[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 29 (Wednesday, March 7, 2001)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E297]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




        A TRIBUTE TO DR. MACK ROBERTS OF WAYNE COUNTY, KENTUCKY

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                           HON. HAROLD ROGERS

                              of kentucky

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, March 7, 2001

  Mr. ROGERS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I use this extraordinary means 
to sadly inform the House of the passing of a great American, a 
patriarch of Wayne County, Kentucky, and a family friend.
  Mr. Speaker, long after other doctors had stopped making house calls, 
Dr. Mack Roberts kept making his rounds. While other doctors were 
delivering babies in hospital rooms and administering vaccinations in 
sparkling new clinics, this humble man, known to his patients simply as 
``Doc'', took his skills to the dusty roads in one of the most rural 
areas of the Nation--a four-county region of southeastern Kentucky.
  A beloved physician, Dr. Mack Roberts, of Monticello, Kentucky, died 
Monday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, at the age of 
97.
  Dr. Roberts provided medical care to patients throughout Kentucky's 
Wayne, Pulaski, Clinton and McCreary counties for 61 years, going to 
remote hills and hollows to deliver babies, provide vaccinations, and 
care for generations of family members. When there was no hospital at 
all in Wayne County, Dr. Roberts and his wife, Alma Dolen Roberts, 
opened their home on Main Street in Monticello to the sick and injured 
for treatment. They accepted patients at all hours of the day and 
night, sometimes turning their home into a makeshift emergency room. No 
patient was ever turned away.
  Dr. Roberts grew up amid his large family in rural Wayne County in 
frontier-like surroundings, beginning in a log house. This Member was 
born at home only two or three miles from the same place. The Roberts 
and Rogers families have been close all the while. I especially 
remember Dr. Roberts' father, Rhodes Roberts, presiding over the Sunday 
School classes in the small, weatherboard, rural Elk Spring Valley 
Baptist Church, from my earliest memories. A much younger Dr. Mack 
Roberts would be quietly participating in the church activities. Later, 
my father, O.D. Rogers, assisted Dr. Roberts and others in raising the 
money to construct the new (and present) home for the church.
  Dr. Mack Roberts earned a degree from Cumberland College in 1926 and 
his medical degree in 1932 from the University of Louisville College of 
Medicine. He came home to Wayne County to serve as county health 
officer, where the job of vaccinating children against common diseases 
became a personal crusade. He opened his private practice in Monticello 
in 1939.
  He once told an interviewer that the most important medical 
instrument he could imagine was his Jeep, which he used to make house 
calls to patients across the region's most remote areas. He would take 
the Jeep as far as the road would take him, then sometimes climb atop a 
mule or a horse to travel the rest of the way.
  But there was a time when these house calls took on an element of 
danger. During his years as a county health officer, he remembered that 
he would sometimes travel with an escort because some folks who saw him 
coming down the road thought he might have been a Federal agent looking 
for moonshine whiskey stills.
  Over the years, ``Doc'' Roberts delivered 4,250 babies--about 90 
percent of them delivered in the patients' home. For his work, he 
charged what the patient could afford, and sometimes that meant no 
payment at all. ``One time I delivered a baby and the man offered me 
two gallons of moonshine,'' he has been quoted as saying. ``I'm sorry 
now I didn't take it.''
  His career has been fondly remembered in two books chronicling his 
life. One book, entitled ``Doc'', was written by his great-nephew, the 
Rev. Howard W. Roberts, and published in 1987. Another book, written by 
his wife, Alma, was recently published under the title ``House Calls: 
Memoirs of Life with a Kentucky Doctor.'' As recently as last fall, 
``Doc'' and Alma Roberts made public appearances to sign the memoir.
  Dr. Roberts retired from his practice on July 1, 1993, just before 
his 90th birthday. Since that time he has served as a director of the 
Monticello Banking Company. His wife; three daughters, Helen Dreese of 
Flint, Michigan, Ann Looney of Paris, Tennessee, and Marilyn Drake of 
Monticello; a brother; a sister; four grandchildren and two great-
grandchildren survive him.
  Mr. Speaker, Dr. Mack Roberts had frequently said that he was put on 
this Earth for a reason: to serve the Lord and to serve his fellow man. 
It was a basic and abiding principle that he carried with him 
throughout his 97 years. His selfless devotion to his community, his 
patients and his family has left an indelible legacy for the people of 
Kentucky and the Nation.
  We mourn the passing of this fine physician and community leader, 
whose life serves as an example for future generations of Kentuckians 
and Americans to follow.

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