Author shares grandfather’s history as local doctor, WWII soldier
Trending
FAIRMONT - Author Tamara Thayer got the opportunity to share her grandfather's past from her award-winning book, ‘A Country Doctor Goes to War,’ at the Martin County Historical Society in Fairmont on Tuesday.
Dr. Ellsworth "Mike" Thayer's story starts with his great-grandfather, who Tamara Thayer said came to Minnesota when it was still a territory, and served as a drummer boy in the Civil War.
"That frontier, you served in the war, and that was a thing passed on to the generations," she said. "I think it was something that he just knew he was going to do someday is to serve his country."
When the great depression hit, Ellsworth Thayer's father, a banker in Truman, chose to divide the money left in the bank in equal portions instead of closing the bank and keeping the money for themselves. The stress from this, however, took its toll.
"My grandpa was lying in bed with his dad when the stress of losing the farm, the bank, and then the stock market, he had a massive heart attack and died," Tamara said. "My grandpa was in bed with him when it happened, and he said that was really what made him decide 'I am going to finish this and be a doctor,' because there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t save his dad, and he felt, you know, hopefully as a doctor he’ll be able to find ways to help others."
As a doctor before the war, Ellsworth helped people when he could, with Tamara saying sometimes payment came in methods that would seem unconventional now.
"Truman at the time was mainly a farm community," she said. He did a lot of things, like where if he gave somebody stitches, they might give him a dozen eggs. If he fixed a broken arm, he’d get paid with a pie, things like that. Delivered a baby, he might get half a hog. My dad said they never lived like kings, but they sure ate like kings. They were paid well with commodities."
The rest of the story would not come until later. After going to fight in WWII, Tamara said Ellsworth didn't talk about the war in great detail, even to his son. After Ellsworth died in 2000, a discovery was made that served as the catalyst for Tamara's book.
"My son is in the Navy, and he was deployed," she said. "Dad said, 'Go up in the attic. I want to pass on Grandpa’s uniform to your son.' I went up there and brought down this big box. Underneath the uniform that you see on the table, we found newspapers, 250 pictures that Grandpa took with his own camera. We found eight millimeter footage. We found his diaries."
After staying up the whole night reading, several discoveries were made, including that her grandfather was on Tinian Island, where the Enola Gay took off from to drop the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
That was when she started her journey to write 'A Country Doctor Goes to War,' which was published in 2014.
"It actually was a lot of work, but it was rewarding," Tamara said.
Overall, she said her favorite part was gathering all the family history with interviews, and being able to share that information.
With this presentation, Tamara also shared that a motion picture is in the works, with a 114-page screenplay already completed by Georgia filmmaker Christopher Forbes. There are plans to use Truman for relevant scenes. Tamara said casting is in progress, and locations will start being scouted for filming in August.
"I think that’d be great," Martin County Historical Society Director Lenny Tvedten said. "That’d be really interesting to see how that develops and what the end result is of a movie about Dr. Thayer and his experiences in World War II."