It runs in the Anders family

By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Staff Writer

Say it's the weekend and most or all the Anders clan is (as usual) at their parents' house in north Fayette. A caller asks to speak to the doctor.

Odds are exactly even that any adult who answers the phone could say, “This is the doctor.”

“Dr. Anders?”

Odds are still in the caller's favor.

You have to be a lot more specific, because this is the family of Pat and Rebekah Anders. Both the senior Anderses, three of their brood of six, plus two of their mates, wear M.D. after their names.

It's hard to pinpoint when the Anders dynasty begins. Was it in 1942 after “the war turned everything upside down,” as the family's matriarch puts it, and she returned to her hometown to go to Wesleyan College?

Or was it when doctors at Grady discovered a young researcher interested in medicine and encouraged her to go for it?

Or was it when the University of Rochester dean, formerly from Johns Hopkins where women medical students were not so rare, created a nondiscriminating atmosphere at Rochester's School of Medicine?

It's hard to know exactly where fate took over. As a girl, Rebekah Anders reflected recently, she was interested in medicine, but “I was not too serious about it. In those days hardly anybody went to college, let alone med school, but step by step things worked out.”

Although also accepted at Emory, the Macon native chose Rochester in New York for its more tolerant attitude toward women in medicine. “I moved from South to North,” she said, and found herself in “a different world.”

“They could hardly understand my talk, let alone my culture. There were six girls in the class, and we were all friends — although the fellows in the class were as nice to us as can be.

“Of the six, five married medical students, and five went into practice and stayed in practice all their lives. We've stayed close friends, and got together again when we had our 45th anniversary last year in Rochester.”

Rebekah Yates was one of the five who married fellow medical students. She met Pat Anders, from a Welsh coal mining family in Pennsylvania, in 1949. It was not exactly over a cadaver, as one of her children tells it, but close — they were in anatomy class together, and she was his date for the class's year-end celebration.

By 1951, they married, and as they “were trying to decide where to go to intern, I found out I was pregnant.” The dean, a “forward-looking man” for 1953, let her arrange her schedule so an easy lab came toward the end of the school year.

“The only problem was that my belly sometimes got in the way when I used a microscope,” she later told her firstborn, Tricia.

The stork won the race to the sheepskin: an Associated Press photo of the newly graduated Drs. Anders holding 5-day-old Tricia went national.

The internship question was settled: “We decided on Atlanta where my parents could help with the baby,” Dr. Rebekah continued. “We both interned at old Piedmont Hospital. It was a great experience, with quality doctors.”

Pat Anders discharged his military duty by volunteering for the Navy after one year of internship. He stayed in to do his residency in his chosen specialty, obstetrics and gynecology — all up and down the East Coast.

“That was my time out for family,” Rebekah Anders said. “Pat realized he wanted to go for private practice, so when we were through with military obligations, we came to Georgia.”

At the time, South Fulton Hospital was under construction, and seemed a natural fit, with family close-by to help. Still, Anders waited until her youngest, Tim, was 3 years old before she went to work, and credits her parents' assistance with making it possible.

Juggling home and career is a dilemma most professionals face, but Anders' convictions made the decision for her: “One parent should be home,” she said. “The family ought to come first. Everything else you can go back to do a second time.”

It was a team-effort, she said, with her husband taking the night-time and hospital aspects of an Ob-Gyn practice. “I went to the office part-time, and could still be at home when [the children] got home in the afternoon. We continued that way for a number of years.”

As her offspring grew in numbers and stature, the Anderses “took the plunge and came to Fayette County in 1972 and built this house.” In addition to their six, her husband's elderly aunt lived with the family for the 10 years before she died, and at another time so did both of Dr. Rebekah's aged parents.

“Pat retired from hospital work about 1987,” Rebekah Anders said, “and we moved our office from next door to the hospital to our home. The children had moved out, and there was a good bit of space.”

Her husband retired entirely in 1992, following some health problems, but “I was enjoying my practice and decided to keep on in limited practice, seeing mostly patients I had known for 20 or 30 years.”

Rebekah Anders will be 75 early in September, and — with regret — is hanging up her stethoscope. “I've enjoyed every day being a doctor, and I've been blessed to have been spared the headaches many have had.”

To hear her talk, you'd think she was considering a second career: she speaks wistfully of pediatrics. Instead, however, she plans to upgrade from part-time to full-time grandmother of 19, from age 1 to second year of college.

It's not like she isn't leaving a legacy, not with all the second-generation Anders physicians on call.

One might suspect there was pressure in their career choices. In a sense, there was, and it was negative.

“Our being an example to the children to become doctors was not intentional,” Anders said. On the contrary: “We warned them.

“Some wanted to and some didn't and we were always surprised. For instance, Mark got his accounting degree, then decided to go back to med school. Same with Buffy, who played flute and piano — she decided she could do better in medicine than with music.”

Eldest son David ignored their warnings first; he says he wanted to be a physician since he was 5. His wife Kenya is also an M.D., in dermatology part-time while their children are young.

Firstborn Tricia and her husband, David Jones, heeded the warnings; she's a high school special education teacher in Knoxville where her husband is in sales.

Buffie (Elizabeth, actually, but as a tot, Tricia called her “Wi'buff”) and her husband Mark are both Atlanta-based pathologists.

Janet is a nurse in Warner Robins; she and husband Abe, a technical software specialist at Robins AFB, have four adopted children.

And the youngest, Tim, is comptroller for FC&A in Peachtree City. His wife Michelle has her master's in counseling and psychological services, but like Mark's wife, Kris, is an at-home mom, now developing an Internet retailing business.

“We feel so blessed,” said their admiring matriarch. “They all turned out so well, and all our in-law children too. The Lord has blessed us every step of the way.”