MISSISSIPPI YEARNING
Meet 89-year-old Carrol Frazier Landrum — the doctor who works out of his car
A journey into America’s poorest and sickest state, where opposition to Obama’s health reforms are fierce — but also where an 89-year-old doctor treats patients in his car because the only other medical help they can afford is prayer.
Six days a week, around 10 in the morning, an 89-year-old man named Carrol Frazier Landrum drives his dented black Toyota Camry into an empty parking lot next to a dollar store. He parks under the shade of a pine tree. He starts reading a medical journal. And he waits.
Around noon, when the blazing Mississippi sun moves to the other side of the sky, Landrum turns the car back on, drives for five seconds to the other side of the parking lot, and parks under the shade of an elm tree. Then, until 4:30 p.m., he reads and waits some more.
A few times a day, someone pulls into the lot and parks beside him. Usually they have a cold or cough or rash they want him to check out, sometimes something more serious. Occasionally, this year, they just want to thank him.
“He’s really a miracle. He really is. He’s a miracle,” said Lou Ann McDuffie Harris, an exuberant 55year-old who dropped by to chat one day in August.
McDuffie Harris pointed to her legs. One is bigger than the other. Polio. Landrum, she said, treated her when she was a poor infant.
During the Eisenhower administration.
“Dr. Landrum ain’t nothing but a Godsent man,” McDuffie Harris said. “Old as he is and he’s still practising medicine? Still is reaching out to the community to help people? For anybody to practise medicine
in their car? That mean a lot to a little town. Everybody love Dr. Landrum. Everybody love Dr. Landrum. My hero.”
The black woman with the booming voice bent down to give the quiet white man a hug. She smiled. His eyes welled with tears.
He is not used to this, the emotional expressions of gratitude. But they have come pouring in this year, this very strange 63rd year in the career of a revered, briefly persecuted, professionally homeless MD.
Carrol Frazier Landrum grew up on a Mississippi cotton farm, then served in the Navy and Air Force and got his medical degree. In 1959, he moved to Edwards, a segregated small town half an hour from the state capital of Jackson, to be closer to a pretty girlfriend.
Three months later, Mary Ann Mobley left the area to become Miss America. Her ex-boyfriend stayed put. For 56 years, with brief exceptions, Landrum has been Edwards’s only doctor.
He kept his practice in Edwards through a black civil rights boycott of white professionals, through an attack on his office by “KKK-variety” white racists angry at his compassion for blacks, through the steep decline of a once-thriving farming town into poverty, drug addiction and blighted emptiness.
He now keeps his practice in Edwards even though he is an 89-year-old without an office.
“Every time I would think about leaving,” he said, “somebody would make some remark that would change my thinking. They would say, ‘I don’t know what we would do without you.’ ” The feeling is mutual. Landrum never married: paraphrasing the lyrics of B.B. King, another Mississippi man who made it to 89, he said the only woman he loved loved somebody else. Instead, he devoted himself to a community.
He is a lanky 6-foot-5, shorter now because of his old-age stoop, with probing brown eyes and a gentle laugh. He wears khaki pants held up by suspenders. His walk has become a shuffle. His memory is impeccable.
Relentlessly courteous — he calls men 60 years younger than him “sir” — he is cherished in and around Edwards for his knowledge and for his empathy. When he talks about how the justice system ensnares the poor with fines they can’t afford and guilty pleas they can’t afford to pass up, he sounds, except for the Old South drawl, like a Black Lives Matter activist.
He has, in fact, committed much of his life to black lives. Edwards, population 1,000, is now 80 per cent black and deeply impoverished. Income per person is less than $15,000 per year. Hundreds of residents live in ramshackle trailers and tiny houses.
Landrum charges the archaic price of $45 per appointment. When he charges at all. For his most desperate patients, he waives his unbeatable fee.
“For a lot of them,” he said, “it’s not what I’m going to eat, it’s if I’m going to eat.”
Landrum worked for more than a decade
out of an apartment right beside the apartment where he lived. When erratic drug addicts moved into the adjacent units, he said, his patients grew afraid to show up. He decided he needed to move when his nextdoor neighbour brandished a gun twice in two days.
He found a safer place to live, but Edwards had no usable office space. Retirement never crossed his mind: he doesn’t have hobbies, and a town needed him. There was only one plausible solution.
At 86, Landrum started seeing patients out of the 2007 sedan with the busted tail light.
He drove up to 80 kilometres to meet the people who had trouble coming to him. For the others, he simply idled in the vacant lot. It was there, said Edwards resident Jessie Mae Jelks, 78, that he immediately and correctly diagnosed her sick husband with congestive heart failure.
“I had all these people. And they kept calling,” Landrum said, his eyes welling again.
“Even though I was as seeing them out of an automobile, that didn’t seem to bother them.”
But an anonymous complaint was filed with the state medical board. In January, a board investigator summoned him to a meeting. For reasons that remain murky, he demanded that Landrum surrender his licence on the spot.
Landrum refused. The board gave him an extra week to think.
“And during that week,” he said, “word got around.”
His patients began circulating online petitions. More than 80,000 people signed. Patients and other supporters from around the region began showing up in the lot to sign paper copies — lining up, he said, “kind of like at McDonald’s.” His cause was adopted by talk radio hosts, a Democratic congressman, a conservative think-tank in Arizona.
The outcry cemented his resolve. With a news camera rolling, he left a voicemail with the medical board from the driver’s seat of the Camry.
“I’m Dr. Landrum,” he said. “I called to tell you that I have chosen to not resign my medical licence.”
Before hanging up, he added, “I thank you kindly.” The board didn’t stand a chance. In April, the decision was finalized. As long as Landrum took a refresher course on proper record-keeping, he could keep his licence. And keep working from the car.
He will not have to do so much longer. During the uproar, Harrison Williams, a local businessman who bought the former post office building attached to the parking lot, offered to let Landrum use part of the building rent-free. A local contractor, Karl Vriesen, did a free renovation to turn the space into an honest-to-goodness doctor’s office, examination room and all.
“He gives to the community, so whatever somebody can do, that’s what you do,” said Vriesen, a 59-year-old white man. “Instead of travelling somewhere — he’s got more experience than two doctors that you could see simultaneously.”
“I’ve been here 15 years. I never heard a complaint of him being a bad doctor,” said Williams, a 54-year-old black man. “I talked to a lot of people. They love him here.”
The office is almost complete. By the time Dr. Carrol Frazier Landrum turns 90, health willing, he should be practising medicine indoors.
“I talked to a lot of people. They love him here.” HARRISON WILLIAMS A LOCAL BUSINESSMAN