An angel on snowshoes
Museum helps pass along the lessons of Dr. Kate
WOODRUFF – She looks the quintessential grandma in pictures, round face with a wide smile, gray curls poofing from her head, a smile seemingly tailor-made for giving out hugs or a plate of warm cookies.
The images can’t show the steely spirit and dogged determination that distinguished Dr. Kate Pelham Newcomb and made her famous worldwide.
As one of two doctors in the 1940s and 1950s who practiced in a 300-square-mile swath of Wisconsin’s Northwoods, from the Minocqua-WoodruffArbor Vitae area to the Upper Peninsula boundary, the Woodruff-based doctor earned people’s respect by delivering more than 3,000 babies without losing a child or mother, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.
She let nothing stop her from treating her patients. She made house calls in the worst of weather, through sub-zero temps and blinding blizzards. She traveled via snowshoes, canoe, snowplow and a Model T Ford modified with skis in front and tracks in back.
She once traveled more than 376 miles in a day to visit patients in Tomahawk, Rhinelander and Ironwood, Michigan. In the late 1940s, it became clear to her and Woodruff area community members that the community could use a hospital of its own, and she became a driving force behind the effort to build Lakeland Hospital, now known as Howard Young Medical center and part of the Aspirus system. But it wasn’t an easy road.
Dr. Kate, as people called her, would go on to become a pioneer reality TV star after appearing March 17, 1954, on a show called “This Is Your Life.” It thrust Dr. Kate into the role of a Wisconsin icon, taking on the mystique of Paul Bunyan or the hodag in Wisconsin. Except she was real.
It’s against all odds that Dr. Kate pulled all this off. Becoming a doctor meant she had to buck the wishes of her father and defy the expectations of a sexist society. She was quiet and didn’t seek the spotlight, not the kind of personality that brings fame.
“She was such a mild-mannered, soft-spoken woman,” said Gary Simmons, the vice president of the board of the Dr. Kate Pelham Newcomb Museum in Woodruff, which opened in 1988 and preserves the history of Dr. Kate, the Woodruff area and the effort to build the hospital.
“She didn’t like the hoopla . ... She was more concerned about her patients.”
Building a hospital
Earlier this month, the Dr. Kate Museum was filled with dozens of thirdgraders from the nearby Arbor VitaeWoodruff School, along with parents, teachers and other interested people. The gathering was the capstone of a Dr. Kate curriculum that has been part of third-grade lessons at the school for more than 30 years.
The classes were about history and a prominent local person. But anyone learning about Dr. Kate is also going to soak up lessons about community, perseverance and devotion.
The first thing people need to know about Dr. Kate is that she wasn’t alone, said Marsha Doud, secretary of the museum’s board and curator.
The entire community supported Dr. Kate and her quest to build a hospital in Woodruff. Part of the reason Dr. Kate gained such respect was because she was willing to travel to care for her patients — but she also knew they would be better served if they had a hospital nearby.
The hospital’s official groundbreaking took place in 1952, even though there weren’t enough funds to cover the full cost of construction. Hospital board members hoped progress on the hospital would stimulate more donations, but the effort ran out of funds when the building was about three-fourths complete.
Around that time, math teacher Otto Burich was teaching high school students about quantities, and a discussion about what a “million” would look like took place. They decided as a group to collect 1 million pennies.
Burich and his students organized a Million Penny Parade in which they encouraged people to bring in their pennies to donate, and wrote hundreds of letters to bolster support. The class reached its goal in April 1953. They donated the pennies to the hospital building effort and construction resumed.
Their effort caught the attention of Ralph Edwards, host of “This Is Your Life,” and arrangements were made to profile Dr. Kate on national television. The show was popular with Americans at the time: Edwards would surprise guests and go through a retrospective of their lives, bringing in colleagues, friends and family members to comment. Those who knew Dr. Kate knew she wouldn’t consent to being the focus of the show, so they contrived a different reason to get her to Los Angeles.
“She never would have gone on ‘This Is Your Life’ had they not told her she was going to a medical convention,”
Doud said.
At the end of the show, Edwards made an appeal to viewers to send pennies, and another $105,000 was collected, enough to complete the building, add additional rooms and purchase equipment.
It took ‘a lot of grit’
It’s been almost 70 years since that triumph, and many people who live in the Minocqua-Arbor Vitae-Woodruff area want to make sure the story isn’t forgotten. And they still adore the driven woman who inspired it all.
They are proud of the fact that Dr. Kate became a doctor against the wishes of her father.
“It wasn’t ladylike,” Doud said. “To become a doctor took a lot perseverance on her part.”
That’s why the Dr. Kate third-grade curriculum is so important. It’s passing Dr. Kate’s spirit on to other generations, years after she died in 1956 at age 70.
Among the students soaking in the
Dr. Kate mystique this year were twin sisters Sierra and Sofia Stenz.
“She couldn’t be a doctor because she was shy,” Sierra said, “And her dad didn’t want her to be one, and she didn’t want him to get mad. Finally she said, ‘Hey Dad, I’m going to be doctor,’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’”
It took a lot of work for Dr. Kate to become a doctor, “and a lot of grit,” Sierra said.
“I thought about Dr. Kate a lot when I was writing about her,” Sofia said. “She delivered over 3,000 babies!”
Their mother, Christina Bayer, laughed at how learning about Dr. Kate engaged her daughters. “Yeah, they’ve told me the whole story,” she said. “Every night.”
The Dr. Kate lessons help bridge generations, too. Mary Anderson, 93, of Arbor Vitae, connected with her neighbor, Charlotte Renkas, 8, when she learned Charlotte was studying about the doctor.
Dr. Kate delivered Anderson’s first child in 1953, in Tomahawk, because the Woodruff hospital wasn’t completed.
Anderson remembers Dr. Kate as a matter-of-fact physician who was straight to the point.
“Sometimes she was a little gruff,” Anderson said. “But she was good.”
Contact Keith Uhlig at 715-845-0651 or kuhlig@gannett.com. Follow him at @UhligK on Twitter and Instagram or on Facebook.