The doctor is in: Pioneering Moses Lake physician celebrates 103rd birthday

MOSES LAKE — Jim Young’s kids always knew when he was working late.

Young is one of Moses Lake’s earliest physicians, an obstetrician who started practicing in Moses Lake in 1954. Young celebrated his 103rd birthday Sept. 20 at Columbia Crest Center in Moses Lake.

Of course, babies have their own timetable and Young was the only obstetrician in town.

“I was the only specialist in OB here for a period of time. For quite a period of time,” Young said.

As a result, he spent many nights working late. And when he had to work late, he started a family tradition.

“If I had a delivery in the middle of the night, I always stopped at the (doughnut shop) and bought a dozen doughnuts and took (them) home to the family for breakfast,” he said.

He didn’t mind midnight deliveries, he said, because he liked being a doctor.

“It didn’t make a bit of difference if it was twelve o’clock at noon or twelve o’clock at midnight. It was fun,” he said.

Young said he ended up in Moses Lake because he liked what he saw of it driving by on the highway.

“I was practicing in Yakima, and had a practice established, and I got a little note from the War Department,” he said.

That note from what is now the Department of Defense ordered him to military service.

“I landed two years of duty at Fairchild (Air Force Base),” he said. “I wanted to go overseas, but they sent me to Fairchild.”

He commuted back to Yakima on weekends, a route that took him by Moses Lake.

“The lake just appealed to me. The town was new, my wife liked it, and the kids liked it, and so we came here,” he said.

Moses Lake’s hospital was about five years old, in a building converted from a military barracks, one of many buildings in town converted to other uses after World War II.

“If a woman came in and we had to do a delivery, we’d have to start moving equipment around so we could get in there and get it done,” Young said. “But we functioned. And we functioned well for a community of that size. Then as the community grew, we had to have more space.”

The hospital moved to its current site in 1955.

“I remember the day that we moved into the present hospital, as it was. That was luxury at the time,” he said.

Young’s daughter, Nancy Young, remembered the days when her dad made house calls.

“I used to ride along. He had a spotlight in the car, and I would shine the spotlight on the house numbers,” she remembered.

The stereotype of the 1950s is most small town doctors were general practitioners. But Young said that wasn’t always true. The late Robert Ruby, a pioneering surgeon in Moses Lake, opened his practice in 1955. Another doctor was an ear, nose and throat specialist.

A lot of people had received medical training during military service or got interested in medical careers while they were in the service, he said. After they finished medical school, they were looking for places to practice.

“Moses Lake looked like a pretty good place at that time,” he said.

The local physicians respected each other, he said.

“I knew all the doctors of the time, and we were all friends. No animosity – any displayed animosity, I would say,” Young said. “It was a tight-knit community. We forgave each other for any mistakes, picked up the pieces and moved on.”

Young grew up in Rexburg, Idaho, and said his decision to be a doctor was influenced by a family role model.

“I had an uncle who was a doctor, and actually he helped me along,” he said.

His dad started out raising orphan lambs, eventually raising sheep and cattle and buying a farm. But Young didn’t really see his future on the farm.

“That was not my idea of a way of life,” he said.

He was in medical school during most of World War II, he said, serving a few months toward the end of the war.

He retired from practice in 1988, he said.

Along the way, he was on the Moses Lake City Council, the Moses Lake School Board and the city planning commission. He’s in the Moses Lake High School athletic Hall of Fame as the football team’s biggest fan. He attended home and away games for a quarter-century.

“He couldn’t miss a Moses Lake football game,” said his son, Bob Young.

After retirement Young took up amateur radio and became a skilled metalworker.

“One of the saddest days of his life was when his doctor told him he couldn’t use his arc welder any more,” Bob Young said.

Jim Young’s friend, Terri Mrazek, said there have been some pretty good stories along the way, like the time the doctor and a friend tried to land a plane on the frozen surface of Moses Lake. Young said they landed okay, but it didn’t end well. The plane started to sink. It didn’t sink all the way to the bottom of the lake, but it did end up underwater.

“He’s had a long life, and he’s done a lot with it,” Bob Young said.

And Jim Young said he liked being a doctor.

“I can honestly say that I enjoyed it. Getting up in the middle of the night was not that much of a job, even though it was sometimes rather taxing. The rewards were much greater than the problems it created,” he said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.