Adventure Just Happened To Fall In Dr. Martha's Lap

JOHN DAY, Ore. - Dr. Martha has patched up spies in Saigon, Vietnam, tended the sick in Africa and made house calls by small plane in eastern Oregon. She has skied the Swiss Alps and climbed Mount Hood three times.

A tiny, bespectacled woman - she stands only 4-foot-11 - Dr. Martha Rohner van der Vlugt, 87, of Silver Springs, Md., insists she wasn't courting danger, only staying busy.

"In my life, we were always busy all day," says the Swiss-born physician who made house calls around John Day in a small Cessna airplane for many years. "You make something to do, and that's a way of life."

Dr. Martha, as everyone has called her for decades, returned to Oregon recently to accept the Charles Preuss Outstanding Alumni Award from Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland and attend her 60th class reunion - and visit old friends.

Looking back, she doesn't recall ever giving much thought to notions of high adventure. Most of what she did seemed necessary at the time. And, of course, it was, well . . . fun.

Dr. Martha first came to the John Day Valley in 1938. She had just graduated from the old University of Oregon Medical School in Portland and had married Dr. Gerold Gilbert van der Vlugt. He was a surgeon, and she practiced obstetrics and pediatrics.

Until his death in 1964, they were known across eastern Oregon as "Dr. Jerry" and "Dr. Martha."

And they became, in their own way, living legends.

"They were both lovely people, and they cared very much for each other," said Mae Jeanett Henning, 67, of John Day, who worked for them. "The adventure just happened to fall in her lap."

Dr. Jerry quickly established himself with the region's bristle-jawed loggers and leathery cowhands for an exploit of such courage and pluck that nobody ever has attempted to duplicate it: He surgically removed his own appendix in a hunting camp.

Made house calls in a plane

The van der Vlugts lived on a 34,000-acre cattle ranch near John Day, where they raised four children of their own and three children of her brother and sister-in-law, who were killed in a car accident.

They made house calls in a small airplane, using gravel ranch roads as airstrips. They delivered babies, performed surgeries and set up a 30-bed hospital in Canyon City. Somehow, they found time to be pillars of their church, support the Grant County Fair and the local grange and fraternal organizations, and start a ski club.

In those days, eastern Oregon was still wild and woolly, and visiting a doctor definitely wasn't part of the code of the West.

"The people didn't come in until they were practically dead," said Anne Gruenenfelder, 73, a niece of Dr. Martha's who came to live with the van der Vlugts at age 16.

Take one memorable Christmas Eve in the early '40s. The van der Vlugt family was opening presents when they heard a rapping at the door. Their son Jake opened it to find and found a tall man standing in the cold and holding a bloodstained rag to his neck.

Gasping that he "needed a doctor," he fell forward, nearly crushing Jake and exposing a wound where his throat had been cut in a knife fight.

They laid him on the kitchen table - which saw frequent use for the emergency delivery of babies and treatment of broken bones - and Dr. Martha and Dr. Jerry gave him the world's best Christmas present. They saved his life.

Another time, a strapping young logger showed up with a 2-inch-diameter branch penetrating his stomach and emerging from his back. They sewed him back together, and he recovered - and promptly married one of their nurses.

A Sunday drive for the van der Vlugt family sometimes meant going to distant parts of the region and inoculating ranchers, cowhands and their families against Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Curiously, almost nobody objected to her status as a professional woman in those pre-feminist days.

"I was just treated like a doctor - they seemed to accept me from the very beginning," she said.

'Always liberated'

But this corner of Oregon sometimes surprises outsiders. Dr. Martha's close friend, Grace Williams, now 60 of Canyon City, broke all the reigning taboos by setting up shop as an attorney in 1948. A group of business people and ranchers later urged her to run for Grant County district attorney, a job she held from 1959 to 1979.

"I was always liberated, and she was, too," Williams said of Dr. Martha. "We never worried about that."

Dr. Martha and Dr. Jerry often worked until 10 or 11 p.m. They would arrive home exhausted to find their children already asleep, and then fall into bed only to be roused an hour or two later to deliver a baby. She and Dr. Jerry often slept and worked in shifts.

Dr. Martha graduated from Portland's Jefferson High School in 1928 and later from Reed College. Even before starting medical school, she worked in the University of Oregon's bacteriology department, participating as a researcher in the original culture of human blood cells.

Dr. Martha's life changed abruptly in 1964, when Dr. Jerry succumbed to a heart attack. She took their youngest daughter, Carrie, and returned to Switzerland.

"I thought I could run away from grief," she said. "You know, you can't. But I tried."

She spent two years living in Geneva, brushing up on her French, skiing the Alps - breaking one of her legs in the process - and visiting most of the capitals of Europe. Then deciding it was time once again to do something "constructive," she accepted a job with the U.S. State Department as the first woman regional medical officer in the foreign service.

She was posted to Nepal, Laos, Vietnam and Senegal. While assigned to Senegal, she had responsibilities in Mali, Upper Volta, Gambia, Niger and Mauritania. And during a stint in Saigon in the middle of the Vietnam War, the U.S. ambassador singled her out to handle "special cases."

"Now and then someone would have to be evacuated from the country quickly - European, Vietnamese, Chinese," she said. "I don't know where the ambassador found these people, but he didn't want them going to the military hospitals. In other words, they were probably doing spy work."

Retiring from the State Department in 1973, she joined the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Office of Retirement Programs, where she reviewed disability and special entitlement claims. Dr. Martha retired from there in 1992.