ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, January 8, 1997 TAG: 9701080017
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
Get the cameras ready: Tonight Blacksburg changes its name to "Bedford Falls" for a remake of "It's a Wonderful Life," featuring Dr. Charlie Boatwright in the Jimmy Stewart starring role.
The plot remains the same. A modest yet steadfastly devoted citizen learns how much he means to the community when friends and neighbors donate money in his name.
This time, however, there'll be no angels, flashbacks or movie stars. It will be a real life gathering with about 300 of Boatwright's friends to officially kick off the Dr. Charles L. Boatwright Scholarship Fund drive.
Boatwright's been practicing family medicine in Blacksburg for 40 years, basically his entire medical career. Along the way, he's quietly acquired a small legion of devoted patients, people who revere him for his professional judgment and his soft, folksy touch.
He's also a modest man - another reason why people like him so much - and the idea of standing in such a limelight makes Boatwright uncomfortable.
"It's embarrassing," he grumbles, his character-lined face turning only briefly from grin to scowl. "They ought to wait until I kick the bucket."
But there's no stopping the momentum of this latter-day fan club, which aims to help needy Southwest Virginia students attend the Medical College of Virginia, Boatwright's alma mater.
So he's being reluctantly cooperative. "If it helps them out, then good," he says of the future medical students.
The fund drive may be more helpful than anyone dreamed when the scholarship committee formed several months ago. Friends of Boatwright have been writing checks so fast that the committee has already raised its goal, even before the campaign's public unveiling tonight.
"It's really a testimonial to the kind of person he is," says Kara Broderick, MCV's medical school director of development.
"He's a legend," says Betsy Massey, one of Boatwright's first Blacksburg patients and a member of the scholarship steering committee.
Members of that committee aren't professional fund-raisers. Many are people, like Boatwright, who moved here around the time of Virginia Tech's big growth spurt in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
They met Boatwright while raising their families here, and began a personal and professional relationship that's spanned generations.
The doctor is 70 years old now yet still practicing at his characteristically nondescript Church Street office. A Lee County native, Boatwright opened offices at Blacksburg and Newport in 1955, soon after he graduated from MCV.
"My luck was coming to a place I was needed and growing up with the town," he says.
In those days doctors were rare - Boatwright was the first to hang a staff-and-serpent medical shingle in Newport for many years - and soon diagnosed that interpersonal skills were just as important to building a successful practice as dispensing medical advice.
"About all I had to sell was personality," he recalls.
Not that affability was ever difficult for Boatwright. "I'm a hick, I'll admit it," he says. "I get along with anybody."
One of Boatwright's hallmarks has been that his patients have always spanned the local social spectrum, from college bigwigs to country bumpkins. He confides that his favorite patients were those he saw in Newport, a small rural village in eastern Giles County.
"He is just a very friendly man," says Hattie Miller, a longtime Newport resident who worked as Boatwright's nurse there. "In all the years I worked for him, I don't think he ever turned down a patient, whether they paid him or whether they didn't."
Miller, who is bright and regal at age 89, recalls that patients paid Boatwright $3 per office visit - and complained about the cost. House calls were $5, which Boatwright performed dutifully if not always enthusiastically.
One time, Miller says, a Giles County patient called Boatwright to his home at 11 p.m. during a snowstorm. When the doctor arrived, the patient told him, "I just can't get to sleep."
Boatwright handed the man a sleeping pill and left. "I think the bill was a little higher than normal," Miller says.
Even so, Boatwright says he enhanced his skills by sitting with a family and eating pie at their kitchen table during house calls. "If you like people, you've got to know more than sore throats."
Although he rarely gets to flex his skills in this modern era of medical specialization, Boatwright says he enjoyed practicing everything from obstetrics to setting broken bones.
"That was the fun of it. You could do almost anything."
He's also acquired the reputation among his patients for being a master diagnostician, a doctor who could spot or predict a medical problem, and one who would not hesitate to refer patients to a specialist if need be.
"He's a doctor who counsels families in a very compassionate way," Massey says. "You never feel that you're being lectured to."
Never seeking attention, Boatwright has always been committed to making his community a better place, says Dorothy Domermuth. "That's something I've always admired about him."
He's earned a range of community awards and held positions of responsibility in local organizations without getting his name or picture in the paper very often - which suits him fine.
Boatwright is also thankful he came around when he did, before medicine became corporate and impersonal, and the doctor-patient relationship became so mutually wary.
He says he has no plans to retire. That suits his patients, says Massey. "People say they've got to go before he does."
Tonight, at the Custom Catering Center in Blacksburg, the scholarship kickoff will be a dinner and tribute to Boatwright, with T. Marshall Hahn and Dick Frizzell presiding. For the next several months the committee will be accepting public donations and pledges.
They're also asking for donors to send personal reminiscences about Boatwright for a scrapbook they plan to present to the doctor when the campaign ends in several months.
Throughout all the hoopla, Boatwright says he won't change his feeling about the "privilege" of serving the community.
"The best part is going to a ball game, or walking down the street, and having people say 'Hi' to you."
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Boatwright (left) and his first nurse in Newportby CNB(below), 2. Hattie Miller, today. color. 3. In a photograph from
early in his practice, Dr. Charlie Boatwright gives a polio shot to
Virginia Tech policemen Brice Porterfield while Blacksburg farmer
Jim Givens (above, left) and John Bill Miller of Radford Bros. await
their turn. 4. Dr. Charlie Boatwright and nurse Hattie Miller posed
for this photograph in the mid-1950s.