There’s a Doctor in the House

Approaching his first house call of the day, Dr. Thad Jones creates a soft rhythm: Fla-thap. Fla-thap. Fla-thap. It’s the music of his leather flip-flops.

“I wore my good shoes for you,” Jones joshes before he examines his patient, 93-year-old Marian Hill. She sits in a parlor chair, grinning up at him. Her slightly hunched shoulders relax. She shows him the bump on her leg, which Jones suspects is a tumor. He spends nearly 30 minutes with her before moving on.

It’s an unscheduled call to Hill, whose daughter, Martha McManus, has been a patient for decades. So Jones, not yet properly dressed for work, hastily hops into his old Land Cruiser and up the winding streets of Laguna Beach he goes.

“I’ve been a patient of Thad’s since, oh, 1956 or ‘57, since before my husband and I were married,” explains McManus. “He’s not exactly a by-the-book doctor, but he’s delivered the kids and treated our broken bones and broken hearts.”

For 40 years a fixture in Laguna Beach, Jones is a throwback to a time when the family doctor knew where you lived because he’d been there.

The plane, the yacht, the wives plural. A successful physician and former chief of staff at South Coast Medical Center, Jones has had his share of trophies. And travails.

At 73, he is officially semiretired--longtime bookkeeper Alice Hill rolls her eyes and inserts “alleged.” Yet some weeks he sees as many as two dozen patients, not a one of them insured by a health maintenance organization. “He is an old-fashioned small-town doctor,” says Brian O’Connor. Now 37, he is the third of four siblings Jones delivered.

“I still remember him coming to our house when I was 9, because I had a really bad cold. He is still my dad’s doctor, and I’ve brought my kids to see him.”

Margaret Hefti, 83, and a patient of 27 years, recalls with glee: “I run into him at the hardware store the other day, he’s in an awful, awful-looking [cruiser], just a disreputable-looking thing. I think it’s white, what paint there was on it. And he was as disreputable-looking himself, you know, the [scruffy] clothes. You don’t run into a lot of doctors around town like that. Not exactly your Jaguar or Mercedes type.”

Adds Hefti, “He called me the other day at home to tell me he’s saving a coupon for me for a $19.95 tape player. They don’t make them like this anymore, and I’m not even sure they ever did.”

*

Across the street from the Hare Krishna compound, near the Laundromat and Thrifty gas station is the office of Dr. Jones. Wood-framed, with a brick skirt around the bottom, the building on Glenneyre Street is as unpretentious as its tenant.

Open the waiting-room door and the first thing you see is a blue recliner. Get the answering machine and the voice you hear is Jones personally announcing when he will return. Occasionally, he says it’s Monday when it’s Tuesday.

Yes, the man still makes house calls each week. Always did when a patient was too sick to make it in.

Then there’s his refusal to join the managed-care machine, although Alice in his office will help with those Medicare and insurance forms. One longtime patient, forced by mounting bills to switch to an HMO, chose it only after poring over piles of documents--with Jones.

“To my patients and friends,” he began a November 1995 letter. “When I commenced practicing medicine over 40 years ago, I thought I would have to be dragged out of my office either infirm or senile. Today I am neither infirm nor senile, but I am being shut down by another nefarious evil. It masquerades under many names but is best known by the generic term of ‘managed care.’ . . . This is to announce I am closing my office at the end of 1995.”

He went on to say that he would continue to offer his medical services via house calls within reasonable distance and would maintain his office phone line. Possibly, he added, “I may even succumb to one of those newfangled gadgets called a fax.”

It’s now been more than a year--still no fax machine--since Jones reduced his practice to a so-called part-time job. He never really did close his office, though half of his ministering is done in the field. He does his own scheduling. He no longer pays for hospital privileges. That has reduced his costs.

“I’m as careful now as I have always been,” he explains. “I don’t do what I am not competent to do, which is what usually gets most doctors into trouble. That and sloppiness.”

Jones may see two or three patients daily in his office for tetanus shots, flu symptoms, minor troubles.

He typically sees 14 patients a week and talks by telephone to another 14 or 15 for follow-up chats.

Bucking the yoke of managed care was only part of his so-called retirement. He was also plain tired of the hours he thought a full-time doctor should keep.

Now his medical office is his home, his only vices a plane and outings on the boats of friends. Life is scaled down for plenty of time to visit his four kids and seven grandchildren, fly his Cessna Cardinal RG, maybe navigate a boat into an exotic harbor.

The waiting room that becomes his living room after hours is a comfy nook, lined with boat and plane and history books, a few easy chairs and reading lamps. The reception counter holds framed snapshots and an embroidery of a smiling plane, its motto: “Flying is the second best thrill to man. . . . Landing is the first.”

Such lack of affluence might put off a few potential patients. Longtime friends say some people wonder what’s wrong with him that he doesn’t have a fancy car or office.

But Jones’ fans don’t mind. They like that they never get an out-of-state answering service or billing calls. They like a doctor with enough mirth and confidence to hammer into his office door a gift from a patient and fellow salt, now deceased. The brass nameplate, which once adorned the Queen Mary dispensary, reads: Second Class Doctor.

When her family was tight for cash, one patient confided, Jones calculated what insurance would pay and waived the balance. At one time he was the only Spanish-speaking doctor in Laguna and treated uninsured day laborers when he could.

The fluency in Spanish has been helpful on his visits to a clinic in the Mexican town of San Blas, where he works with a group of physicians and nurses that treats the poor.

The man, of course, is no saint. His children adore him, find him the smartest person they know; friends call him relentlessly curious and well-read. They all say he’s great fun. His oldest son points out, though, that their father’s leaving their mother 34 years ago for another woman was part of the “dark side.”

But that was a long time ago.

*

Thaddeus Crane Jones III, named after “one of the least known of the disciples of Jesus,” grew up affluent in Pasadena. His father was a successful investment advisor, but young Thad eventually chose medicine.

“It wasn’t like I had a childhood calling, though,” he says. “Little kids don’t want to be doctors, because every time they go see ‘em they either feel bad or get hurt.”

High school years were spent surrounded by ocean, at the Catalina Island Boarding School, outside Avalon. In 1942, after 18 months as a chemical engineering major at Princeton, Jones enlisted in the Navy, where he served as an electronic technician’s mate; he did maintenance and repair on radar, radio and sonar.

Seeing the Orient, the South Pacific, was great. “Except,” he adds with standard deadpan, “the shooting at each other; I didn’t particularly like that.”

Discharged near Boston, Jones observed his best friend interning at a nearby hospital and switched his focus to medicine.

Jones went through medical school at USC. Then came two years of training at the L.A. hospital run by the Santa Fe Railroad for its employees.

“It was a good place for a [general practitioner] to train,” Jones recalls, because a smaller number of trainees got to do a greater variety of work. “At L.A. General [now County-USC Medical Center], you would be number squillion in line to do anything.”

Next stop: Barstow, where Jones treated rail passengers and crew at Santa Fe’s Harvey House.

“They had me, or nothing. It was pretty tough,” Jones said. “If someone was really sick, we would put them on a train. It was like a battalion aid station in the war. When things got dull, and they did get dull, I’d go out and watch the Super Chief go through.”

By then he had married a woman he met while she was at Skidmore College and he was at Princeton. He was a well-bred and charming doctor, she a Nova Scotia native whose family also was wealthy, her father having helped build New York’s Empire State Building and United Nations headquarters.

Here they were, plunked into desolate 1950s Barstow. And she was pregnant. Fortunately, good luck followed. A World War I buddy of his father’s was selling his Laguna Beach practice. Thad Jones bought it.

Laguna in 1955. Jones smiles at the thought.

“My office was right downtown, where the Bank of America building is now, at Ocean and Beach. I was there four years; it was pretty busy after awhile. . . . The windows were open on to the street and I’d sit at my desk working, and people would walk by, and if I knew them well, we’d talk.”

He smiles again. “It wasn’t so frantic then. Younger doctors don’t even know the fun they are missing. Insurance companies decide how they practice medicine and treat patients. The older doctors--younger than me but who’ve been in medicine 15 or 20 years--they know what they are missing, and how different it was then.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, general practitioners like her father still reigned, says Susan Oldham of Salinas, a nurse who worked with him at South Coast Medical Center. “Now,” she adds, “you have five or six specialists doing what Dad did then.”

During those first years building his practice, Jones demonstrated his eclectic interests. Doctor, yachtsman, pilot, runner, he also portrayed two different characters in the yearly Pageant of the Masters performances, in which people on stage re-create works of art.

Jones and his wife had four children. But the marriage did not survive Jones’ affair with a nurse in the late 1960s; within the year, the family’s oceanfront home in Three Arch Bay was sold to divide assets. His wife moved with their children back to San Marino. The nurse became Jones’ second wife. (He would divorce, marry a third time and divorce again a few years ago, amicably.)

His oldest, Thaddeus “Moke” Jones, 47, was in boarding school and recalls seeing little of his father in those days. But the younger Jones, a sports gear exporter in Laguna Hills who also works on yachts, says he and his siblings spent long days aboard their father’s boat. All four kids know how to sail, as do many of their children.

In 1970, Jones moved into his Glenneyre location. His romance with the sea persisted, and he followed a family tradition.

His father had sailed in every Transpacific Yacht Race before World War II, when the event was suspended. The race was resumed in 1947. Since then, Thad Jones has sailed a record 22 consecutive races, which are held every other year between California and Hawaii.

Long before it became common, Jones ran almost daily along the shore and winding streets of the town, inadvertently becoming a roadside attraction. People gawked.

“You know about his run to Mexico?” asks Rick Coye, flight instructor and Jones friend of 25 years. “Thad ran, and a partner drove. The driver had a heart attack and later died. Thad survived, as you can see, just fine.”

The run in question was a 914-mile journey that Jones made from the U.S.-Mexican border to the southern tip of Baja California. By then, Jones had competed twice in the Boston Marathon. The Mexico run--in honor of his 50th birthday--required an average of 27 miles a day, for 35 days straight.

Until an injury five months ago, Jones was still running; ever the self-deprecator, he would argue that what he does is more aptly called jogging.

Jones frequently piles a few provisions into his ancient Toyota Land Cruiser and heads for the west coast of Baja, about 200 miles south of Ensenada. He may spend weeks on end, sometimes alone, camping at a beach 50 miles from plumbing.

He is often joined by his grandchildren and kids, whose interests are as varied as his. (Jones’ other daughter manages a Cartier jewelry store, and his youngest son runs a cattle ranch.)

On the doors of his Land Cruiser, fastest jogs on camping trips are logged in black pen along with peak temperatures. It’s a mobile diary of some cherished times.

Friends long ago nicknamed it the Yellow Peril, Jones explains with obvious enjoyment, “after malaria, because it was a threat to mankind when it broke out.”

Canary yellow, it is soldered and patched together, and plastered with bumper stickers (“Party ‘til It Breaks,” under the windshield.)

“He knows the real meaning of what Bondo is for,” Martha McManus says. “He uses it to fill in the holes on his cars.”

In what is a typical anecdote for Jones, he tells of being on a Mexico trip in the Peril. There was blistering heat. Jones paused on some deserted road, arms stretching overhead. “The roof lifted right off, it just cracked off,” he said, grinning as he filled the Peril’s tires before driving it from his Oceanside plane hangar back to Laguna. “Had to fiberglass the damn thing it was so corroded. Still holding.”

*

The radio crackles as Jones clears for takeoff and steers his Cessna onto the Oceanside Airport runway, a mere asphalt strip without a control tower.

Soon aloft, he heads immediately toward the dazzling turquoise ocean. It is this moment, floating in the sky, that captures Thad Jones, M.D.

“Paying for the plane and the insurance, that’s about my biggest expense,” he says. “The office is paid for; it doesn’t cost much to keep me happy. So I’m making as many house calls as I want. I’m liking it. It’s part medicine and the rest is B.S.-ing about old times. Hell, if it’s late enough in the afternoon, I might even stay for a cocktail.”

As usual, he makes as if that’s about all he’s up to. As usual, there is more adventure in store. Next month, he and a friend will take a boat from St. Thomas to Portugal. Before then, he will be heading south of the border to camp and stargaze; there’s a comet to catch a last glimpse of . . . .