Funeral of a Small-Town Doctor / From the Memoir ‘The Good Times Are All Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town’

Julie Whitesel Weston grew up in Kellogg, Idaho, in the 1940s and 1950s, when it was “a wide-open, Wild West town” with brothels and gambling dens that attracted men who worked for the Bunker Hill silver mine. Her father, a doctor, examined the prostitutes twice a month for venereal diseases. He also made middle-of-the-night house calls and received venison and elk steaks from patients, whom he asked, “How’s your body?” After setting up his practice, Glen Whitesel stayed in Kellogg until he died in 1978, and sometimes played the snare drum for Tommy’s Trio at the Sunshine Inn.

Julie Whitesel recalls her childhood in her recent memoir The Good Times Are All Gone Now: Life, Death, and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). In this excerpt, she describes her father’s funeral, attended by friends such as real-estate developer Jim Bening and attorney Bob Robson.

“An honor guard of nurses, each dressed in white starched cap, dress, and stockings, stood like wings on either side of the elaborate coffin at the front of the church. His doctor partners served as pallbearers, along with Jim Bening and Bob Robson, and an extra six of friends, a double ring of hands. Townspeople – miners, wives, businessmen and women, gambling and drinking buddies, Tommy’s Trio, my friends, their parents, teachers, coaches, patients, not-patients — filled the church, spilled out into the parking lot, sang hymns, shed tears. The Episcopal priest, Father McReynolds, who had been one of my father’s gin rummy partners and was shaking with Parkinson’s disease, eulogized him.

“‘How’s your body?’ he began. A low wave of laughter filled the church. ‘No one who knew Doc Whitesel would ever say he was without failings. But I like to think he earned a place in heaven in spite of those failings, common to us all, in one form or another. Glen was our doctor, our friend, and an irreplaceable man in Kellogg, Idaho.’ He faced the casket and added, ‘See you later, alligator.’”

You can learn more about The Good Times Are All Gone Now on the sites for the author and for University of Oklahoma Press.

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