The Doctor

For sixty years Herman Kiefer was simply "the Doctor" to a large part of Detroit, and the family kept the stories.

He believed in fresh air. Called to a stuffy sickroom where the windows had been painted shut, he kicked out a window sash. When a patient questioned his orders, he answered: "Am I your doctor or am I not?"

When a man came to him choking on a fishbone, he whittled a strip from a barrel hoop and cleared the throat with it.

He carried his fees in his tall beaver hat, which served as his cash box. To a patient who complained that he couldn't read the doctor's handwriting, he said: "I learned how to write — now you learn how to read."

And when Judge Swan's elderly mother seemed to be dying, he told her flatly: "You are going to live twenty years yet!"

Beyond his practice he was president and treasurer of the German-American Seminary, served on Detroit's Board of Education from 1866, and sat on the committee that created the city's first public library. The Saga calls him "the old white one, the father of them all."