LITTLE ROCK — For most of his medical career, Dr. John D. Wright was rushing out the door, ready to help his next patient.
“We’d hear the phone ring at 3 or 4 in the morning and hear his Volkswagen putter off to go to the hospital or a house call or something,” said his son, John Tom Wright.
Wright, a doctor for more than 50 years, died Friday at his Benton home from dementia and pneumonia complications.
He was 86.
Growing up, Wright watched his grandfather, a doctor, use his career to help people, rather than to make money.
“[His grandfather] got paid with things like eggs, chicken, fence mending, firewood, things like that,” John Tom Wright said. “I think that’s really what influenced my dad because he truly had a servant’s heart.”
After graduating from Benton High School in 1943, Wright went into the V-12 Navy College Training Program. He eventually became a lieutenant junior grade in the U.S. Navy.
Though Wright had some memorable moments in the Navy, marrying his high school sweetheart, Jeana Merle White, was the ultimate whirlwind, his son said.
“They had met on a school bus,” his senior year, John Tom Wright said. “I think they caught each other’s eye.She was 15, he was 17.”
Before shipping out from Miami, the two eloped in Hot Springs on March 22, 1945.
“She had to lie about her age because she was too young,” John Tom Wright said. “[Her family] didn’t expect it to last.”
After Wright was discharged, he attended college and graduated from what is now UAMS Medical School in 1951. After working in Russellville, he moved to Benton in 1956 to set up a small medical office.
“It looked like a Norman Rockwell painting,” John Tom Wright said. “He’d have the porcelain-coated steel furniture in his office. He was not extravagant at all.”
Wright kept his practice until his retirement in the early 2000’s, said his son, Dr. Kent Wright.
“[What] many of his patients admired and appreciated about him is he didn’t just rush them in and rush them out,” Kent Wright said. “If they had something to say, he’d take the time to listen.”
Wright responded to various emergencies, from delivering babies to once helping the injured in a train derailment, John Tom Wright said.
“He’s delivered babies from babies he delivered. When they grew up [they] said, ‘You’re going to deliver my babies,’” John Tom Wright said. “He was totally a giving person ... if people didn’t have the money, he’d still treat them.”
Wright was also an advocate in the late 1950s for allowing black people to use Saline Memorial Hospital.
“He had a lot of black folks that came to his office, too,” John Tom Wright said. “I’m sure he lost a lot of patients over that, but he looked beyond the color and saw people.”
While Wright served on the Benton School Board for five years in the 1960s, “he caused a big stir when he was pushing to let kids dance” at school functions, John Tom Wright said. “Gradually they allowed students to dance.”
Wright, a deacon at the First Baptist Church in Benton, taught adult Sunday School for 56 years. In the back of his Bible, the family found a quote Wright heard from an old pastor that “ really meant a lot to him,” John Tom Wright said.
“‘Death doesn’t change anything - it only makes permanent that relationship established during life,’” John Tom Wright said.
Arkansas, Pages 8 on 02/13/2012