Last in a three-part series.
The 53 years since a young man just out of dental school moved to the Andrews Valley in hopes of starting a new life seems like yesterday. He and his wife Sandra first moved into the house where Mike and Ellen Henderson lived on the hill above Burke Wood’s store. Later they moved into the house where Evelyn Wood Heaton and Edgar Wood, were raised, the two-story home on the right across the railroad tracks by the depot.
Faye Sherrill was the beacon that Dr. Vollmer needed to guide him into a new practice, as she had worked for the previous dentist, Dr. Larston Ezzell, for many years. Faye was very outspoken, and I remember her telling Dr. Vollmer, “If you don’t make it, it will be your own fault, because the patients are here a waiting.”
Dr. Vollmer’s patients loved him. Matthew wrote about his dad, “He took a lot of pride in his work, which was patient and careful enough, that his patients, after extractions and other procedures, often claimed not to have felt a thing. He worked slowly and carefully.”
“As a kid, I’d spent entire days in that office, watching “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Bewitched” on a tiny television suspended from the bottom of a cupboard in the dental lab, where the girls stirred impression mixture in flexible green bowls.”
“My father was nothing if not an indiscriminate flirt, and his patients, men, women and children, all loved being at the center of his attention. Periodically, my father would call me to an examination room saying, “I’d like you to meet my girlfriend,” and there, beaming in the dental chair, would be a little old lady whose gnarled hands he was squeezing.”
“Unlike other dentists I knew, my father did not drive expensive cars, or play the stock market. For years, he drove a beat-up Ford truck, the inside of which was littered with magazine inserts, dirt clods, packets of stale Trident gum, mint flavored dental floss, and cardboard boxes of rubber gloves.”
Matthew summed it up best when writing about his parents. “I have to imagine that the selflessness and generosity my parents exemplified in every interaction they ever had with anyone in town endeared them to almost everybody. I was always recognized as Jim or Sandrea’s boy, and always with admiration, whether I knew or recognized the person who my parents were talking to, in a parking lot, or an aisle of Ingles, or at Hedden’s nursery.”
“I think they just wanted to teach me how to love people. How to talk to them. How to be interested in them. I think the greatest gift they gave me was to show me that the world is full of interesting people. It could be as simple as stopping by someone’s house just to talk or deliver a box of fruit that my mom had sold. Nobody was ever beneath them, and in almost everyone they met they found something to admire.” Sandra Gilbert Vollmer passed away September 11, 2019 after a long illness.
Sometime later after the death of Sandra, Dr. Vollmer reconnected and married Jolene Brecht, a friend he knew from his college days at Loma Linda University which is located in Southern California. They reside in Andrews and we wish them well in their retirement and much happiness in the years to come.
Kandy Barnard is the Andrews Valley columnist for the Cherokee Scout. Email her at kandybarnard@gmail.com.