Widmer Medical Endowed Scholarship Fund
The Widmer Medical Scholarship for nursing or pre-med students attending Goshen College, Goshen, Ind., was established in 2012 by Helen Yoder Widmer, RN (1917 – ) to honor the lives and work of her husband Dr. J. Glen Widmer, MD (1918 – 2011), his brother Dr. Reuben B. Widmer, MD (1916 – 2014) and their sister Esther M. Widmer, RN (1905 – 1971).
Glen, Reuben and Esther were three of nine children born to Christian G. Widmer (Switzerland) and Elise Rediger (Alsace) who were married in Europe and immigrated to the United States in 1903. They settled on a farm south of Wayland, Iowa, where their children attended the one-room Douglas Country School. To continue their education, some of the children walked four miles to attend Wayland High School. Esther graduated from Goshen Academy, and both Esther and Reuben graduated from Goshen College. Glen attended Goshen College for three years before early admission to University of Iowa’s Medical School.
J. Glen Widmer
Glen married Helen Yoder in 1943, and after graduating from University of Iowa’s Medical School in 1944, he served until 1945 in the U.S. Public Health Service as a doctor on a transport ship returning troops home from World War II. In 1946 he established and maintained a general practice in Wayland for almost 50 years until he retired in 1994 at age 76.
Throughout his life Glen was very active in Sugar Creek Mennonite Church and later with Gideons International. He was a community leader sensitive not only to the well-being of his patients but also the health and welfare of the region, volunteering his time and energy to make his home community a more complete and sustainable place in which to live. He was the driving force behind establishing Parkview Home in Wayland, which has since grown from a retirement home into a full nursing and retirement home complex that now serves an extended local and regional community. He also was instrumental in establishing Crooked Creek Christian Camp near Wayland, a facility that has grown into a multi-use retreat center.
Glen’s generative and nurturing inclinations carried over into gardening, which was a pleasurable activity for him that provided produce for his family and friends. Farming was in his blood. Glen also tended a 40-acre timber near Wayland where he loved to walk, drive his old beat-up pickup truck, cut firewood and forage for nuts, berries and mushrooms, often bringing home a bouquet of wildflowers for Helen. He enjoyed a good farm/household auction and collected antiques, pictures, prints and books. He was fluent and loved to speak Alsatian German, maintaining contact with the family’s European relatives. An amateur and self-taught photographer, he made home movies and specialized in color stereo slides that he shot during his travels. Glen and Helen enjoyed traveling and visited countries on all the continents except Antarctica. Through the Mennonite Medical Association Glen volunteered to be on call for short-term service. In 1972, accompanied by Helen and their 13-year-old daughter Jan, he traveled to Ethiopia to work in a hospital for six weeks when a missionary doctor suddenly became ill.
Glen was a generalist in the best sense of the word and an intellectually curious person with a wealth of information on a wide range of subjects including local knowledge of Iowa history and geology as well as the details of many generations of Widmer family history. Glen was inventive, caring and possessed extensive practical knowledge and skills that along with his manual dexterity enabled him to creatively solve many medical, material and social problems. He was a man of moral strength and integrity and greatly valued in the home, church and community for his wise opinions and pragmatic advice.
Reuben B. Widmer
In 1939 Reuben married Annabel Raber, RN (1916 – 2008), a nurse from the Goshen/Elkhart area who had graduated from nursing school in Ft. Wayne, Ind., in 1937. Reuben graduated from Goshen College in 1940 and from University of Iowa’s Medical School in 1943. He served in the medical core of the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Public Health Service in Florida before establishing a general practice in Winfield, Iowa, a town about 14 miles from Wayland.
In 1972 Reuben closed his practice and moved to Iowa City to join the faculty of University of Iowa’s Medical School where he taught residents in the Department of Family Practice, sharing with them his practical application of knowledge and diverse skills learned in the field while treating his patients. In 1977 he was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year by the family practice residents of his college, and in 1982 the Iowa Academy of Family Physicians honored him as Medical Educator of the Year. Reuben compiled a body of research based on his years of practice in rural communities and wrote papers on topics ranging from depression in primary care patients to teen pregnancy. He was awarded professor emeritus status near the time of his retirement in 1988, and the research library/electronic learning center in the Department of Family Practice was named for him in 1998. Reuben was a man of integrity with many of the same attributes as Glen. He was also a great storyteller and was much loved for his sense of humor as well as for his practical medical skills by both the Winfield community and his colleagues and students at University of Iowa.
The Brothers and Their Practices
As young boys Reuben and Glen were almost like twins. It was said that Reuben, the more outgoing of the two, was always talking and coming up with ideas, but it was Glen who figured out solutions and how to implement their ideas. From the very beginning they were a great team and as adults were always in sync and worked well together. Reuben and Glen’s clinics and practices were independent but similar. The two brothers consulted back and forth and covered for each other for a weekly afternoon off and for vacations. Due to the rural nature of their practices, both brothers maintained their own pharmaceutical supplies and dispensed medicine from their offices. At a time when specialization was gaining prominence and before family practice became a specialty, Reuben and Glen were both broadly skilled physicians and surgeons, providing health care to their patients (and sometimes even their patients’ animals!) in appreciative rural communities. Both were true country doctors on call 24/7 who regularly made house calls throughout the region. Many a night Glen would read and fall asleep in his chair, still dressed in his suit ready to go in case he was called out later in the evening. Both brothers delivered hundreds of babies and almost daily drove the 16 and 19 miles to Henry County Hospital in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, where they were members of the staff and to where they referred most of their patients. Iowa City was just an hour away, and Reuben and Glen also utilized its hospitals and specialists for more difficult cases.
Esther M. Widmer
Esther graduated from La Junta Mennonite School of Nursing in La Junta, Colo., in 1930 and worked at Washington County Hospital in Washington, Iowa, for four years before attending Goshen College where she earned her BA degree in chemistry in 1937. She went on to become Education Director at Washington Boulevard Hospital of Chicago; Director of Nurses at Mennonite School of Nursing in Bloomington, Ill.; Director of Nursing Education at Grant Hospital of Chicago and Director of Nurses at Methodist Hospital, Peoria, Ill. In 1949 Esther returned to Goshen College and Elkhart General Hospital to be Director of Nursing Services at the hospital and a key figure in setting up the hospital’s clinical facilities for the new collegiate-level nursing program being developed at Goshen College, which opened in 1950. Esther also helped plan the clinical fieldwork for students, taught parts of the pharmacology course and in general, paved the way for cooperation between the college and the hospital—a relationship that continues to the present day. She returned to Wayland in 1956 to help care for her aging parents and to be Glen’s office nurse. In 1961 Esther accepted a clinical research position at University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City where she remained for six years. Esther was an intelligent, calm, kind and thoughtful person who valued her independence, choosing to remain unmarried to pursue her nursing career. She was generous and from the beginning helped her two younger brothers, Reuben and Glen, attend Goshen College. She also helped finance their medical school education, along with Annabel and Helen, who were also working nurses. In later years Esther became a close member of Glen and Helen’s family, visiting on holidays and often accompanying them on family vacations.
Helen Yoder Widmer
Helen was born in Garden City, Mo., and raised in Cheraw, Colo., where her family endured the hardships of The Dust Bowl and The Great Depression, historic events that were more severely felt on the eastern plains of Colorado than in the agriculturally productive area around Wayland. After graduation from La Junta Mennonite School of Nursing in 1939, two of Helen’s friends wanted her to accompany them to work in their respective home communities. Helen applied to hospitals in Bloomington, Ill., and Washington, Iowa, and received a letter from Esther Widmer, Director of Nurses in Bloomington, which stated that unfortunately they did not need nurses at that time. As a result Helen went with her friend Welma Graber to work at Washington County Hospital, which was about 11 miles from Wayland. The young nurses had only a couple of non-sequential days off during the month, and when one of those days fell on a Sunday, they often were able to get a ride to Sugar Creek Church with another friend. This is where Helen and Glen met. Because of gas rationing, Helen and Welma occasionally rode their bicycles 15 miles on the gravel and dirt roads from Washington to Wayland to visit Welma’s family and also Glen who stayed with his family on their adjacent farm when he was home from Goshen. Later, Helen and Esther reflected on the irony of Esther “rejecting” Helen as a nurse and thereby setting in motion the circumstances for Helen and Glen to meet and marry, and for Helen and Esther to eventually become sisters-in-law and friends.
Helen was a lively and energetic young wife and mother who also assisted Glen in the office when help was needed. However, her main focus was to keep the house in order and dinner ready for their growing young family of six children. As dedicated and supportive partners throughout their lives, Glen and Helen did almost everything together so that many of Glen’s accomplishments were Helen’s as well. A talented seamstress who continues to knit and crochet, Helen, at age 98 today, is still very mentally alert and participates as she can in church and community activities. She drives locally and lives at home with the help of their daughter Jan, a proud Goshen College nursing graduate from the class of 1980. Their son Jim graduated from Goshen’s pre-med program in 1974 and from University of Iowa’s Medical School in 1978. He is a family practice doctor in nearby Mt. Pleasant who helped Glen transition into retirement by taking on many of his patients.