SANDY’S DR. ALFRED WILLIAMS

Alfred Williams came to Sandy in 1906 where he found employment in the logging

industry as a “whistle-punk”, a job usually delegated to a boy or inexperienced

woodsman. Williams had previously worked in a Portland drugstore and had always

hoped to be an M.D. He had studied medical books and had some medical knowledge

but had failed to ever pass the State Medical Exam. This was undoubtedly due to the

fact that he had never been to medical school.

Finally, due to the terrible world-wide flu epidemic in 1918 and the shortage of

doctors, the State Medical Board relented and gave Williams a license to practice. As

long-time Sandy pharmacist Ivan Barker explained it to me; the Medical Board felt that

Williams probably “couldn’t do much damage.”

Actually Williams had quite a successful practice for 29 years in the Sandy area. He

was noted for prescribing what was believed to be his secret formula for treating the flu

that were in his pink and black pills that he prescribed and seemed to work. He advised

his patients to take two of each, then go to bed and stay there for a week. Many years

later, Ivan told me that actually the pink pills were aspirin and the black ones a cathartic,

so that advice probably still would be good today!

To William’s credit, he would make house calls any time of day or night and his

bedside manner would cheer people so that he had many people’s confidence. Medical

people of today are recognizing that one’s mind and outlook on life are important to

healing physical problems, so maybe Williams was ahead of his time. Always a

bachelor, he often “just happened” to arrive for house calls at meal time.

Williams was a dapper little man with reddish-brown hair and mustache. He always

wore a checkered suit, a straw hat in summer, and was remembered for driving his old

Packard car for many years. His shirt and suit were usually wrinkled, but he never

seemed to vary his wardrobe. He was often called “Doc Yak” for a comic-section

character of that era. For a time he was the only doctor in Sandy.

In about the early 1930s, Williams had a combination home and office built at the

corner of Proctor Blvd. and Hoffman Ave. where a printing company is now located. It

had huge vertical old-growth cedar logs at the corners and a lot of plastered walls in

between so that the building was impossible to be architecturally described. It has been

extensively remodeled.

I remember one time when I was about 10 years old and had a severe sore throat

that hung on for a long time. My dad took me to see Dr. Williams. The “Doc” reached up

on a dusty shelf and retrieved a bottle of peroxide, took off the cap and ran his hand

around the lip to be sure it was clean, then handed it to me to gargle. I gargled and that

was the extent of the treatment. Many years later, I mentioned it to Ivan Barker and he

said peroxide quickly loses its strength, so it probably didn’t help me.

But hey, I did get better, so it must have helped!

Information and photo from Hometown Sandy, Oregon by Phil Jonsrud, copyright

2011 by Sandy Historical Society, pp. 26-28.