Ken Dodge Is Soon to Retire

When Ken Dodge graduated from the physician assistant program at Stony Brook University — a member of the program’s first graduating class in 1973 —the job title was a new one and the concept was relatively unknown. “Nobody knew what we were, what we could do. Every hospital we went to for training was a training for them as well as us,” he said. Forty-one and a half years later, as he retires from the field, not only has the concept been embraced, but people are often more familiar with the physician assistants at their doctors’ offices than they are with the physicians.

While many among his legions of patients call him Dr. Dodge, he comes instead from a profession borne of a desire to utilize the skills of hospital corpsmen like himself, people who had returned from Vietnam with considerable on-the-job experience. He and other early entrants into the profession were a solution to a problem in American health care at the time — a shortage of physicians. “A good triage officer is what a physician assistant is,” he said.

The first physician assistant program started at Duke University in 1965. Stony Brook’s, at what was then called the School of Allied Health Professionals, began six years later with a class of 17, including Mr. Dodge and half a dozen others with military experience.

“I got into the field by accident,” he said two weeks ago at the Montauk office of Meeting House Lane Medical Associates, as he prepared for his Dec. 31 retirement. “In 1964 I tried to get into the Air Force. I wanted to get into firematics and the crash crew.” He went to New York City to get all his physicals, but “the doctor flunked me,” he said.

Not long after that, he got his draft notice. Not wanting to go into the Army, he volunteered for the Navy and became a corpsman with the Fleet Marine Force, serving two tours in Vietnam. Back home in Bay Shore after his discharge, he was working for Sears, married, and about to become a father when he saw an article on the Stony Brook program. “It was one of those things they call life-changing moments. The first life-changing moment was when that doc turned me down and kicked me out from the Air Force.”

He wasn’t interested in becoming a nurse, and medical school was too much of a commitment. “To get into medical school, you had to have a four-year degree. I would have had two and a half more years of schooling before I could even apply, and with a kid on the way, this seemed to be a good alternative.”

His first job out of the program was with the East Hampton Medical Group under Dr. Robert Sucsy. “I believe I was the first physician assistant working in a private practice on Long Island,” he said. Two months before he was hired, two of the three family practitioners in the East Hampton Medical Group retired.

“We did emergency medicine,” he said. “Back then, there weren’t even emergency room doctors at the hospital. An ambulance brought patients to the medical center and some of us in the medical group would just go out to the ambulance and take a look at the patient. Sometimes they would be wheeled into the office.” When the group broke up around 1980, he moved on to work with Dr. Raymond Medler doing internal medicine.

After that he worked for 20 years with Dr. Michael Israel in East Hampton, and finally with Dr. Kristy Chen in Noyac, before joining Dr. Anthony Knott in Montauk. (Dr. Knott left the practice last month.) Many patients have followed him from East Hampton to Sag Harbor to Montauk.

“I love my patient population. It’s been a pleasure seeing people and being able to do it. I’ll miss them. . . . A big part of why my patients like me, I like to think that almost all of the time I can sit there and talk to them a bit. . . . The business part of medicine is sort of interfering with that. The push is to see more, move more patients in less time. It cuts into the time to empathize, explain . . . console them. . . . It’s not the era of managed care, it’s the era of mismanaged care.”

Mr. Dodge did house calls until just a few years ago, but they were “time-intensive” and hard to continue with a full schedule of patients.

When he wasn’t working, he seemed never to be idle. He volunteered for almost 30 years with the East Hampton Ambulance Association, five of them as its chief. He served on the East Hampton School Board for nine years, six of them as president, coached summer soccer for 25 years, and was a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts in the late 1980s. He also worked briefly for the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s office in the early 1980s, handling “basic stuff” on the South Fork.

At home, he raised four children, divorced, then remarried, adding five stepchildren to the family. “Now I’ve got nine kids, plus nine grandchildren, eight of them within two miles of us.” His wife, Ruth Dodge, is deputy chief dispatcher for the East Hampton Town Police Department, and he proudly pointed out that she was “the first woman to get a supervisor position ever in the department.”

While he’s ready to retire — “They say when you start to think about retirement, it’s time to retire” — at an energetic 70, he hardly looks or seems ready to slow down. “In retirement I will do more fishing, clamming, stuff like that.”

“I won’t miss the business of medicine,” he said, “but the practice of medicine, it’s going to be hard to give that up.”

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Correction: The original version of this story online and in print gave Mr. Dodge's retirement date as Jan. 31. In fact, it was Dec. 31.