Dr. Donald Crow, Family Practitioner Who Was `Country Doctor At Heart'

Dr. Donald Crow made house calls for 50 years.

He also sewed up the neighbor kids, and his own children as well, on the kitchen table in the family's longtime Rainier Beach home.

Having grown up on a farm on Marrowstone Island, off Port Townsend, Dr. Crow's rural upbringing stuck with him.

"He was a country doctor at heart," said his daughter, Laurel Tyler of Renton, a nurse. "He really didn't go in for this big-city, high-dollar stuff."

Dr. Crow died May 12 at Swedish Hospital from complications related to a stroke. He was 82.

He was born Aug. 21, 1908, in Chico, Calif., his family's home for just a few months. They were traveling by wagon from Wisconsin to the West Coast. Eventually, they ended up at Texada Island in British Columbia.

Tyler said the women in the family complained of the remoteness of Texada, however, so the clan moved to Marrowstone Island.

There, Dr. Crow's father farmed, logged and hunted. Dr. Crow learned all these skills. From the time he was 9 years old, Dr. Crow often recounted, he saved his odd-jobs money for medical school.

One family story holds that Dr. Crow sold pelts from animals he had trapped to pay for his first bicycle.

Dr. Crow attended the Seventh-day Adventist Academy in Auburn, then Walla Walla College. He earned his medical degree in 1936 from Loma Linda College in California. His first job in medicine was working for the Army Corps of Engineers at the massive Ross Dam site in the North Cascades. He tended injured workers mostly.

When World War II broke out, he volunteered for the Army. He was assigned to the Air Corps as a flight surgeon, and was stationed in the Pacific. Like thousands of other servicemen, he visited Japan after the war ended and saw the devastation at Hiroshima.

He returned to Seattle and set up a general medical practice. He met his wife, Lucy, at Seattle General Hospital, where she worked in a laboratory. They married on March 6, 1947, and made their home in Rainier Beach.

Nowadays, Dr. Crow would be called a family practitioner. "He was a gentle person, nonaggressive, real interested in his family and in his medicine from an old-fashioned point of view, not interested in the financial end of it at all," said his son, Donld of Bothell.

When not practicing out of the old Stimson Building or the Capitol Hill Clinic, Dr. Crow enjoyed the outdoors. He hunted frequently in the Cascades, and enjoyed fishing on Puget Sound and in Lake Washington.

He also dabbled in his garden after retirement a few years ago. His masterpiece was a freestanding apple tree - espaliered, or pruned so that it grew flat as if it were attached to a wall.

Besides his son and daughter, Dr. Crow is survived by another son, Rodney of San Diego, another daughter, Leslie of Seattle, three grandchildren, and his former wife, Lucy.

A memorial service is scheduled for 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Renton Seventh-day Adventist Church, 1031 Monroe Ave. N.E. Memorials are suggested to Medic One.