Uncover the story of Seattle’s Country Doctor Community Clinic, from its formation by anti-war social justice activists to its role as one of Seattle’s first healthcare clinics to welcome HIV+ patients, and its lasting legacy as a patient-centered, community-based healthcare clinic.

This episode is hosted by Tony Williams and features guest Tom Byers with an appearance by Tim Burak.

Curated HistoryLink article set for this episode includes:

• Country Doctor Community Clinic (Seattle) by Rita Cipalla
• Black Panther Party's Seattle chapter opens the Sidney Miller Free Medical Clinic (now the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center) on December 1, 1969. by Nick Rousso
• HIV/AIDS in Western Washington by Rosette Royale

Additional HistoryLink resources for this episode:

• Black Panther Party's Seattle chapter opens the Sidney Miller Free Medical Clinic (now the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center) on December 1, 1969. by Nick Rousso
• Lifelong AIDS Alliance (Seattle) by Nick Rousso
• Antiwar protesters block Interstate 5 in Seattle on May 5, 1970. By Walt Crowley

For more information about Seattle Roots Community Health, visit:

• www.seattleroots.org

For more Field Notes episodes and other HistoryLink podcasts, visit the:

• HistoryLink.org Podcast Page

Those stories, and plenty of others, have rippled around the country and created all kinds of protests and solidarity actions. And I don't know about you, but I’ve heard a lot of people comparing the time we live in to the late '60s. It was also a time of political upheaval, opposition to the Vietnam War, socialist and communist organizing, and powerful anti-racist and anti-sexist movements created a lot of change, really quickly.

Tony: So can you introduce yourself to me? Tell me a little bit about who you are and what your name is.

Tom: My name is Tom Byers, and I'm, uh, an old man now, recently diagnosed with Parkinson's, but still, uh, still trying to do the right thing.

Tony: Yeah. Sorry to hear about the Parkinson's diagnosis.

Tom: Everybody's gotta go on some kind of journey, and this happens to be mine.

Tony: Can you tell me a little bit about where we are right now?

Voice-over: Tom was one of those young people.

Tom: There were a group of us who'd all been involved in the anti-Vietnam War, uh, movement who decided that the movement needed to do more than just protest the war. It needed to demonstrate that there were other ways of managing human existence than the kind of capitalism and, uh, war culture that we were feeling at the time.

So this one had been vacant for a number of years, and we decided to make a run at trying to get that building for the clinic.

Voice-over: And they called it Country Doctor.

Tony: How did you guys come up with the name for the clinic?

And the last verse of the song says, "The bridge at midnight trembles. The country doctor rambles. Banker's nieces seek perfection, expecting all the gifts a wise man can bring. The wind howls like a hammer. The night blows cold and rainy. My love, she's like some raven at my window with a broken wing."

Voice-over: Before we get into all the incredible work that Country Doctor did though, I wanna tell you a little more about Tom Byers and how he got here. He's originally from Michigan and North Carolina, but he came here by way of Cornell University in New York.

Voice-over: So instead, Tom and his friends got involved in organizing big protests.

Tom: We took over the I-5 freeway, and I got indicted for that along with seven other people and couldn't leave town. And during that time, um, I got involved with friends who had experience in the healthcare system and had this idea for establishing a clinic.

And, uh, we worked together all during the time I was under indictment. And on the day the clinic opened, uh, the charges against me were dropped.

Tony: That's awesome.

Tom: The Panthers in Seattle were, to the best of my knowledge, the, the first chapter of the Black Panther Party outside the state of California. So they were very, a very early, um, chapter of that movement.

And when we started, um, organizing the clinic, we tried to take advantage of the experience of those who had already gone before us. Not just the Panthers but the, uh, Native Americans had established a clinic in the basement of the public health service hospital that's now Pacific Medical Center.

Voice-over: Country Doctor was started by Fred "Gino" Gianola, Elizabeth Nucci, Rebecca Jones, and Carol Nelson.

Linda McVeigh became important in the collective too. All of this and more is detailed in one of HistoryLink's newest articles, Country Doctor Community Clinic, Seattle, by Rita Chipala. As always, you can find a link to this article and all the articles we talk about today in the show notes. There's even audio versions.

Anyways, as Tom and his friends got interested in community healthcare, they started asking for advice from the more experienced groups in town.

Tony: Yep.

Tom: So that's, that's where we, we went.

Voice-over: I wanna stop for a second and just applaud how these folks went about what they were doing. Instead of deciding where they were gonna start a clinic in a vacuum, they talked to the people who were already doing the work and asked them where they could make the biggest impact.

And then they started knocking on doors in the neighborhood, asking people whether a community clinic would be helpful to them, and if so, what it should look like. That led them to a really strong start.

Tom: So when we held the first community meeting after we did all our knocking on doors and listening to people, I think 70 people showed up at the meeting, and four of them were doctors ready to volunteer.

Tony: Wow, that's awesome.

Voice-over: They ended up in the abandoned fire station because they were able to cut a deal with the city.

Country Doc would provide vaccines to the community, and in exchange, the city wouldn't make them pay rent. The clinic was staffed entirely by volunteers, so they could start out on a shoestring budget. The more experienced medical professionals would help the newer volunteers get up to speed.

Tom: We really believed that the skills needed to be widely shared and widely spread-

Tony: Yeah

And the role of advocate became a great training ground and proving ground for young people who were destined to become doctors. I think in the first five years we had 22 patient advocates go to medical school.

Tony: Wooow.

Voice-over: Country Doctor provided a host of services to the community. Primary care, pediatrics. They even provided medical care to protesters.

Tom: Those of us who were working in the clinic when there would be demonstrations, we would be the, uh, medical crew-

Tony: Oh, yeah ...

Tom: that would go in and, you know, uh, help people deal with the tear gas and the-

Tony: Yeah

Tony: Yeah

Tom: So it felt like it was complementary to what the movement was trying to achieve.

Voice-over: And they stayed connected to the other movement organizations that helped them get started, like the Black Panthers.

Tom: I remember going over to the Sidney Miller Clinic and they had sandbags in the waiting room. In case bullets would come in the front door... in case bullets would come into the building. And I remember standing on the front porch of that, that house, that clinic, while the police...unmarked police cars were circling the block.

Tony: 'Cause being there as white people sort of served as a barrier?

Tom: Uh, yeah. Yeah. To be blunt, yes.

Today, it's merged with Country Doctor. They're separate physical clinics, but they're both run by a non-profit called Seattle Roots Community Health. I asked Tom, looking back at this era, if he had a favorite memory of what it felt like to be a part of such an incredible community effort to make sure people got the healthcare they needed.

Tony: Wow, that's awesome.

Voice-over: As Tom got a little older, opportunities arrived to build power in more traditional ways.

I believed in him. I, uh, thought he had a shot at being a great mayor, so I took a leave from the clinic, and I went to work in his campaign. And when he won, he asked me to go to work for him, and I did.

Voice-over: Tom moved from being a radical building grassroots infrastructure to a career in institutional politics.

He took over Health and Human Services for Mayor Royer, and that led to a bunch of other gigs. Eventually, he was even appointed deputy mayor under Paul Schell.

Tony: Was it ever challenging for you to switch over from kind of the more radical community advocacy side of things to being on the inside of a lot of these rooms where decisions get made?

Tom: You have no idea.

Tom: Well, the first thing I've gotta say about that is [00:17:00] I am not the expert by any stretch of the imagination about Country Doc's role during the AIDS epidemic because I was gone by then.

Tony: Yeah.

Tom: And so I would respectfully, uh, point you toward people who really did the work and... But what I do know about Country Doc, because it's a community clinic, and its community is Capitol Hill. Yeah. And Capitol Hill was the neighborhood hit the hardest in the early days of the epidemic; Country Doc responded the way a community institution should.

Voice-over: They treated the folks who showed up on their doorstep, and they started doing community education around what was happening.

Tony: Yeah.

Tom: They also had staff members who, who died of AIDS.

Tony: Yeah.

Tom: Um, meanwhile, the, you know, city government was wrestling with the impact of the epidemic- on the, the whole community, the fear and stigma and all of those issues. I remember one particularly difficult issue was before very much was known about AIDS, firefighters were afraid to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Tony: Oh, wow.

Tom: It was a, a very difficult time made less difficult by a lot of heroic actions on the part of the community itself and on the part of some spectacular medical professionals who got out in front of the information and had the skill to speak to the community most at risk about prevention and how they could live their lives without, without as much risk. I think-

Tim: Hey, Tom.

Tom: How are you?

Tim: Good. It's good seeing you. Looks like you’re being interviewed...

Tom: They ought to interview you

Voice-over: This is Tim Burack. In an incredible stroke of luck, he walked by this cafe at exactly the right moment to help tell this part of the story. Because back in 1980, Country Doctor helped him establish the Seattle Gay Clinic.

So we set up a volunteer clinic there, and, uh, it was there from 1980 to 1985. You know, I was working... My real job, my day job was at the public health department where I was an administrator for many years. [00:21:00] And when the HIV/AIDS epidemic started, um, I helped start the HIV/AIDS program at the health department.

But Tom got some of the very first funds from the city to help us put together an AIDS hotline and eventually an... what became called the AIDS Prevention Project.

Voice-over: They learned from Country Doctor and created another absolutely vital connection point for medical services in Capitol Hill.

Tim: Eventually there were over 100 volunteers at the clinic. The clinic, uh, al- also ended up kind of being a sort of a community center for the gay community when we didn't have one. Out of the Seattle Gay Clinic was created the Chicken Soup Brigade because that, in the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic, uh, so many gay men were, you know, living at home without any help or without families.

Tony: What did it feel like, you know, to be in this community at the time when HIV first started getting discovered and people were learning about it and trying to figure out how to treat it? Sorry to ask such a tough question , but-

Voice-over: The Seattle Gay Clinic had a huge impact on quality of life for a lot of folks diagnosed with AIDS. And the Chicken Soup Brigade eventually morphed into LifeLong, a community health organization focusing on supporting people with HIV.

They're still around today. But it all started at Country Doctor, which Tim has nothing but good things to say about.

Tim: Even now, it's... Although it's in a different place, it's o- over on 19th Avenue, it's still viewed as a, a very gay friendly place- Yeah ... and a place that has a very strong HIV, um, component and providers who are very knowledgeable about HIV.

Tim: I believe there's a page on HistoryLink, um, about the Seattle Gay Clinic.

Tony: Yeah.

Tim: And, uh, so, you know, some of the things that I can't answer here, if you go to that HistoryLink, you'll, you'll find a lot of information that I contributed some to, but a lot of other people contributed to that also.

Voice-over: This article is called LifeLong AIDS Alliance Seattle. It's by Nick Russo It's kind of a tough read because of how many wonderful people Seattle lost to AIDS, but it's also hopeful because it shows how the community came together in the face of an unspeakable tragedy to take care of each other and how those bonds still matter today.

Tim: The best part is seeing Tom after all these years. Good to see you, man. And, and of all the places to be right across the street from this wonderful clinic. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna let you guys-

Tony: Great. Well, thank you so much

Voice-over: When I got Tom back I asked him a question I'd been thinking about for a bit.

Tony: It's fascinating to think of all of these movements at the same time deciding to develop clinics. Mm-hmm. So why do you think that happened? Why was there this kind of wave of people who had gotten politically mobilized, you know, deciding to, deciding to start healthcare systems?

Tom: You know, that's a very good question, and one I don't really have an answer for except that it was something that seemed so essential to people's lives. And it was a time where in me- in healthcare the general practitioners were disappearing and the whole healthcare system was going to greater and greater specialization.

Tony: Yeah.

That's... Uh, that plus most of the people, whether they were farm- had come out of the farm workers movement or the Panthers were, uh, representing populations that had been underserved anyway before that transformation had happened in the medical system.

Tony: Totally. So it just made it even worse.

Tom: It made it even worse.

Tom: You know, I think- In, in our time, we felt the government had taken a wrong turn.

We felt betrayed. Uh, and we felt like we could do something about it. You know, we're the biggest generation. We're the baby boom. Right. We're the youth culture. Yep. And we felt we could do something about it. I hope people feel that way now, because the orange menace is not immortal, you know? He's gonna be gone.

But I'm all for making Medicare a whole hell of a lot better than it is. And what does this new generation wanna do with power? That's the question I hope they're asking themselves.

Tony: Great. Well, thank you so much, Tom-

Tom: Sure

Tony: ... for joining me on this beautiful day to take a look at this firehouse and talk about Country Doctor.

Tom: Well, thank you. It was fun.

This one is from the article on Country Doctor.

Jennifer: In its first year, Country Doctor saw 8,000 cases, operating on a $4,000 budget. For the second year, a fundraising goal of $25,000 was set, money that would be critical since the clinic's cofounders had eschewed government grants because of the strings attached.

Though he works occasionally as a house painter to support himself, Byers spends most of his time at the clinic. Time not taken up with treatment of patients is often devoted to staff meetings, for Country Doctor [00:30:00] has, from the outset, been an exercise in collective decision-making.

Voice-over: Field Notes is a production of HistoryLink.

You can check out over 8,000 articles about Washington history on our website, historylink.org. And again, check out the show notes for links to audio and text versions of the articles we talked about today. If you like the show, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app. It really helps us out.

And share it with a friend. Special thanks this week to Tom Byers and Tim Burack for all the incredible work they've done to make Seattle a better place. HistoryLink Field Notes is produced, engineered, and hosted by me, Tony Williams. It's edited by Sierra Fitch. Executive producers are Elisa Law, Taelore Rhoden, and Jennifer Ott.

Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next episode.