azing out across a vast stretch of West Texas prairie, you can almost see the curvature of the Earth. Nothing obstructs the view. Arching sky falls to meet the hard ground somewhere beyond the eye’s range. Between here and there are fence posts and pulled barbed wire, a ranch house or two and countless stunted, twisting mesquite growing thick, the cattleman’s scourge. The land is worn and tough. Wind and sun have done their work during the long drought.

In every direction, the seemingly featureless curve is uninterrupted, but the homogeneity is deceit. As anyone who has hiked for any distance over such a plain can attest, the expanse is cut through with deep gorges, rough ridges, shallow valleys of old knobby oaks and wide tanks.

For those not baptized in the culture and history of the West Texas plain, tanks are ponds. And flat is not always so flat.

This is the land where TAFP’s Family Physician of the Year, David Greer, M.D., grew up and where he has practiced medicine for three and a half decades. Here in Henrietta, Texas, a short drive east from Wichita Falls, everyone knows the country doctor and his wife, Lea Ann. Both of their families have deep roots in Clay County.

On gravel and dirt roads around town, Dr. Greer learned to drive, occasionally chauffeuring his grandfather, Albert Greer, M.D., from house call to house call. The grandson carried the doctor’s black medical bag. Back then there was no electricity or indoor plumbing “out in the country.” The elder Dr. Greer had been practicing since the late 1800s, when he would make his house calls in a buggy pulled by two horses. He cared for the people in and around Clay County until he was killed in an automobile accident on the way to a house call in 1950.

Greer credits his decision to study medicine to the time he spent with his grandfather. “I liked the idea of working with people, taking care of them,” he says. He remembers thinking a lot about becoming a doctor, wondering if he wanted to put forth the effort and concentration. There was a World War I veteran who was the husband of Greer’s English teacher and one day as he came to pick up his wife at the school, he stopped to talk to the young Greer. “The subject came up about what I was going to do and whether I’d be a doctor, and I can remember sort of saying, ‘Well, I don’t know. That’s a whole lot of work.’ And I can remember his words to me were, ‘You know, anything worth having is worth working for.’ I never will forget that.”

Greer has the look of a man who knows what a day’s work is. He’s not a big man, about 5’8” and wiry, with a chiseled face and a silver moustache. At 67, Greer is fit and trim, operating at a steady pace. He’s generous, polite, respectful and soft spoken. He looks like a man of few words, but he’s not.

“He can talk your ear off,” Lea Ann says.

The nurses at Clay County Memorial Hospital, where Greer sits on the board of directors and makes rounds even when he’s not on call, say he is a fair man. “If you make a mistake and you are honest and forthright about it, Dr. Greer is very understanding,” says Sarah Johnson, L.V.N. “But don’t try to keep anything from him. He won’t put up with any nonsense.”

Greer is quick to note that Johnson is quite a singer and guitarist. Johnson winks. “Dr. Greer and I are big Bob Wills fans.” Texas swing is alive and well in Clay County.

As Greer prepares to make his rounds at the hospital one Saturday morning, a man wearing a black felt cowboy hat greets him from across the counter at the nurses’ station. Greer walks around and shakes the man’s hand. They exchange pleasantries and ask about each other’s families. Then the doctor asks about the man’s father-in-law, who is in the hospital. It seems the family had been trying for some time to talk the elderly man into leaving his cattle ranch and entering an assisted living facility. His wife had died two years ago and he was still trying to keep things up on the ranch. The week before, he had been out feeding the animals when he fell and found that he couldn’t get up. He spent about 18 hours outside before someone came upon him and brought him to the hospital.

Greer bids goodbye to the man in the hat and walks down the hall to visit the father-in-law, who is in good spirits. Greer says the man raises Hereford cattle, “real good ones, too.” The man seems proud of them. He says his father was Greer’s science teacher. When asked if his family has been in the area a long time, he smiles. “I live in the house I was born in, if that tells you anything.”

Greer finishes his examination and says the man is doing just fine. He looks down at the man in the bed, asks if he has anything he needs to talk about and the man says no. Greer waits, leaning over with a hand on the bedrail. He drops his head, thinking about something. He pulls air through his teeth and looks back at the man.

“The only thing is, where I’m supposed to go when I leave here.”

Greer pats the rail and tells the man not to worry about that. “Your daughter is going to take care of that. They’re going to take real good care of you.”

On the walls of his clinic hang several examples of Western art, prints and originals purchased in places like Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico. The doctor and his wife love to visit art galleries when they travel and sometimes they can’t help but bring something home.

There is a large poster commemorating TMA’s 150th anniversary. The poster features a picture of Greer’s grandfather in his horse-drawn buggy. In 1989, Greer brought the photo and other reference materials to Texas sculptor Edd Hayes and commissioned a limited edition bronze sculpture called “Racing the Stork” in honor of his grandfather. Only 25 were made and one is on display at the clinic.

A newspaper article is framed on another wall with a large picture of a young Greer riding a bull in a rodeo. Yes, he was a bull rider on the rodeo circuit for a while, and it’s said he was pretty good at it.

On shelves in his office are many pictures of family and friends. Dr. and Mrs. Greer raised two children who are very much a part of their lives: John Greer and Jan McDonnell. There are five granddaughters in all and plenty of pictures of them. There are a couple of pictures of John and his dad playing polo. For Christmas one year, John bought his father polo lessons, which the two of them took together. “It’s a lot of fun,” Greer says, though they haven’t played in a while. “Lea Ann says I’m getting way too old for that and I need to act my age.”

There are several pictures of Greer family members posing with members of the Bush family. During President George H.W. Bush’s term, Jan worked in personnel at the White House and John worked in the Treasury Department. One picture shows Jan giving Sandra Day O’Connor a tour just before she was officially appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Jan would later work for George W. Bush’s gubernatorial campaign.

While their kids were in Washington, D.C., Dr. and Mrs. Greer took the chance to tour the White House. Greer says the most interesting part was the West Wing. “That’s where all the action takes place.” Since they were with Jan, they had passes to go places most visitors never see, like a little cafeteria Greer remembers. “I could hardly eat for looking at the people in there.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, and James Baker, Secretary of State in the cabinet of George H.W. Bush, were among the statesmen they met there.

The Greer Ranch brand, “Angle G,” is engraved on a tile outside the historical museum in town. Dr. Greer runs about 125 head of Black Angus cattle on the family ranch. The two brands below were given to Greer and his younger brother when they received their first cows at ages 11 and 7.

Greer is passionate about history and politics, although he doesn’t consider himself very involved in politics. He says for years he complained about politics and politicians until finally, John and Jan suggested that he do something positive instead of grousing all of the time. “I’d never really thought of it like that.” He’s says he’s found that the politicians he’s spoken to have always been willing to listen.

On another wall hangs a display box full of service medals. After completing medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Greer joined the U.S. Army and completed a rotating internship at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, Calif. He became a flight surgeon in 1965 and the next year, Greer and his wife were stationed in Darmstadt, West Germany. Their three-year stay turned out to be a very interesting time to be in Europe. The Soviet Bloc was a looming threat, the Six-Day War occurred in the Middle East, and the base was always full of U.S. troops passing through on their way to Vietnam.

Greer was a commander at the U.S. Army dispensary and a post surgeon at Cambrai-Fritsch Kaserne. He operated a medical facility and took care of the military unit, dependents, civilians and the staff of Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper. Along with a couple of German doctors, he worked with an Egyptian doctor and a Jewish doctor from New York. “I had my own little peace-keeping job trying to keep those two apart,” he says.

Greer commissioned Texas sculptor Edd Hayes to create this bronze statue, “Racing the Stork,” in honor of the doctor’s grandfather, Albert Greer, M.D.

They were in Germany during the democratization effort in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet invasion of 1968. Greer remembers that the U.S. military maintained continuous surveillance of Germany’s eastern border. The Greers kept the gas tank in their car at least half full at all times with water and blankets in the trunk. Those were base rules.

In December of 1968, Greer landed at the U.S. naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in the Republic of Vietnam. Lea Ann went back to Henrietta. Greer spent the next year as a flight surgeon with the 16th Combat Aviation Group in Da Nang and Chu Lai. He also served in the 23rd Division Americal. For his service, he earned a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Clusters, an Air Medal with eight Oak Leaf Clusters, an Army Commendation Medal, a National Defense Service Medal, a Vietnam Service Medal, a Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal and a Meritorious Service Award.

He earned his Purple Heart when a round hit a helicopter he was riding in and some shrapnel became imbedded in his eye. “They took it right out. It wasn’t a major thing,” he says.

Jan McDonnell says her dad kept all of those medals hidden away in some old box. She dug them out, researched their significance and the citations he received with them and put together the display.

“It’s a beautiful country,” Greer says of Vietnam. “I thought when I left, I didn’t leave anything there and I’ll never go back. If things ever normalize to the point where you can have — where tourist business could be generated, it would be a wonderful place. Beautiful beaches all along that coast.”

When he came home, the couple began looking for a place to practice. Henrietta was the last place on their list. Greer says they were ready to strike out on their own, but Henrietta was in need of a doctor. They decided they’d try to help out for a few months, and they’ve been helping out ever since.

The doctor has held countless positions of responsibility in town, at the hospital, and in the many organizations to which he belongs. He’s dedicated and tenacious. His son, John, says one of his dad’s favorite sayings is “I’d rather eat a green worm than give up.”

John told the crowd at the ceremony where Greer was presented with the Texas Family Physician of the Year Award that his father has always done things that John didn’t understand until years later. “I could never understand why he would consistently pay a premium for livestock at the local county youth livestock show that had placed at the bottom of its class when the top animals sold for less, and buy them anonymously. Or drive his vehicles to near-empty, then travel 10 miles south of Henrietta to fill up when there are perfectly good gas stations in town.” John says he knows now. Those are among the little things Greer has done to help out the community, to give an underprivileged high school kid some extra money for college, to help a family keep their business going when times were tough.

Steve McDonald, D.V.M., and his wife Polly McDonald, D.V.M., moved to Henrietta in 1988 and opened the only veterinary clinic in town. They wrote letters recommending Greer for the award. In his letter, Steve McDonald writes that when they opened their clinic, they had little more than their enthusiasm and they certainly didn’t have any health insurance. “Dr. Greer, totally on his own initiative, offered us free medical care. Actually, he didn’t offer it; he simply refused to take payment when he rendered us services. He was assisting us, in his way, to help us provide the town and the county veterinary services …” He says they can never repay the doctor’s kindness to them, though they try by offering services from time to time and by giving him anthelmenthic drugs for his cattle. “How many physicians are paid in cattle wormer?” McDonald writes.

Well, Greer’s grandfather was paid in whatever his patients had to offer: eggs, vegetables, chickens. Bartering still works in some places. The country doctor would appreciate that.

When he addressed the audience at his award ceremony, Greer told them he owed the honor in part to his role models. He told them about driving those dusty roads with his grandfather, about opening the barbed wire gates for him and carrying his medical bag. He talked about the broad scope of medicine practiced by many other physicians he counts as role models. “I don’t expect to fill their shoes,” he said, “but I’m certainly privileged to be able to follow in their footsteps.”