The Kindest Doctor In Wyoming: Remembering Rock…

Myron Harrison remembers tagging along with his father on house calls.

It was the mid-1950s, and Dr. George Myron Harrison was a small-town doctor in rural Sweetwater County. This meant Dr. Harrison had to do it all, from delivering babies and taking out spleens to making house calls in coal mining camps with his young son in tow.

Those house calls left an impression on young Myron, who can still recall the abject poverty of the camps and the tiny, shoebox-sized, drafty wooden homes with dirt floors that housed the miners and their families.

He appreciated his dad’s kindness as he examined sick children before administering a shot of penicillin.

Dr. Harrison was synonymous with penicillin, Myron joked, which he believed cured most ailments.

That Myron also became a physician is likely a testament to the impression those early years had on him, he said, though admittedly his career choice was a result of not knowing “what the hell I wanted to do.”

His father, who passed away in 1989 at the age of 74, never put any pressure on him to follow in his footsteps, Myron said.

The one house call that sticks out the most with him is the time Harrison was called out for an emergency on an oil drilling rig in rural Rock Springs.

It was a Sunday morning, Myron recalled, and he and his father drove through miles of desolate terrain and sagebrush just to get to the rig.

A worker had gotten his leg entwined in a Kelly bushing so tightly that he couldn’t move. The doctor had no choice except to amputate the man’s badly shattered leg to cut him loose.

Young Myron purposefully avoided watching that practical procedure until it was over, and the man was rushed off to the hospital in a waiting ambulance.

This was just part of the day-to-day job, which back then was an around-the-clock position, Myron said.

The family lived a block from the old Memorial Hospital, where Harrison went often at all times of the day and night to deliver babies and tend to patients with any number of health problems.

“He learned it all before you could just call in a specialist for everything,” Myron said.

Real Education

In many ways, Dr. Harrison’s early life prepared him for his eventual career.

He was born in Springville, Utah, in 1915. His mother, Alta Crandall Harrison, died when he was 7. Harrison was then shipped off to live with an uncle in Salt Lake City because his father, George, was an engineer on the Union Pacific Railroad and was gone for long periods of time.

Later, his uncle loaned Harrison money to attend college at the University of Utah, followed by medical school in Chicago, where he graduated in 1941 before joining the U.S. Army as an air medic.

It was in the Pacific Theater of World War II that Myron said his father got his true medical education working on “flying ambulances” patching up soldiers. He also contracted dysentery during this time, which led to bowel issues that plagued him for the rest of his life.

After the war, he took a job as a company physician for the Union Pacific Coal Co. in Superior.

He married Mary Straight, a teacher, in 1946. A year later, the couple moved to Rock Springs, where Harrison left the railroad and set up his own practice, and the couple went on to have six children: sons Myron, Richard and Robert and daughters Gwen, Maribeth and Carolyn.

Like Imelda Marcos

As the oldest, Myron’s outings with his dad were rare times that he got to spend with a busy father who seemed to be always working or golfing on his precious days off.

Apart from his proclivity for prescribing penicillin, Dr. Harrison was also well known for his snappy golf outfits and shoes, and for picking up the sport at a time when few people played it. He was the first member the Rolling Green Country Club in Green River.

Myron said his father was drawn to golf after seeing Bob Hope and Bing Crosby entertain the troops during World War II.

“Both of them were avid golfers and were joking all the time and having a great time,” he said. “My dad was so impressed with that that he came back to the United States and picked up the game.”

His dad even had a little No. 1 tag from the course that he put on his golf bag, and one of Myron’s favorite photos of his father is posing with that bag in one of his dapper golf outfits.

“He had a closet with 50 alpaca sweaters in a rainbow of matching colors with matching golf shoes,” Myron said. “He was like Imelda Marcos.”

As a golfer, Dr. Harrison wasn’t particularly good, but he loved being out there golfing.

“Those were his hours of relaxation because he was always on call, 24 hours a day for most of his life,” Myron said.