Divide and conquer

Southern Living, Oct 1999 by Horton, Orene Stroud

I ask if there is any car here he couldn't bear to part with. "The 1959 Morgan," he replies. "I've had that car since I was in college. Morgans are totally handmade in England and have wooden frames. And they only make a couple or 300 of them a year."

Wooden frames? So how do you fix a scratch? Brush on a little Sherwin-Williams? "The answer is, you don't scratch 'em," says Bob.

Leesburg, Georgia

Twenty years ago, if you got sick in the backwoods of southwest Georgia, you were in big trouble. Then "Doc Hollywood" arrived.

Jim Hotz may not look like Michael J. Fox, but he inspired Fox's character in the movie about a big-city doctor coming to a small, Southern town. Trained in internal medicine at prestigious Emory University in Atlanta, Jim could have set up a lucrative practice there. Instead, he opened a clinic in tiny Leesburg (near Albany), which hadn't seen a doctor in 40 years.

In fact, there wasn't a doctor anywhere in all of Lee and Baker Counties. "It didn't seem right that we should have places in our country without physicians," asserts Jim. "The people here deserve health care just as good as everybody else's."

Jim opened his first clinic inside a humble trailer in 1979. Today, six modern health clinics operate in four counties, supplying comprehensive primary care to more than 25,000 people a year. Poverty, common here, doesn't limit care. Patients pay what they can, subject to a minimum $10 fee per visit.

Jim's mission is to shrink the ever-widening gulf between urban and rural health care. "It used to be healthier to live in rural areas," he notes. "Now because of access problems, rural health is worse." Lack of doctors means many people fail to seek treatment for chronic health problems, such as hypertension, diabetes, emphysema, and high cholesterol. "If you compare the deaths per 100,000 for southwest Georgia to those in the rest of the state, we have 382 excess deaths a year," says Jim. "My son heard this and said, `Geez, that's the exact size of my grade school."'

But decades of service are paying off. Baker County now boasts a 100% immunization rate. And hospital admissions in clinic communities are half of those in area communities that lack facilities.

"Doc Hollywood" Hotz doesn't regret his move to the country for one minute. "Rural life is about values," he states. "You can always make more money in the city. But when you see your kids grow up and the values they attain, you realize coming here was a very good thing."

Eufaula, Alabama

Kendall Manor Inn, our bed-and-breakfast home for the night, always elicits strong reactions from first-time guests. Some feel awe. Some feel inspired. I feel grateful I don't have to paint it.

For six years, owners Tim and Barbara Lubsen have labored to restore the historic Italianate landmark, built by merchant James Turner Kendall in 1872. They've put on a new roof, installed new ceilings, rebuilt the porch, caulked and repaired windows, added new heating and air conditioning, and repainted everything. At the moment, Tim's fiddling with brand-new gutters.