ourneys that started in Brooklyn, Okanogan County ranch end in Brewster for Fred and Verona Schnibbe

Fred Schnibbe is a Brooklyn, N.Y. boy who was kind of annoyed to be drafted in 1943, because it cost him a really good job in a machine shop. But it was the start of a whole new journey, far from Brooklyn and far from the machinist's trade.

Fred Schnibbe ended up in the medical corps, was sent to Europe for the climactic campaigns of World War II; those days in the medical corps sparked an interest in medicine. His girlfriend (and later wife of 60 years), Verona (known around the Quad City area as Ronnie) introduced him to the Okanogan country. That led to a 40-year career practicing medicine in Okanogan County. Now, after many years of retirement in Brewster, Fred and Ronnie are moving on. They'll set up their new house in Walla Walla.

As far as Ronnie Schnibbe is concerned, it all turned out exactly like it was supposed to. "God has been such a guide."

Fred Schnibbe grew up in 1930s Brooklyn, in the midst of the Depression, when a good job was hard to come by even for a high school graduate. He had a good job that he liked, and he never expected to have another career or live outside New York, he said. The war changed all that.

The U.S. Army assigned him the medical corps; he was sent to Europe after D-Day, fought with units in southern France and was part of the army that occupied Germany and Austria at war's end. Those days in the mobile hospital unit kindled his interest in medicine, he said.

During the war his sister got a chance to go to college, way out west in Washington at Walla Walla College. "She kept sending me the school paper," Fred Schnibbe said, and he liked what he read. He wanted to go to college after the war, he said, he wanted to study medicine and he decided that if he got the chance for college he'd go to the school out west.

The U.S. government set up a program for those millions of returning GIs, appropriately dubbed the GI Bill, that provided money for college. Fred carried through on the promise he made to himself and went west to Walla Walla College. And there he met a young woman from Okanogan County who was studying English and wanted to be a writer.

Verona Schnibbe's dad was working at the Chrysler garage in Goldendale when he got the chance to buy a cattle-hay ranch in the Aeneas Valley in far-off Okanogan County. It was 1935. The valley had no electricity or phone; there was no running water or indoor plumbing. Ronnie and her sister Ginger "rode horseback, four and a half miles each way, to school," she said. Girls who had lived in a town with paved streets and an indoor bathroom might be less than enthusiastic about all the frontier living, but Ronnie loved Whistling Pines Ranch. "It's a beautiful, beautiful place." Their friends at school would talk about how much they wanted to get out of Okanogan County, but neither Verona nor her sister could understand that, she said.

She went away to college and met this young Brooklyn guy, a war veteran. After his first year of school he went home for the summer, to work and make a little money. When he came back, just before school started, his girlfriend invited him up to see the ranch.

Fred Schnibbe didn't have a car, but that wasn't going to stop a guy who had fought the Germans across half of Europe. He hitchhiked from Walla Walla to Spokane and on to Disautel, which was sort of the end of the line. He asked for directions at a logging camp; "it was 25 miles from her ranch," and nobody at the logging camp had ever heard of the Aeneas Valley. But one of the foremen took pity on him; "he took me home for supper," and offered to drive him to the ranch. As they got closer to the ranch "the road got smaller and smaller until it was just two little ruts with grass in between," Fred recalled. The logging camp foreman wasn't very impressed. "He said, 'Why do people live out here?' And I said, 'I have no idea,'" Fred remembered.

Ah, but the ranch had its attractions-Fred and Verona Schnibbe were married in 1948, two weeks after Ronnie received her diploma. The spring of 1948 was memorable for a lot of reasons, mostly the great early spring flood, one of the biggest on record. Even the creeks and streams around Whistling Pines Ranch overran their banks. Her family had to use a "high wheeled wagon" to get in and out of the place; her wedding dress was delivered in that wagon, Ronnie said.

Fred Schnibbe had decided he was going to be a doctor. After graduating from Walla Walla College in 1950 he attended medical school at Loma Linda University in southern California, and worked at the Los Angeles County Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. He spent a year as an intern in Portland. But the Brooklyn boy with three years of experience in urban hospitals wasn't really all that sure he wanted to practice in the city. Even though his parents and brother were living in Portland by the time he interned there, he just didn't feel like the kind of practice he'd have in Portland would let him use all his capabilities, Fred said.

But his father-in-law stumbled on the solution. Ronnie's dad was very active in county organizations, and at one of his meetings he happened to sit next to the man who managed the bank in Twisp. He said the people of Twisp and Winthrop were "just desperate for a doctor," and golly gosh, it just so happened Ronnie's dad know of a young doctor who was looking for a practice. Fred Schnibbe took it. "We wanted to be in a place where we could be of service," Verona said.

It turned out the bank manager knew what he was talking about. "I had patients come to my door before we even got the office open. I guess they really needed somebody," Fred said. He saw 30 to 40 patients per day, Dr. Schnibbe recalled, and made a trip to Okanogan Douglas Hospital every day, sometimes twice a day. Lots of times the doctor went to the patient in those days, Fred recalled; sometimes the family station wagon was pressed into service to deliver patients to the hospital. (With a schedule like that Fred Schnibbe didn't have a lot of time at home, so sometimes Verona and their three sons would go along on house calls. "Three little boys and graham crackers and a diaper bag," she remembered.)

The fastest trip he ever made anywhere, Fred recalled, was a ride from Twisp down to photophotoOkanogan Douglas Hospital; his patient was in labor and he was afraid she would have complications. They got to the hospital in what looked like the nick of time. "It took five hours before she delivered," Dr. Schnibbe remembered.

He loved hospital practice, general practice, Fred Schnibbe said, but all that driving around got kind of old after a while. After about two and half years he and his family moved to Brewster, where he formed a partnership with two veteran doctors in January 1958.

"There are several reasons I stayed in Brewster," Schnibbe said, starting with that partnership. "Two great partners. Harold Stout and Harold Lamberton. Couldn't be better to work with." They had a lot of experience and were happy to share it with their colleagues. "They were good tutors for me," Dr. Schnibbe remembered.

Another reason was the ancillary medical staff at the hospital, people like Wilmer Wysong in the lab and director of nursing Lori Holt. Visiting specialists came regularly from Spokane, and the internal medicine specialist, orthopedic doctors, urologist and cardiothoracic surgeon were great doctors and great guys. Longtime (48 years) hospital administrator Howard Gamble was great at his job, despite his inexplicable preference for the Yankees over the Dodgers. The nursing home operated by Jerry Tretwold provided good care. The staff at Community Medical Center, his office staff, the nurses and aides at the hospital-all the way along, they were good at what they did and provided excellent support, Dr. Schnibbe said. "Physicians can't do it all by themselves," he said.

The patients provided the other reason to stay around. "The people that live here in the Quad City area are tremendous people. And Grand Coulee also." Patients came from throughout the whole hospital district, from Omak and Okanogan, Tonasket and Oroville. "We had a great partnership here, and that would pull people in."

Dr. Schnibbe was in what's called family practice now-in fact he's a charter member of the American Academy of Family Physicians. He had two other areas of interest, cardiology and urology (which is the study of the kidneys and urinary tract). His business partners and hospital officials encouraged him to get extra training, including a stint to learn more about coronary care at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

Fred Schnibbe was in practice about 40 years. After he retired he and Ronnie continued to live in the house they designed and built in 1968, but now it's just getting to be a little too much. They looked around north central Washington for a smaller place, Fred said, but every place had a yard that needed upkeep. They found a place at a senior citizen community near their old college stomping grounds in Walla Walla.

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

"Kudos to the people in this area, to the partners, the nurses-so many people who have made my life," Fred Schnibbe said. "I couldn't start to name all of them, because I wouldn't know where to stop."

Their house was burglarized once; the thieves didn't take Fred's camera, which was insured-and that money could've allowed him to buy a better one, he said. Instead they took the stereo and television, and when Ronnie was cleaning up the mess she found the thieves had stolen a bunch of Fred's freshly ironed business shirts and cleaned out his sock drawer. His office staff learned the thieves had stolen all of the doc's socks. So they bought him a whole wardrobe of new socks; "they cleaned out Whybarks," Ronnie remembered, and Violet Whybark threw in a couple of pairs of Brewster Bear socks. They filled a garbage can with individually wrapped pairs of socks, and bought a cake emblazoned with "sock it to you."

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