Newsletter Spring/Summer 2000

A History of Wenatchee Valley Clinic
Dermatology Offers New Laser Treatment
Clinic Cardiologists HOPE Study
Welcome New Physicians and Clinicians

Wenatchee Valley Clinic: The history of a thriving anomaly

When Wenatchee Valley Clinic opened on April Fool’s Day, 1940, the local medical community dismissed it as folly—a small brick building, just 50 by 60 feet, manned by three upstart doctors: Albert Donald “Don” Haug, a Lahey Clinic-trained surgeon who loved fast cars and hated OB; Lloyd Smith, a vegetarian and ardent Seventh-day Adventist whose love for ham radios moved him from general practice to the new specialty field of radiology, and Lumir Martin “Mart” Mares, the popular internist who brought them together, a portly workaholic with little talent for surgery but a genius at diagnosis and patient relations.

“They said we’d last six months,” said Dr. Smith, the surviving founder. But Drs. Haug and Mares had a dream, long nurtured, of creating a medical clinic in the West that would rival any in the East. “We knew it would grow,” Dr. Smith said, “but none of us had any idea it would grow to what it is now,” one of the largest and most progressive multispecialty clinics in the Northwest.
But Wenatchee Valley Clinic has always been an anomaly. It became a group of specialists when most doctors worked alone as general practitioners, and invested heavily in the latest equipment and training.

Although there were three founders, it was Dr. Mares who brought the venture together. He was an easy man to underestimate at first, earthy and rumpled, with small holes in his jacket from cigarette burns. But behind the country-bumpkin exterior, Dr. Mares had a keen business sense, and he awed his colleagues with his tireless work ethic, his endless supply of funny stories and his gentle, charismatic way with patients.

Dr. Mares was the first of the founders to move to Wenatchee. He arrived in December of 1928. He spent his last dollar on the train ticket from Chicago to Wenatchee, and then had to hock his overcoat to have enough money for food.
In October of 1931 Dr. Mares rented two small rooms on the fifth floor of the Doneen Building in downtown Wenatchee. The practice was so popular that patients would spill out of the tiny reception area and into the hall, waiting for their turn with the doctor.

In those days, indeed, until the late 1970s, Wenatchee’s hospitals had no emergency-room doctors. So after a full day of practice, Dr. Mares spent many nights making emergency house calls, surgeries or deliveries. He was a strong believer in house calls, not just in Wenatchee but as far north as Okanogan County, a good 80 miles away. In those days, Dr. Mares charged $2—about eight dozen eggs—for an office visit and $3 for a house call. A herniotomy cost $25, including the post-operative care, and an obstetric case cost $35, the same as an appendectomy.

By 1935, Dr. Mares was earning enough to move his practice to a suite of seven rooms across the hall. It was around then that he met Dr. Smith, a general practitioner in the wheat town of Mansfield, about 60 miles northeast of Wenatchee, who also doubled as the assistant health officer for Douglas County.

Dr. Smith worked pretty much alone in those early days, a 25-year-old doctor responsible for a vast rural area. “I was practicing 60 miles from the nearest hospital, and when I went to see my first patient, I was scared to death,” Dr. Smith said. “Those were the days before antibiotics, sulfa or anything and I used a lot of prayer, I’ll tell you that.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Mares was looking for a surgeon to join his growing practice. He found Don Haug, who ha