Fred and Verona Schnibbe recognized as Brewster Citizens of the Year

Fred Schnibbe said he used to have friendly arguments with diehard Yankee fan Howard Gamble, back when Howard was Okanogan Douglas Hospital administrator and Fred was a physician there. Of course Fred Schnibbe was a Dodgers fan-"I grew up in Brooklyn," he said. Dr. Schnibbe was a Brooklyn boy who ended up in the rural West and provided medical care in Okanogan County for 40 years. For their contributions to the community Fred Schnibbe and his wife Verona (known to everybody as Ronnie) were selected as 2009 Citizens of the Year; they will be honored at the annual Brewster Chamber of Commerce banquet next Monday, March 16 at American Legion Post 97 in Brewster.

So how did a Brooklyn boy end up out in the great Northwest? Well, the first step came courtesy of Uncle Sam, in 1943. Like millions of other young men, Fred Schnibbe was drafted for service in the U.S. military during World War II, and served from 1943 to 1945. Schnibbe said he was kind of annoyed at the time; he had a pretty good job in a machine shop and expected to make that his career. The Army had other ideas, and assigned him to the medical corps.

Schnibbe made the march across France into Germany during the campaigns of 1944-45. At the time his sister was going to college out in the Pacific Northwest, at a college operated by the church the family attended. "She kept sending me the school paper," Fred remembered. His work with the medical corps got him interested in medicine as a career, and with the GI Bill making college affordable for veterans after the war, Schnibbe decided to attend Walla Walla College, operated by the Seventh -day Adventist Church.

There he met a girl who was studying journalism. Verona Schnibbe spent most of her childhood on the family ranch north of Omak, in the Aeneas Valley. Her dad bought the Whistling Pines Ranch in 1931, she said, giving up a job at the Chrysler garage in Goldendale to make the move. At the time Okanogan County was way off the beaten path; the ranch didn't have electricity, a telephone or plumbing, Ronnie said. "We rode 4-1/2 miles horseback, each way, to school." And it was a great place to grow up, Ronnie said; "it's a beautiful, beautiful place."

In his first year at college the Brooklyn premed student met the Okanogan County girl in the journalism school; they were married in 1948. (It was flooding that spring and the ranch was cut off, Ronnie remembered; she had to ride in on a high-wheeled farm wagon to get her wedding dress from the house.) Fred Schnibbe graduated from college in 1950, then enrolled in medical school at Loma Linda University in Southern California. (It too is operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.) At the time doctors learned a lot of their trade by working with doctors in hospital settings; Schnibbe said he worked in hospitals for most of his junior and senior years in college.

After two years practicing in Los Angeles, Calif., the family moved to Portland, Ore., for his residency. His parents and brother lived in Portland by then, but Fred said he didn't think the medicine he was practicing there allowed him to use all his capabilities.

But Ronnie's family still lived on the ranch; her father knew lots of people all around the county, including the bank manager in Twisp, a man named Lou Couey. At a meeting the two men got to talking, and Lou Couey lamented that Twisp had no doctor, and really needed one. Well, Ronnie's dad happened to know one. That was in 1955.

A lot of his classmates stayed in cities and bigger towns, Fred said, but "we wanted to be in a place where we would be of service." Lou Couey was right about the need for medical care in the upper valley; "I had patients come to the door before the office was open," Schnibbe remembered. "I guess they really needed somebody." It was a busy practice-30 to 40 patients per day plus at least one trip down to Brewster, to Okanogan Douglas Hospital, every day. And some house calls to boot. (Sometimes the family came along on house calls; "three little boys and graham crackers and a diaper bag," Ronnie remembered.) After about 2-1/2 years the Schnibbe family moved to Brewster. Dr. Schnibbe said he liked his practice but that drive to Brewster every day was a little long, and he wanted his sons to attend a Christian school.

In 1958 he founded a new practice in Brewster with two well-established physicians; there were "several reasons why I stayed in Brewster," Schnibbe said, and his fellow partners were two of the biggest reasons. "Harold Stout and Harold Lamberton. Couldn't be better to work with. They were good tutors for me when I came." They were always willing to consult and share their expertise, Fred said, which in his opinion helps the patient.

Patients came from all over the valley, from Twisp to Grand Coulee to Chelan to Okanogan and all the way to Oroville. "There was a great partnership here, and that would pull people in." All three doctors were family practice physicians (Fred Schnibbe is a charter member of the American Association of Family Physicians) but they also pursued specialties. Fred was interested in urology and the kidney tract, and pursued a second specialty in cardiology.

Brewster was a great place to practice medicine, Fred said. "The people that live in the Quad City area are tremendous people. Grand Coulee too." The nurses and staff at the hospital, the staff at Community Medical Center and his office staff, the lab techs and X-ray techs and scrub techs and staff all along the way, knew what they were doing and did it well. "Physicians can't do it by themselves," he said. The local doctors also benefitted from the expertise of visiting specialists who came to town regularly. "They were such nice people, weren't they?" Ronnie said.

"Looking back on it, I couldn't think of a nicer place to practice," Fred Schnibbe said.

Fred Schnibbe practiced medicine for about 40 years. After he retired he and Ronnie continued to live in the house they built in 1968. ("Our boys were getting to the place where our little 900-square-foot house was getting too small," Ronnie said. They hired an architect but his ideas were not in synch with theirs, so they had to take the design process into their own hands.) But by last summer the big house and the big yard was getting to be too much. (Fred had an extensive collection of roses, but that was the extent of his green thumb, he said. "I'm not a gardener. I had a rock garden and even the rocks died.") They moved to a senior community in Walla Walla last summer.

Two of their sons followed Dad into medicine; Dale is an optometrist, and their late son Robert was an ophthalmologist. Their son Richard works in the construction business in California. They have three grandchildren.