Memoir
Dr. Barney Mac Wisinger
Introduction
By the time he was five years old… well, “maybe six or seven,” he concedes…Barney Mac Wisinger knew he wanted to be a doctor. As an organizer of the “Lightning Rangers,” a group of youngsters from Pine Bluff Arkansas, Barney became friends with a boy named Eddie Warren whose father was an administrator at Pine Bluff’s Davis Hospital, the site of Barney’s birth on November 10, 1929 at 6:15 PM.
Spending time with the Warrens, Barney became fascinated by the field of medicine, and this fascination was deepened both by stories told on the radio and from discussions overheard while working as a 7-year-old soda jerk at a pharmacy owned by a neighbor, Offie Lice.
“I was supposed to be working the ice cream counter, he recounts 80-plus years later, “but I overheard things.” There were stories about local women being treated with paregoric, a tincture of opium prescribed for diarrhea, but used off-label for “nerves,” and historical discussions of drugs used to perform amputations and treat gunshot wounds during the Civil War. In the 1930s, the Civil War was still very much alive in the minds of Pine Bluff residents, and young Barney was not immune from this fascination, particularly after visiting Friendship Cemetery, the resting place of still-revered local heroes.
The only child of Alec Franklin Wisinger and Vida Willis Hamaker, young Barney took in all this information and more, because unknown to him, he had the good fortune to be born with an eidetic memory, the kind of brain that hears or reads something then stores it photographically. Probably more than anything, this was the gift that allowed him to excel and prosper at most anything he tried, and which similarly kept him active in the medical field until after his 85th birthday.
Wisinger and Hamaker family genealogies
Both the Wisinger and Hamaker families have deep roots in Arkansas, Alec’s family being among the founders of the town of Hampton, and Vida’s family holding a similar position in New Edinburg. Now mere hamlets, the communities are located 50 to 60 miles southwest of Pine Bluff which itself is 45 miles southwest of Little Rock. To this day, the Wisinger family continues to own timberland nearby, an investment that helped fund the educations of Barney’s children and grandchildren.
Alec Wisinger, Barney’s father, was a fourth generation American, and the sdescendent of Confederate Army survivors, including his great-grandfather, Thomas Franklin Wisinger. Alec, born in 1901, was the youngest of three children born to Thomas Franklin’s son John Malcom Wisinger; his siblings included Guy Dewitt Wisinger who was born in 1894 and succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic in 1917; and Fannie Mae Wisinger Allison, the eventual wife of Lester Allison, a World War I veteran, and parent of Rubye Lea, Hazel (also known as Kitty), and Joe, who followed in his father’s military footsteps and served on a submarine during World War II.
The Wisinger family, possibly goldsmiths, emigrated from southern Germany, and according to research conducted by Joe Allison, made their first appearance in the American Colonies in Philadelphia in 1753, having arrived on a ship called the Edinburg. Johaan (John) Wisinger settled, in Charleston, SC, while Johaan’s son John Jacob Wisinger Sr. (b. 1775) moved his family to Allison’s Mill—Dallas County—Alabama. John Jacob Wisinger Jr. (b. 1808) later sired Thomas Franklin Wisinger (b. 1837) who, according to Joe Allison’s records, served with Confederate generals Price, Johnson, Beauregard and Bragg, and was the family member who first crossed the border into Arkansas, probably around 1865.
After the war, Thomas Franklin Wisinger became the proprietor of a general store in New Edinburg, where he and his wife gave birth to the aforementioned children, Guy, Fanny and Alec. Alec chose to leave retailing, and after attending college for several years, was made principal of a consolidated school district near New Edinburg; his most famous student was Bear Bryant who later became head couch of the University of Alabama Razorbacks. It was during his stint in education that Alec met Vida Willis, a teenaged beauty with whom he “ran off” in 1927. Having dared to marry one of his academic charges, Alec was unable to retain his school district position, so he and Vida moved north to Pine Bluff where he returned to his retailing roots by starting work as a furniture salesman at a store called Reep and Crawford, a purveyor of North Carolina-made furnishings.
But being a subordinate, did not sit well with young Alec, who saw the huge margins going to the store owners, not the young salesmen. As such, with two colleagues, he rented space near a Kiwanis Hall close to the Pine Bluff depot, and opened the Arkansas Furniture Company. The AFC, which produced its furniture locally, catered to a black clientele, and hired black salespeople, thrived; after the early deaths (“pulmonary and heart disease”) of his partners, Alec became its sole proprietor, and according to Barney, a wealthy man.
Less is remembered about Vida, the third of five sisters, all of whom eventually succumbed to dementia diseases. According to Barney, his maternal grandmother, whose name he’s unable to remember, died of breast cancer in 1931, but he recalls happy visits to his aunts and their families. The eldest of Vida’s sisters, named Sue Brown, married a man named Lloyd who held a government job in Louisiana and eventually “became dependent on drugs” to get through her days. The second eldest, Lois, married a man with the surname Henderson. Despite having only an 8th grade education, Henderson worked as a roughneck on oil rigs and eventually wound up with his own successful drilling company in Houston
The sister to whom Vida was closest was named Geneva. About two and a half years younger than Vida, Geneva married a man named Ray Atwood whose father, Ed, ran the bank in New Edinburg. Geneva and Ray bought a house that was cattycorner from the consolidated school where Alec had once been principal.
Finally, Vida’s youngest sister, Geraldine, married a man named Paul Mosley, the son of a Baptist preacher who worked as an clerk at a woman’s store on Main Street in New Edinburg. Paul died in his 60s of high blood pressure and Geraldine subsequently remarried.
Early Pine Bluff days
The newlyweds Alec and Vida bought a house on 5th Avenue at Poplar Street in Pine Bluff, then later moved to 1611 W. 8th Street, the home Barney lived in until he left for college. While Alec managed the furniture business (located at 113 E. 4th Avenue), Vida, a devout Christian, administered Pine Bluff’s First Methodist Church Sunday School where, according to Barney, she “talked to Jesus.” It was her intention that her only child—“once she had a son she didn’t need to get pregnant again,” Barney recalls, though his mother told people she had a later miscarriage—be involved or even ordained in the clergy. Instead, Barney revolted, causing a rift with Vida that lasted for years. “I refused to go,” he says of the Sunday School classes he remembers over 2,000 adults attending. “I wanted to be a doctor, not a minister.”
In one of his earliest memories, his first day of kindergarten, Barney asserted his independence in an equally precocious manner: unassisted, the six-year-old shocked his mother and his Sixth Avenue Street School teacher, Mrs. Weeder, by walking home unassisted. “That was one of the first times I realized I had a photographic memory,” Barney recalled.
Despite his superior memory, Barney was a mediocre student. “I wasn’t serious,” he says. While at Pine Bluff High School, from which he graduated in 1947, he played coronet and trumpet in a band led by a master named Scrubby Wilson. “Girl trumpet players,” he remembers, led everyone onto the field wearing red, white and blue uniforms, and carrying “really long trumpets,” while regular band members followed wearing grey. Starting in high school and continuing through midlife Barney remained an avid softball player—he says his favorite position was pitcher—and during his youth and young adulthood he also spent time on the basketball court.
Along with Eddie Warren and his cousin, Charles Atwood, (Geneva’s son; a pediatrician who went on to become an author-advocate for plant based diets) Barney attended Hendrix College, a Methodist-affiliated school serving about 600 students in Conway, AR, 75 miles north of Pine Bluff. It was at Hendrix that Barney became motivated past sports, music and girls…”so many pretty girls,” he remembers. Burning the midnight oil, he studied chemistry, taking almost twice as many hours as his fellow students. “I graduated in three years,” he says, proudly, remembering how easy it was for him to visualize information then repeat it on an exam. “I would start reading two or three days before the exam—it would only last that long, before I had to clean my brain out—but I always made ‘As’,” he smiles. By then, he was aware that medicine also came with the added status of a big house in a nice neighborhood, a fancy car, “and maybe a servant or two.” Barney couldn’t wait to start medical school.
Advanced education
Barney was accepted at the University of Arkansas Medical School where his prodigious brain made life challenging for his classmates and Phi Chi medical fraternity brothers. “We were graded on a curve,” he remembers, and because his scores were so much higher than the rest of his classmates’, “half of them,” including his then-roommate Eddie, were forced to leave the program. Still, returning to Pine Bluff in the summers, Eddie’s dad offered him work at Davis Hospital. “I was popular because I was able to compound a lot of medicines,” he says.
Barney received a BS in Medicine from the University of Arkansas in June, 1953 and in June, 1954, he received his Doctor of Medicine diploma accompanied by the Mosby Book Award for scholastic excellence. During Medical School he made “a lot of money,” at bridge, because he was able to remember which cards had been played. “I played poker, too,” he recall, but says bridge is a game of memory, while poker (“a man’s game”) is a game of chance.
In August, 1954 Barney passed the Arkansas State Medical Boards and became licensed to practice medicine and surgery. As one of the top students in his class, he was invited to start an internship at Philadelphia General Hospital, an honor, he says, awarded only the very best students in the country. It was in Philadelphia that he met Meta Moria Querker, another medical prodigy, who had studied at nursing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and was then practicing her craft and teaching at Philadelphia General. The two became close, but Barney hadn’t explored the world yet—“Philadelphia was my first time out of Arkansas; it was a big jump,” he remembers, and he still held a flame for a Pine Bluff beauty named Gwen Nieser.
Anxious to see Gwen and feeling the need to confront his mother who continued to lobby for his return to her religious roots, Barney returned to Arkansas where a professor-mentor at the Medical School invited him to start up a program in neurology. It turned out Gwen wasn’t the sweet, smalltown girl he remembered. While he’d been off learning medicine, she’d gone to New York and become a “brassy” professional dancer, performing what he perceived as lewd, or at least “wild” dances with a vaudeville impresario named Horace Heidt; eventually she landed on television, possibly with the June Taylor Dancers. “She wasn’t the girl I remembered,” he shrugs. Meanwhile, Meta had made several visits to Arkansas, and the two were growing closer. Barney stayed on in Little Rock through the summer of 1956 and shortly after he was awarded a certificate of residency, the government sent him a conscription letter. Life was about to change and Barney was set to travel far, far from Arkansas.
Europe, the military and a budding medical career
In the 1950s, the American Medical Association struck a deal with the United States government that allowed medical students to defer their obligatory military service until they completed their medical training and residencies; this program, which continued until 1973, was called the Berry Plan, named for Dr. Frank B. Berry, who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health and Medical Affairs from 1954–1961. Barney was given the option to serve his term in Germany, an offer attractive to Meta, whose family spoke German; whose father was a member of the American Bund; and who, with her two sisters and a brother, had performed in a “The Sound of Music--von Trapp-type” musical group in her home town of Dobb’s Ferry, New York. Barney went to San Antonio for three months of basic training where he learned to use “a machine gun…overhead bullets… tracers.” Upon completion, Barney proposed to Meta and they were married in Manhattan several days before he was sent overseas via cargo plane. Meta returned to Dobbs Ferry to pack her belongings, and several weeks later boarded a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.
Barney was initially prepared for an assignment at Frankfurt’s “97th General Hospital” a posting he considered “dull, dull, dull…all I would have done was see patients,” he says. But because of a misclassification, he was awarded the rank of Captain and assigned instead to the “10th General Dispensary.” The 10th General, was located in the former headquarters of the IG Farben Company, in the early part of the 20th century the world’s largest pharmaceuticals and chemical company; in 1945 the massive, six towered building was occupied by the Allies and became known informally as the Pentagon of Europe, or more formally as “The Headquarters Building, European Command.” It was from an office in this mammoth complex that Barney was given the assignment of examining high ranking generals and other “top brass and celebrities.”
“A lot of these generals,” he begins, “they had pretty cushy jobs, but they were aging. They weren’t in perfect health, but they needed someone say they were, so they could keep their commissions.” Barney, “a bad soldier,” he chuckles…“I’d always forget to salute,”…apparently charmed his higher ups by looking the other way, and the generals wrote letters to the “powers that be” commending his services. Over time, while also covering evening internal medicine rounds for “regular people,” he became “the go-to guy” for individuals, both military and civilian, who needed “special looking after.”
“It was a good assignment,” he says. “And all because of a screw-up.”
When they first arrived in Germany, Barney and Meta were offered a room in a home occupied with several other German families. “We shared a stove,” he says ruefully. But eventually they moved to a comfortable apartment with several bedrooms “where we could really live it up.”
Living it up took various forms. Because Meta was fluent in German and had relatives (“they’d all been Nazi sympathizers,” Barney confides) across the country, but mostly in Bayern (from which the Wisinger family also originated) the couple traveled frequently. Germans, Barney remembers, did not like their American occupiers. ”They were angry at losing the war,” he says, “and gas for Americans was 30 cents a gallon while for them in was $3.00.” Still the couple made friends and integrated themselves into German life, playing bridge and attending concerts. “There were lots of festivals…Oktoberfest…opportunities for fun.” They traveled outside the country, visiting Scandinavia, Holland and Switzerland (“we stayed on a small lake…rented the bottom of a chalet…all our food for ten days and it cost under $3.00 a day,” he remembers.
Meta and Barney also traveled to East Germany, then occupied by the Soviets. It was at this time that Barney became fascinated by what he saw as the destructive powers of communism, a theme that would stay with him for the rest of his life. “We drove through Checkpoint Charlie and everything was grey,” he remembers. “Everyone was poor…they had nothing.” Long a student of the Civil War…“everyone from the south identifies with the Civil War…we would drive in our Model T to visit battlegrounds and cemeteries”…he now had another era of history in which to immerse himself.
It was during the second year of their German assignment that Meta became pregnant; their daughter, Erika Luisa, was born in February, 1958, several months before Meta, and a few month later, Barney, returned to the States. The family resettled in Rochester, MN where Barney was awarded a residency and fellowship at the Mayo Clinic. It was during his 27 months in Minnesota that Barney became interested in chest medicine, a specialty that included pulmonary diagnosis and the study of chest and lung diseases. At the time, chest medicine was a new specialty, one that hadn’t spread to many other parts of the country. Barney had a new passion and a new mission.
Minnesota was a dynamic learning experience. Barney worked long hours seeing internal medicine patients and incorporating his new found chest knowledge, while Meta, also employed at Mayo, gave birth to a second child, David Barney, in August, 1960. But neither spouse loved the endless Minnesota winters, so hearing of an opening at a clinic in Marion, OH, the growing family packed its Chevy and headed to Ohio where for a brief period Barney joined a practice called the Smith Group. The practice, as it turned out, was “not to my liking,” Barney recounts: the Smith brothers, Fred and Philip, sons of a congressman, were not well received in the community, possibly because they were osteopaths. As such the practice had difficulty attracting patients, a condition that frustrated Barney. After several unhappy years, the family drove north to Toledo where Barney had been alerted to another practice and teaching opportunity.
Early years in Toledo
Unlike the sophisticated medical community he’ d been part of in Minnesota, 1960s Toledo was less evolved: “This town was so far behind…they didn’t know anything about chest medicine,” Barney recalls, a deficit he set out to fill through his new internal medicine and chest medicine practice, as well as through his similarly integrated teaching,
In the early 1960s, Toledo was home to several hospitals, most of which clustered near Collingwood or Detroit Avenues. Barney took both clinical and teaching positions at Maumee Valley Hospital, a dilapidated facility near the present University of Toledo Medical Center (formerly the Medical College of Ohio) and saw patients at other facilities, which may have included the precursors of Toledo Hospital, St Vincent, Mercy, Flower, Riverside and Parkwood hospitals. Around 1962, when another pulmonary doctor “didn’t work out,” he accepted a position at the West Central Medical Group where he joined physicians Bob Walker, Brian Bradford, Crowley Keller, Gordon Mather, David Sheer, Robert Glad and Robert Woodward.
Around that time, according to Barney, local physicians were lobbying for the founding of a medical school that would serve Ohio residents…Dayton and Akron were also in the running. It was through the activism of Brian Bradford, Gordon Todd and several others, Barney remembers, that Toledo won out. Work began on the new campus in 1964—also the birth year of Barney and Meta’s third child, Randall. While the campus was under construction, Barney taught internal medicine and chest medicine at Maumee Valley and later, when it was completed, in what he refers to as the “Basic Sciences Building.” According to his memories, Barney “ran” basic sciences as an uncompensated volunteer while teaching students the intricacies of COPD, lung and other chest cancers, pediatric pulmonary disease, pneumonia, asthma, respiratory failure and other acute diseases.
The period was a schizophrenic time for him to be teaching about these conditions, he remembers, because while the connection between lung cancer and smoking had been conclusively made, “people were so entrenched in smoking that even doctors refused to accept the findings…I’d go to medical meetings and couldn’t see the damned screen there was so much smoke,” he says. A modest smoker himself, he admits to not being able to completely break the habit: until he was in his 70s, he was known to partake of an occasional Tiparillo or tamp a bowlful of pipe tobacco.
It took five years for the Medical College of Ohio to open, but when it did, Barney was a recipient of one of its first Golden Apple awards for excellence in teaching.
He ran non-stop between seeing patients in Toledo and outlying communities, often subsisting on as little as four hours of sleep a night. The family had started its Toledo sojourn in a house on Oldham Drive in North Toledo, but as Barney’s income increased, he moved up automotively to Cadillacs and residentially to Wedgewood Court in Corey Woods.
Child-rearing was left increasingly to Meta as Barney took on additional responsibilities and responded to crises, often in the middle of the night.
“I never turned down a patient,” Barney recalls, relating stories of 4 a.m. wake-up calls whose in-need patients were triaged by younger anesthesiologists, but ultimately seen by him. Because of this, he admits, he had “a fairly limited family life,” but his children, all academically oriented, thrived at their schools. Only occasionally, he says, would he be able to pull away from his teaching or patient load to attend an activity or take the boys to a weekend sporting event.
Sadly, there were other problems at home; Meta, after Randy’s birth and Barney’s deep dive into work, developed a drinking problem. Although she was able to function in her nursing career, Meta became increasingly agitated, and there were fraught Christmases, thrown objects, and calls to the police. Meta and Barney separated in 1972 and divorced four years later.
Later Toledo years
After the separation, Barney took a third-floor apartment at the Cedars, a mansard-roofed complex at the corner of Douglas and Central Avenues, adjacent to a donut shop and close to both Toledo Hospital—Barney was on staff, now—and the West Central Medical Group. “Erika and David were on their own then; they were teenagers,” he remembers, but Randy, still young, would spend weekends at his father’s apartment where they’d take in a ball game, or simply spend an evening going to dinner together. Meta kept the Corey Woods home until a few years later (1979) when she moved to Florida be closer to her retired mother and to pursue an advanced degree; Randy, then a high school sophomore, went with her, and several years later David enrolled in a Florida college.
The Toledo Hospital pulmonary group had offices on the 6th floor of the midtown tower. One floor below worked a pretty nurse named Prudence Seeger. Prudie’s grandparents had lived in South Dakota where her grandfather’s land speculation during the Depression made the family wealthy. Her father, a coast guard captain who lived to be 104, later transplanted the family to San Diego, eventually to seaside La Jolla. According to Barney, Prudie attended private schools and studied nursing at California’s Kaiser Permanente, but unlike Meta, she was neither as bright nor as committed to her profession. She liked animals, “kings and queens” and British history. Barney was still playing the field— “there were lots of nurses looking for doctor husbands,” he says conspiratorially—but in addition to working on an adjacent floor, Prudie, whose former husband had moved her to Toledo, also lived at the Cedars and one thing led to another.
A second marriage
As a physician, Barney was often invited to conferences in warm places, to which he’d take his Meta and the kids, but Prudie wanted to travel more extensively. Shortly after Richard Nixon ‘normalized’ relations with China, Barney and Prudie joined a group of doctors visiting, among other places, Beijing, Shanghai and Japan: “I wanted to see what it was like living under communism,” he recounts, noting that “he wasn’t impressed.” In order to get the visas necessary to visit the country that later underwhelmed him, Prudie and Barney were obliged to marry. “The Chinese didn’t want unmarried people sleeping together,” Barney recalls. “I wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t needed to.” Although Prudie, 16 years Barney’s junior, desired a grander ceremony, the couple was married by a justice of the peace before they flew off to Hong Kong in spring, 1981.
Prudie also wanted a baby, but as a father of three with an already overextended schedule, Barney said “no.” The consolation prize was a parade of dogs and a big home in the then-under construction Ottawa Hills subdivision of Hasty Hills. Originally Barney sought property on the ravine that ran off Sylvania’s Corey Road, but all the “good” plots were taken. “I wanted to be in an affluent neighborhood,” he admits. “If you’re going to do something, do it right.” He put down a deposit on what was then the second largest tract he could find, a cul-de-sac called Challedon Road, and hired an architect to design a spacious house with a wood-paneled projection room/den, white carpeting and dining room furnishings, and a curving staircase leading to a second-floor balcony. “She wanted a New Orleans feel,” he says recalling the construction. Though none of the kids ever lived there, over time they’d visit and, particularly Randy would help groom the enormous yard. The location turned out to be propitious: not far from Toledo Hospital, there were winter days when Barney says he was the only physician who showed up for his students and rounds.
World travels
“I’ve been to over a hundred countries,” Barney says, and while that’s an exaggeration, he has been to many. The travel bug started when his family was young, when he and Meta took the kids to visit relatives in Europe and Arkansas, then to prowl Civil War sites and national parks. Randy particularly remembers a trip to Austria (“I must’ve been about four”) when he became ill and was forced to drink goat milk—not a taste he relished. Later, particularly after David became a dedicated fisherman, there were “boys” trips to the southern USA, the Upper Peninsula and Canada. Randy remembers a mosquito-infested week in Missinaibi, Ontario that included poison ivy, an outhouse, a mouse in the wall and several puddle jumper planes necessary to access the remote wilderness. Then there was an earlier trip to Toledo Bend Reservoir south of Shreveport on the Louisiana/Texas border where a fishing guide named Lloyd affectionately (he thinks) referred to him as “Little Shit.” (Erika remembers being pleased not to be invited on the fishing excursions,)
With Prudie there were more European excursions as well as trips to southern California where Barney admired Mt. Solead and ogled celebrities who lived near his father-in-law’s residence. Prudie, Barney says, was “first and foremost an anglophile” who “worshipped Princess Diana,” and he himself enjoyed countries “where English is spoken.” Several times the couple visited England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Then there were tours to Norway and Sweden, Finland and Russia (another place Barney found “ruined by communism”) as well as a journey that included Austria, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. Yet another voyage took the couple to Cairo, Athens and Rhodes. But mostly, it was America that called him. “I’m a patriot,” he says, emphasizing his southern roots, recalling his lifelong fascination with the Civil War, and calling out his favorite foods: catfish, grouper, crab salad, turnip greens, chicken gumbo and dumplings.
Doctor, teacher, caregiver
Until the era of medicine-as-business, Barney enjoyed the independence of “being his own boss” even if it sometimes took him to neighborhoods that might be defined as threatening. “There were times the police accompanied me on house calls,” he remembers. Over the years, as such, he met a wide variety of individuals: For example, he recounts that the “king” of the gypsies appeared in his office one day with the “queen,” a middle-aged woman suffering from pneumonia. “She was in real distress,” Barney says, but under his care she made a full recovery. As thanks, the king returned with a beautiful young woman: a gift for the doctor who saved his queen’s life. Not wanting to offend the king…but not about to accept his offering…Barney led the young woman to an examining room and peppered her with questions about health conditions from which she might be suffering. The woman shook her head at everything until Barney hit on headaches. “I’m sorry,” Barney said, leading her back to the waiting king. “I can’t take her. She has problems.”
Barney understood patients as people, not as their diseases. “First thing I would do with a patient, “ he says, “was sit down, and find out who they were…their family…why they came to see me.” Often his appointments ran late because of this. “I felt bad about that,” he says, “but everyone got his full turn.” Sometimes his colleagues wondered why he would spend so much time with patients who were obviously seriously ill. “Dying is not an option,” was his response, but when the end did come, he would attend his patients’ funerals and sit with the mourners. “If they were veterans, I made sure they got full military honors,” he says, “…I did not want families to feel they were alone.” It was this compassion, no doubt, that brought him to the attention of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation which in 2010 awarded him its Gold Doctor Award for “sensitivity, kindness and compassion in the practice of medicine.”
Patients noticed. “When I said I was going to stop practicing medicine, three of them died on the spot,” he says.
Students were treated to similar generosities. When he was able, he would invite them to dinners, and during a period when he was consulting with patients suffering from asbestosis and beryllium disease, he’d pile students into his Cadillac or Lincoln and drive them to the affected communities for onsite experience.
Although Barney sees extended life expectancies as a brilliant advance in medicine, over time he became frustrated with changes in the health care model that valued profits over care and prevented him from spending time with patients and working at multiple hospitals. “There was real competition between Toledo Hospital and the Medical School,” he remembers. As one of the main catalysts of the clinical program at what was then MCO, he would be invited onto WSPD radio to discuss chest medicine research. “I talked about asthma and such,” he remembers. “It was good publicity for the school…helped build its reputation.” But his becoming a “celebrity doctor” did not sit well with administrators at Toledo Hospital which viewed MCO as a rival. “I said ‘I’ll leave,’” Barney told Toledo Hospital, adding that he knew they couldn’t afford to lose him. “They tried to tell me what I could do, but I had more power…I trained everyone…they couldn’t push me around.
“You can’t stop me from doing what I want,” was his final offer.
Barney was similarly discouraged by what he saw as the pharmaceutical industry’s push to encourage doctors to prescribe their products…often by treating them to expensive boondoggles or at least elaborate dinners. “I wanted to give my residents exposure,” he says, of some of these events, “but I wanted them to get educated, not to be told to prescribe pain pills.”
Avocations
An avid Razorbacks, Lions and Tigers fan, some of Barney’s happiest off-work memories are of spending time in Detroit with his sons, and later in life, with Prudie. “There was so much going on there,” he says of the city’s museums, retail and rich automotive history. Another area of interest is prohibition and the gangster ethic that grew from that. Lining the shelves of the Challedon Road projection room are stacks of The Untouchables DVDs, and if his memory serves him, he and Prudie lunched at a Bloomfield restaurant called Machus Red Fox the weekend before Jimmy Hoffa was allegedly abducted nearby. “We knew they were bad guys, but we romanticized them,” he says of his attraction to gangsters, many of which, he adds, came from the South. (“Most of them came from agriculture backgrounds, but the soil was depleted. They found they could make more money robbing people.”) One of the delights of watching these movies, he says, is watching them on a 90-inch “Elite” Japanese screen. “I said, get me one of those…they’re the best,” he remembers. Asked about favorite music and musicians, he cites band marches and commends Karen Carpenter and Frank Sinatra…“He was also connected to the mob,” he says, not unapprovingly….“but it was a long time ago.”
As Barney aged, he became fascinated by the organ, eventually purchasing four and moving them into his residence. For ten years he took lessons every Tuesday with an Erie Road instructor whose minister-husband impressed Barney by his desire to treat patients’ spirits. “I was her only organ student,” he says, “all the others studied piano which isn’t as hard.” Asked why he wanted something hard, he says the idea behind organ lessons was to keep his mind sharp. Indeed, his mind was sharp enough to keep him working on worker’s comp cases through 2017...”asbestos, metsothelioma…those kinds of things.” Though his body, over the years suffered bouts of heart, bladder, lung and kidney disease and in his oldest age, he was forced to use a walker to compensate for a broken hip joint, “I’ve survived,” he says. “I’ve never limited myself.
Family matters in the end
Though he was unable to spend much time with his children when they were younger—he wouldn’t get home until ten or eleven at night—Barney is proud of his offspring and their accomplishments. Erika, his eldest, retired to Florida in late 2019 after spending years as a financial executive in Toledo; she met her husband, Jan Rizzo, a dentist, when they were employed as summer help at West Central Medical Group. (According to Barney, all his children, and many of their friends passed through the doors of WCMG.)
David, who shares Barney’s eidetic memory, began his vocational quest thinking of oceanography, but followed in his father’s footsteps: after attending medical school in Florida, he became an internist in Arizona. Like his father, he’s also married to a nurse, Darla, née Bremeyer.
Randy an environmental engineer who studied Chem E. in North Caroline (“I split the difference between my mother in Florida and Barney in Toledo,”) lives and works near Virginia Beach with his wife Sharon (MacDonald) a guidance counselor. Because he was still in grade school when Meta and Barney divorced, he is the only child to have spent much time with his dad as a child, and is also the one, according to Barney, who helped out most with yard work and chores at the Hasty Hill house.
Then there’s the next generation starting with Erika and Jan’s daughters: Sarah, a lawyer is presently employed by Wells Fargo; she and her husband Patrick Rosenthal, an attorney for the Bank of Montreal, are raising a son, Jack, in Brooklyn. Sarah’s sister, Emily received a Ph.D in physical therapy and is currently engaged to Alex Person.
David’s children, include a son Alex, a chemical engineer living in Los Angeles and a daughter, Amanda, who’s working on a Ph.D in psychology in Chicago.
Randy and Sharon are the parents of Mark, a financial analyst in the Washington DC area, and Catherine, the youngest grandchild, now at Virginia Tech studying chemical engineering.
Interestingly, all three Wisinger siblings have homes on the water: Lake Diane, MI for Erika; Lake Gaston, VA for Randy, and a site near Prescott, AZ for David.
In March, 2013, Prudie Wisinger suffered a severe asthma attack on a visit to her 103-year-old father in California. After retrieving her from the Detroit Airport, Barney wanted her admitted to Monroe Regional Hospital, but she refused and died soon after. “Prudie died of unhappiness,” Barney says with a sigh. “She came from millions of dollars… but she was in misery…she didn’t have children… I wouldn’t stop serving patients.”
Meta Querker Wisinger died in 2017 after spending her final two years in an assisted living facility in Lambertville, MI.
Going forward
Because of Prudie’s love of animals and Barney’s care for patients, much of his philanthropy, he says, has been directed toward charitable agencies concerned with animals, the Republican Party and organizations that help sick children, specifically St. Jude’s and Shriner’s Hospitals. “For 30 years we had dogs,” he recalls, calling out two in specific, a German Shepherd named Shiloh and a pug mix named Sushi.
Asked if he’s suffered disappointments, Barney mentions his wives deaths and the current state of political incivility…“there were better times in the past,” he muses…but says that for the most part he hasn’t many regrets.
During the summer of 2018 the entire Wisinger clan gathered at Erika and Jan’s lake house for a family reunion. A picture hanging on the wall outside the white-carpeted living room, now refigured as Barney’s first-floor bedroom, shows a healthy family with a smiling patriarch: Barney Wisinger: Doctor, Teacher, Father, Caregiver.
By the time he was five years old… well, “maybe six or seven,” he concedes…Barney Mac Wisinger knew he wanted to be a doctor. As an organizer of the “Lightning Rangers,” a group of youngsters from Pine Bluff Arkansas, Barney became friends with a boy named Eddie Warren whose father was an administrator at Pine Bluff’s Davis Hospital, the site of Barney’s birth on November 10, 1929 at 6:15 PM.
Spending time with the Warrens, Barney became fascinated by the field of medicine, and this fascination was deepened both by stories told on the radio and from discussions overheard while working as a 7-year-old soda jerk at a pharmacy owned by a neighbor, Offie Lice.
“I was supposed to be working the ice cream counter, he recounts 80-plus years later, “but I overheard things.” There were stories about local women being treated with paregoric, a tincture of opium prescribed for diarrhea, but used off-label for “nerves,” and historical discussions of drugs used to perform amputations and treat gunshot wounds during the Civil War. In the 1930s, the Civil War was still very much alive in the minds of Pine Bluff residents, and young Barney was not immune from this fascination, particularly after visiting Friendship Cemetery, the resting place of still-revered local heroes.
The only child of Alec Franklin Wisinger and Vida Willis Hamaker, young Barney took in all this information and more, because unknown to him, he had the good fortune to be born with an eidetic memory, the kind of brain that hears or reads something then stores it photographically. Probably more than anything, this was the gift that allowed him to excel and prosper at most anything he tried, and which similarly kept him active in the medical field until after his 85th birthday.
Wisinger and Hamaker family genealogies
Both the Wisinger and Hamaker families have deep roots in Arkansas, Alec’s family being among the founders of the town of Hampton, and Vida’s family holding a similar position in New Edinburg. Now mere hamlets, the communities are located 50 to 60 miles southwest of Pine Bluff which itself is 45 miles southwest of Little Rock. To this day, the Wisinger family continues to own timberland nearby, an investment that helped fund the educations of Barney’s children and grandchildren.
Alec Wisinger, Barney’s father, was a fourth generation American, and the sdescendent of Confederate Army survivors, including his great-grandfather, Thomas Franklin Wisinger. Alec, born in 1901, was the youngest of three children born to Thomas Franklin’s son John Malcom Wisinger; his siblings included Guy Dewitt Wisinger who was born in 1894 and succumbed to the Spanish flu epidemic in 1917; and Fannie Mae Wisinger Allison, the eventual wife of Lester Allison, a World War I veteran, and parent of Rubye Lea, Hazel (also known as Kitty), and Joe, who followed in his father’s military footsteps and served on a submarine during World War II.
The Wisinger family, possibly goldsmiths, emigrated from southern Germany, and according to research conducted by Joe Allison, made their first appearance in the American Colonies in Philadelphia in 1753, having arrived on a ship called the Edinburg. Johaan (John) Wisinger settled, in Charleston, SC, while Johaan’s son John Jacob Wisinger Sr. (b. 1775) moved his family to Allison’s Mill—Dallas County—Alabama. John Jacob Wisinger Jr. (b. 1808) later sired Thomas Franklin Wisinger (b. 1837) who, according to Joe Allison’s records, served with Confederate generals Price, Johnson, Beauregard and Bragg, and was the family member who first crossed the border into Arkansas, probably around 1865.
After the war, Thomas Franklin Wisinger became the proprietor of a general store in New Edinburg, where he and his wife gave birth to the aforementioned children, Guy, Fanny and Alec. Alec chose to leave retailing, and after attending college for several years, was made principal of a consolidated school district near New Edinburg; his most famous student was Bear Bryant who later became head couch of the University of Alabama Razorbacks. It was during his stint in education that Alec met Vida Willis, a teenaged beauty with whom he “ran off” in 1927. Having dared to marry one of his academic charges, Alec was unable to retain his school district position, so he and Vida moved north to Pine Bluff where he returned to his retailing roots by starting work as a furniture salesman at a store called Reep and Crawford, a purveyor of North Carolina-made furnishings.
But being a subordinate, did not sit well with young Alec, who saw the huge margins going to the store owners, not the young salesmen. As such, with two colleagues, he rented space near a Kiwanis Hall close to the Pine Bluff depot, and opened the Arkansas Furniture Company. The AFC, which produced its furniture locally, catered to a black clientele, and hired black salespeople, thrived; after the early deaths (“pulmonary and heart disease”) of his partners, Alec became its sole proprietor, and according to Barney, a wealthy man.
Less is remembered about Vida, the third of five sisters, all of whom eventually succumbed to dementia diseases. According to Barney, his maternal grandmother, whose name he’s unable to remember, died of breast cancer in 1931, but he recalls happy visits to his aunts and their families. The eldest of Vida’s sisters, named Sue Brown, married a man named Lloyd who held a government job in Louisiana and eventually “became dependent on drugs” to get through her days. The second eldest, Lois, married a man with the surname Henderson. Despite having only an 8th grade education, Henderson worked as a roughneck on oil rigs and eventually wound up with his own successful drilling company in Houston
The sister to whom Vida was closest was named Geneva. About two and a half years younger than Vida, Geneva married a man named Ray Atwood whose father, Ed, ran the bank in New Edinburg. Geneva and Ray bought a house that was cattycorner from the consolidated school where Alec had once been principal.
Finally, Vida’s youngest sister, Geraldine, married a man named Paul Mosley, the son of a Baptist preacher who worked as an clerk at a woman’s store on Main Street in New Edinburg. Paul died in his 60s of high blood pressure and Geraldine subsequently remarried.
Early Pine Bluff days
The newlyweds Alec and Vida bought a house on 5th Avenue at Poplar Street in Pine Bluff, then later moved to 1611 W. 8th Street, the home Barney lived in until he left for college. While Alec managed the furniture business (located at 113 E. 4th Avenue), Vida, a devout Christian, administered Pine Bluff’s First Methodist Church Sunday School where, according to Barney, she “talked to Jesus.” It was her intention that her only child—“once she had a son she didn’t need to get pregnant again,” Barney recalls, though his mother told people she had a later miscarriage—be involved or even ordained in the clergy. Instead, Barney revolted, causing a rift with Vida that lasted for years. “I refused to go,” he says of the Sunday School classes he remembers over 2,000 adults attending. “I wanted to be a doctor, not a minister.”
In one of his earliest memories, his first day of kindergarten, Barney asserted his independence in an equally precocious manner: unassisted, the six-year-old shocked his mother and his Sixth Avenue Street School teacher, Mrs. Weeder, by walking home unassisted. “That was one of the first times I realized I had a photographic memory,” Barney recalled.
Despite his superior memory, Barney was a mediocre student. “I wasn’t serious,” he says. While at Pine Bluff High School, from which he graduated in 1947, he played coronet and trumpet in a band led by a master named Scrubby Wilson. “Girl trumpet players,” he remembers, led everyone onto the field wearing red, white and blue uniforms, and carrying “really long trumpets,” while regular band members followed wearing grey. Starting in high school and continuing through midlife Barney remained an avid softball player—he says his favorite position was pitcher—and during his youth and young adulthood he also spent time on the basketball court.
Along with Eddie Warren and his cousin, Charles Atwood, (Geneva’s son; a pediatrician who went on to become an author-advocate for plant based diets) Barney attended Hendrix College, a Methodist-affiliated school serving about 600 students in Conway, AR, 75 miles north of Pine Bluff. It was at Hendrix that Barney became motivated past sports, music and girls…”so many pretty girls,” he remembers. Burning the midnight oil, he studied chemistry, taking almost twice as many hours as his fellow students. “I graduated in three years,” he says, proudly, remembering how easy it was for him to visualize information then repeat it on an exam. “I would start reading two or three days before the exam—it would only last that long, before I had to clean my brain out—but I always made ‘As’,” he smiles. By then, he was aware that medicine also came with the added status of a big house in a nice neighborhood, a fancy car, “and maybe a servant or two.” Barney couldn’t wait to start medical school.
Advanced education
Barney was accepted at the University of Arkansas Medical School where his prodigious brain made life challenging for his classmates and Phi Chi medical fraternity brothers. “We were graded on a curve,” he remembers, and because his scores were so much higher than the rest of his classmates’, “half of them,” including his then-roommate Eddie, were forced to leave the program. Still, returning to Pine Bluff in the summers, Eddie’s dad offered him work at Davis Hospital. “I was popular because I was able to compound a lot of medicines,” he says.
Barney received a BS in Medicine from the University of Arkansas in June, 1953 and in June, 1954, he received his Doctor of Medicine diploma accompanied by the Mosby Book Award for scholastic excellence. During Medical School he made “a lot of money,” at bridge, because he was able to remember which cards had been played. “I played poker, too,” he recall, but says bridge is a game of memory, while poker (“a man’s game”) is a game of chance.
In August, 1954 Barney passed the Arkansas State Medical Boards and became licensed to practice medicine and surgery. As one of the top students in his class, he was invited to start an internship at Philadelphia General Hospital, an honor, he says, awarded only the very best students in the country. It was in Philadelphia that he met Meta Moria Querker, another medical prodigy, who had studied at nursing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and was then practicing her craft and teaching at Philadelphia General. The two became close, but Barney hadn’t explored the world yet—“Philadelphia was my first time out of Arkansas; it was a big jump,” he remembers, and he still held a flame for a Pine Bluff beauty named Gwen Nieser.
Anxious to see Gwen and feeling the need to confront his mother who continued to lobby for his return to her religious roots, Barney returned to Arkansas where a professor-mentor at the Medical School invited him to start up a program in neurology. It turned out Gwen wasn’t the sweet, smalltown girl he remembered. While he’d been off learning medicine, she’d gone to New York and become a “brassy” professional dancer, performing what he perceived as lewd, or at least “wild” dances with a vaudeville impresario named Horace Heidt; eventually she landed on television, possibly with the June Taylor Dancers. “She wasn’t the girl I remembered,” he shrugs. Meanwhile, Meta had made several visits to Arkansas, and the two were growing closer. Barney stayed on in Little Rock through the summer of 1956 and shortly after he was awarded a certificate of residency, the government sent him a conscription letter. Life was about to change and Barney was set to travel far, far from Arkansas.
Europe, the military and a budding medical career
In the 1950s, the American Medical Association struck a deal with the United States government that allowed medical students to defer their obligatory military service until they completed their medical training and residencies; this program, which continued until 1973, was called the Berry Plan, named for Dr. Frank B. Berry, who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health and Medical Affairs from 1954–1961. Barney was given the option to serve his term in Germany, an offer attractive to Meta, whose family spoke German; whose father was a member of the American Bund; and who, with her two sisters and a brother, had performed in a “The Sound of Music--von Trapp-type” musical group in her home town of Dobb’s Ferry, New York. Barney went to San Antonio for three months of basic training where he learned to use “a machine gun…overhead bullets… tracers.” Upon completion, Barney proposed to Meta and they were married in Manhattan several days before he was sent overseas via cargo plane. Meta returned to Dobbs Ferry to pack her belongings, and several weeks later boarded a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.
Barney was initially prepared for an assignment at Frankfurt’s “97th General Hospital” a posting he considered “dull, dull, dull…all I would have done was see patients,” he says. But because of a misclassification, he was awarded the rank of Captain and assigned instead to the “10th General Dispensary.” The 10th General, was located in the former headquarters of the IG Farben Company, in the early part of the 20th century the world’s largest pharmaceuticals and chemical company; in 1945 the massive, six towered building was occupied by the Allies and became known informally as the Pentagon of Europe, or more formally as “The Headquarters Building, European Command.” It was from an office in this mammoth complex that Barney was given the assignment of examining high ranking generals and other “top brass and celebrities.”
“A lot of these generals,” he begins, “they had pretty cushy jobs, but they were aging. They weren’t in perfect health, but they needed someone say they were, so they could keep their commissions.” Barney, “a bad soldier,” he chuckles…“I’d always forget to salute,”…apparently charmed his higher ups by looking the other way, and the generals wrote letters to the “powers that be” commending his services. Over time, while also covering evening internal medicine rounds for “regular people,” he became “the go-to guy” for individuals, both military and civilian, who needed “special looking after.”
“It was a good assignment,” he says. “And all because of a screw-up.”
When they first arrived in Germany, Barney and Meta were offered a room in a home occupied with several other German families. “We shared a stove,” he says ruefully. But eventually they moved to a comfortable apartment with several bedrooms “where we could really live it up.”
Living it up took various forms. Because Meta was fluent in German and had relatives (“they’d all been Nazi sympathizers,” Barney confides) across the country, but mostly in Bayern (from which the Wisinger family also originated) the couple traveled frequently. Germans, Barney remembers, did not like their American occupiers. ”They were angry at losing the war,” he says, “and gas for Americans was 30 cents a gallon while for them in was $3.00.” Still the couple made friends and integrated themselves into German life, playing bridge and attending concerts. “There were lots of festivals…Oktoberfest…opportunities for fun.” They traveled outside the country, visiting Scandinavia, Holland and Switzerland (“we stayed on a small lake…rented the bottom of a chalet…all our food for ten days and it cost under $3.00 a day,” he remembers.
Meta and Barney also traveled to East Germany, then occupied by the Soviets. It was at this time that Barney became fascinated by what he saw as the destructive powers of communism, a theme that would stay with him for the rest of his life. “We drove through Checkpoint Charlie and everything was grey,” he remembers. “Everyone was poor…they had nothing.” Long a student of the Civil War…“everyone from the south identifies with the Civil War…we would drive in our Model T to visit battlegrounds and cemeteries”…he now had another era of history in which to immerse himself.
It was during the second year of their German assignment that Meta became pregnant; their daughter, Erika Luisa, was born in February, 1958, several months before Meta, and a few month later, Barney, returned to the States. The family resettled in Rochester, MN where Barney was awarded a residency and fellowship at the Mayo Clinic. It was during his 27 months in Minnesota that Barney became interested in chest medicine, a specialty that included pulmonary diagnosis and the study of chest and lung diseases. At the time, chest medicine was a new specialty, one that hadn’t spread to many other parts of the country. Barney had a new passion and a new mission.
Minnesota was a dynamic learning experience. Barney worked long hours seeing internal medicine patients and incorporating his new found chest knowledge, while Meta, also employed at Mayo, gave birth to a second child, David Barney, in August, 1960. But neither spouse loved the endless Minnesota winters, so hearing of an opening at a clinic in Marion, OH, the growing family packed its Chevy and headed to Ohio where for a brief period Barney joined a practice called the Smith Group. The practice, as it turned out, was “not to my liking,” Barney recounts: the Smith brothers, Fred and Philip, sons of a congressman, were not well received in the community, possibly because they were osteopaths. As such the practice had difficulty attracting patients, a condition that frustrated Barney. After several unhappy years, the family drove north to Toledo where Barney had been alerted to another practice and teaching opportunity.
Early years in Toledo
Unlike the sophisticated medical community he’ d been part of in Minnesota, 1960s Toledo was less evolved: “This town was so far behind…they didn’t know anything about chest medicine,” Barney recalls, a deficit he set out to fill through his new internal medicine and chest medicine practice, as well as through his similarly integrated teaching,
In the early 1960s, Toledo was home to several hospitals, most of which clustered near Collingwood or Detroit Avenues. Barney took both clinical and teaching positions at Maumee Valley Hospital, a dilapidated facility near the present University of Toledo Medical Center (formerly the Medical College of Ohio) and saw patients at other facilities, which may have included the precursors of Toledo Hospital, St Vincent, Mercy, Flower, Riverside and Parkwood hospitals. Around 1962, when another pulmonary doctor “didn’t work out,” he accepted a position at the West Central Medical Group where he joined physicians Bob Walker, Brian Bradford, Crowley Keller, Gordon Mather, David Sheer, Robert Glad and Robert Woodward.
Around that time, according to Barney, local physicians were lobbying for the founding of a medical school that would serve Ohio residents…Dayton and Akron were also in the running. It was through the activism of Brian Bradford, Gordon Todd and several others, Barney remembers, that Toledo won out. Work began on the new campus in 1964—also the birth year of Barney and Meta’s third child, Randall. While the campus was under construction, Barney taught internal medicine and chest medicine at Maumee Valley and later, when it was completed, in what he refers to as the “Basic Sciences Building.” According to his memories, Barney “ran” basic sciences as an uncompensated volunteer while teaching students the intricacies of COPD, lung and other chest cancers, pediatric pulmonary disease, pneumonia, asthma, respiratory failure and other acute diseases.
The period was a schizophrenic time for him to be teaching about these conditions, he remembers, because while the connection between lung cancer and smoking had been conclusively made, “people were so entrenched in smoking that even doctors refused to accept the findings…I’d go to medical meetings and couldn’t see the damned screen there was so much smoke,” he says. A modest smoker himself, he admits to not being able to completely break the habit: until he was in his 70s, he was known to partake of an occasional Tiparillo or tamp a bowlful of pipe tobacco.
It took five years for the Medical College of Ohio to open, but when it did, Barney was a recipient of one of its first Golden Apple awards for excellence in teaching.
He ran non-stop between seeing patients in Toledo and outlying communities, often subsisting on as little as four hours of sleep a night. The family had started its Toledo sojourn in a house on Oldham Drive in North Toledo, but as Barney’s income increased, he moved up automotively to Cadillacs and residentially to Wedgewood Court in Corey Woods.
Child-rearing was left increasingly to Meta as Barney took on additional responsibilities and responded to crises, often in the middle of the night.
“I never turned down a patient,” Barney recalls, relating stories of 4 a.m. wake-up calls whose in-need patients were triaged by younger anesthesiologists, but ultimately seen by him. Because of this, he admits, he had “a fairly limited family life,” but his children, all academically oriented, thrived at their schools. Only occasionally, he says, would he be able to pull away from his teaching or patient load to attend an activity or take the boys to a weekend sporting event.
Sadly, there were other problems at home; Meta, after Randy’s birth and Barney’s deep dive into work, developed a drinking problem. Although she was able to function in her nursing career, Meta became increasingly agitated, and there were fraught Christmases, thrown objects, and calls to the police. Meta and Barney separated in 1972 and divorced four years later.
Later Toledo years
After the separation, Barney took a third-floor apartment at the Cedars, a mansard-roofed complex at the corner of Douglas and Central Avenues, adjacent to a donut shop and close to both Toledo Hospital—Barney was on staff, now—and the West Central Medical Group. “Erika and David were on their own then; they were teenagers,” he remembers, but Randy, still young, would spend weekends at his father’s apartment where they’d take in a ball game, or simply spend an evening going to dinner together. Meta kept the Corey Woods home until a few years later (1979) when she moved to Florida be closer to her retired mother and to pursue an advanced degree; Randy, then a high school sophomore, went with her, and several years later David enrolled in a Florida college.
The Toledo Hospital pulmonary group had offices on the 6th floor of the midtown tower. One floor below worked a pretty nurse named Prudence Seeger. Prudie’s grandparents had lived in South Dakota where her grandfather’s land speculation during the Depression made the family wealthy. Her father, a coast guard captain who lived to be 104, later transplanted the family to San Diego, eventually to seaside La Jolla. According to Barney, Prudie attended private schools and studied nursing at California’s Kaiser Permanente, but unlike Meta, she was neither as bright nor as committed to her profession. She liked animals, “kings and queens” and British history. Barney was still playing the field— “there were lots of nurses looking for doctor husbands,” he says conspiratorially—but in addition to working on an adjacent floor, Prudie, whose former husband had moved her to Toledo, also lived at the Cedars and one thing led to another.
A second marriage
As a physician, Barney was often invited to conferences in warm places, to which he’d take his Meta and the kids, but Prudie wanted to travel more extensively. Shortly after Richard Nixon ‘normalized’ relations with China, Barney and Prudie joined a group of doctors visiting, among other places, Beijing, Shanghai and Japan: “I wanted to see what it was like living under communism,” he recounts, noting that “he wasn’t impressed.” In order to get the visas necessary to visit the country that later underwhelmed him, Prudie and Barney were obliged to marry. “The Chinese didn’t want unmarried people sleeping together,” Barney recalls. “I wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t needed to.” Although Prudie, 16 years Barney’s junior, desired a grander ceremony, the couple was married by a justice of the peace before they flew off to Hong Kong in spring, 1981.
Prudie also wanted a baby, but as a father of three with an already overextended schedule, Barney said “no.” The consolation prize was a parade of dogs and a big home in the then-under construction Ottawa Hills subdivision of Hasty Hills. Originally Barney sought property on the ravine that ran off Sylvania’s Corey Road, but all the “good” plots were taken. “I wanted to be in an affluent neighborhood,” he admits. “If you’re going to do something, do it right.” He put down a deposit on what was then the second largest tract he could find, a cul-de-sac called Challedon Road, and hired an architect to design a spacious house with a wood-paneled projection room/den, white carpeting and dining room furnishings, and a curving staircase leading to a second-floor balcony. “She wanted a New Orleans feel,” he says recalling the construction. Though none of the kids ever lived there, over time they’d visit and, particularly Randy would help groom the enormous yard. The location turned out to be propitious: not far from Toledo Hospital, there were winter days when Barney says he was the only physician who showed up for his students and rounds.
World travels
“I’ve been to over a hundred countries,” Barney says, and while that’s an exaggeration, he has been to many. The travel bug started when his family was young, when he and Meta took the kids to visit relatives in Europe and Arkansas, then to prowl Civil War sites and national parks. Randy particularly remembers a trip to Austria (“I must’ve been about four”) when he became ill and was forced to drink goat milk—not a taste he relished. Later, particularly after David became a dedicated fisherman, there were “boys” trips to the southern USA, the Upper Peninsula and Canada. Randy remembers a mosquito-infested week in Missinaibi, Ontario that included poison ivy, an outhouse, a mouse in the wall and several puddle jumper planes necessary to access the remote wilderness. Then there was an earlier trip to Toledo Bend Reservoir south of Shreveport on the Louisiana/Texas border where a fishing guide named Lloyd affectionately (he thinks) referred to him as “Little Shit.” (Erika remembers being pleased not to be invited on the fishing excursions,)
With Prudie there were more European excursions as well as trips to southern California where Barney admired Mt. Solead and ogled celebrities who lived near his father-in-law’s residence. Prudie, Barney says, was “first and foremost an anglophile” who “worshipped Princess Diana,” and he himself enjoyed countries “where English is spoken.” Several times the couple visited England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Then there were tours to Norway and Sweden, Finland and Russia (another place Barney found “ruined by communism”) as well as a journey that included Austria, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. Yet another voyage took the couple to Cairo, Athens and Rhodes. But mostly, it was America that called him. “I’m a patriot,” he says, emphasizing his southern roots, recalling his lifelong fascination with the Civil War, and calling out his favorite foods: catfish, grouper, crab salad, turnip greens, chicken gumbo and dumplings.
Doctor, teacher, caregiver
Until the era of medicine-as-business, Barney enjoyed the independence of “being his own boss” even if it sometimes took him to neighborhoods that might be defined as threatening. “There were times the police accompanied me on house calls,” he remembers. Over the years, as such, he met a wide variety of individuals: For example, he recounts that the “king” of the gypsies appeared in his office one day with the “queen,” a middle-aged woman suffering from pneumonia. “She was in real distress,” Barney says, but under his care she made a full recovery. As thanks, the king returned with a beautiful young woman: a gift for the doctor who saved his queen’s life. Not wanting to offend the king…but not about to accept his offering…Barney led the young woman to an examining room and peppered her with questions about health conditions from which she might be suffering. The woman shook her head at everything until Barney hit on headaches. “I’m sorry,” Barney said, leading her back to the waiting king. “I can’t take her. She has problems.”
Barney understood patients as people, not as their diseases. “First thing I would do with a patient, “ he says, “was sit down, and find out who they were…their family…why they came to see me.” Often his appointments ran late because of this. “I felt bad about that,” he says, “but everyone got his full turn.” Sometimes his colleagues wondered why he would spend so much time with patients who were obviously seriously ill. “Dying is not an option,” was his response, but when the end did come, he would attend his patients’ funerals and sit with the mourners. “If they were veterans, I made sure they got full military honors,” he says, “…I did not want families to feel they were alone.” It was this compassion, no doubt, that brought him to the attention of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation which in 2010 awarded him its Gold Doctor Award for “sensitivity, kindness and compassion in the practice of medicine.”
Patients noticed. “When I said I was going to stop practicing medicine, three of them died on the spot,” he says.
Students were treated to similar generosities. When he was able, he would invite them to dinners, and during a period when he was consulting with patients suffering from asbestosis and beryllium disease, he’d pile students into his Cadillac or Lincoln and drive them to the affected communities for onsite experience.
Although Barney sees extended life expectancies as a brilliant advance in medicine, over time he became frustrated with changes in the health care model that valued profits over care and prevented him from spending time with patients and working at multiple hospitals. “There was real competition between Toledo Hospital and the Medical School,” he remembers. As one of the main catalysts of the clinical program at what was then MCO, he would be invited onto WSPD radio to discuss chest medicine research. “I talked about asthma and such,” he remembers. “It was good publicity for the school…helped build its reputation.” But his becoming a “celebrity doctor” did not sit well with administrators at Toledo Hospital which viewed MCO as a rival. “I said ‘I’ll leave,’” Barney told Toledo Hospital, adding that he knew they couldn’t afford to lose him. “They tried to tell me what I could do, but I had more power…I trained everyone…they couldn’t push me around.
“You can’t stop me from doing what I want,” was his final offer.
Barney was similarly discouraged by what he saw as the pharmaceutical industry’s push to encourage doctors to prescribe their products…often by treating them to expensive boondoggles or at least elaborate dinners. “I wanted to give my residents exposure,” he says, of some of these events, “but I wanted them to get educated, not to be told to prescribe pain pills.”
Avocations
An avid Razorbacks, Lions and Tigers fan, some of Barney’s happiest off-work memories are of spending time in Detroit with his sons, and later in life, with Prudie. “There was so much going on there,” he says of the city’s museums, retail and rich automotive history. Another area of interest is prohibition and the gangster ethic that grew from that. Lining the shelves of the Challedon Road projection room are stacks of The Untouchables DVDs, and if his memory serves him, he and Prudie lunched at a Bloomfield restaurant called Machus Red Fox the weekend before Jimmy Hoffa was allegedly abducted nearby. “We knew they were bad guys, but we romanticized them,” he says of his attraction to gangsters, many of which, he adds, came from the South. (“Most of them came from agriculture backgrounds, but the soil was depleted. They found they could make more money robbing people.”) One of the delights of watching these movies, he says, is watching them on a 90-inch “Elite” Japanese screen. “I said, get me one of those…they’re the best,” he remembers. Asked about favorite music and musicians, he cites band marches and commends Karen Carpenter and Frank Sinatra…“He was also connected to the mob,” he says, not unapprovingly….“but it was a long time ago.”
As Barney aged, he became fascinated by the organ, eventually purchasing four and moving them into his residence. For ten years he took lessons every Tuesday with an Erie Road instructor whose minister-husband impressed Barney by his desire to treat patients’ spirits. “I was her only organ student,” he says, “all the others studied piano which isn’t as hard.” Asked why he wanted something hard, he says the idea behind organ lessons was to keep his mind sharp. Indeed, his mind was sharp enough to keep him working on worker’s comp cases through 2017...”asbestos, metsothelioma…those kinds of things.” Though his body, over the years suffered bouts of heart, bladder, lung and kidney disease and in his oldest age, he was forced to use a walker to compensate for a broken hip joint, “I’ve survived,” he says. “I’ve never limited myself.
Family matters in the end
Though he was unable to spend much time with his children when they were younger—he wouldn’t get home until ten or eleven at night—Barney is proud of his offspring and their accomplishments. Erika, his eldest, retired to Florida in late 2019 after spending years as a financial executive in Toledo; she met her husband, Jan Rizzo, a dentist, when they were employed as summer help at West Central Medical Group. (According to Barney, all his children, and many of their friends passed through the doors of WCMG.)
David, who shares Barney’s eidetic memory, began his vocational quest thinking of oceanography, but followed in his father’s footsteps: after attending medical school in Florida, he became an internist in Arizona. Like his father, he’s also married to a nurse, Darla, née Bremeyer.
Randy an environmental engineer who studied Chem E. in North Caroline (“I split the difference between my mother in Florida and Barney in Toledo,”) lives and works near Virginia Beach with his wife Sharon (MacDonald) a guidance counselor. Because he was still in grade school when Meta and Barney divorced, he is the only child to have spent much time with his dad as a child, and is also the one, according to Barney, who helped out most with yard work and chores at the Hasty Hill house.
Then there’s the next generation starting with Erika and Jan’s daughters: Sarah, a lawyer is presently employed by Wells Fargo; she and her husband Patrick Rosenthal, an attorney for the Bank of Montreal, are raising a son, Jack, in Brooklyn. Sarah’s sister, Emily received a Ph.D in physical therapy and is currently engaged to Alex Person.
David’s children, include a son Alex, a chemical engineer living in Los Angeles and a daughter, Amanda, who’s working on a Ph.D in psychology in Chicago.
Randy and Sharon are the parents of Mark, a financial analyst in the Washington DC area, and Catherine, the youngest grandchild, now at Virginia Tech studying chemical engineering.
Interestingly, all three Wisinger siblings have homes on the water: Lake Diane, MI for Erika; Lake Gaston, VA for Randy, and a site near Prescott, AZ for David.
In March, 2013, Prudie Wisinger suffered a severe asthma attack on a visit to her 103-year-old father in California. After retrieving her from the Detroit Airport, Barney wanted her admitted to Monroe Regional Hospital, but she refused and died soon after. “Prudie died of unhappiness,” Barney says with a sigh. “She came from millions of dollars… but she was in misery…she didn’t have children… I wouldn’t stop serving patients.”
Meta Querker Wisinger died in 2017 after spending her final two years in an assisted living facility in Lambertville, MI.
Going forward
Because of Prudie’s love of animals and Barney’s care for patients, much of his philanthropy, he says, has been directed toward charitable agencies concerned with animals, the Republican Party and organizations that help sick children, specifically St. Jude’s and Shriner’s Hospitals. “For 30 years we had dogs,” he recalls, calling out two in specific, a German Shepherd named Shiloh and a pug mix named Sushi.
Asked if he’s suffered disappointments, Barney mentions his wives deaths and the current state of political incivility…“there were better times in the past,” he muses…but says that for the most part he hasn’t many regrets.
During the summer of 2018 the entire Wisinger clan gathered at Erika and Jan’s lake house for a family reunion. A picture hanging on the wall outside the white-carpeted living room, now refigured as Barney’s first-floor bedroom, shows a healthy family with a smiling patriarch: Barney Wisinger: Doctor, Teacher, Father, Caregiver.