And then we had one examining room and there was a hallway and another room. There was a small downstairs bathroom, which became the office bathroom and the laboratory. In the hallway was where you did everything else.

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