Dr. A.D. "Pete" Marshall - Country Boy, Distinguished Professional

By Deborah Turner


"Lookout, Pete!" cried the farmer as a heavy log swinging from a huge chain came near to striking his son. The child was trying his best to be a man, helping his father load logs onto a wagon.

The warning came so fast - and had to if an accident was to be prevented - that there was no time to get the child's real name out.

Pete was a name the boy was familiar with as it belonged to his father's favorite uncle. The farmer had never liked his son's name, anyway - Abbott Dwayne Marshall - though it was part of his own. So it was that the father, John Abbott Marshall, re-named his son. The name "Pete" that was the product of an instant's panic stuck with the boy throughout his life.

Pete was born in a sprawling, two-story house in McLemoresville that his grandparents used as a boarding house, which occupied the site where City Hall sits today. "That was back when McLemoresville had the best high school around," Marshall says, referring to the high school that evolved from the McLemoresville Collegiate Institute. The Institute was established in 1886 and in 1930 became the public high school.

Pete got lucky when his parents moved to a farm in Trezevant when he was around school age, because he loved nature, fishing and hunting. When night fell, his father often had to pull him from the darkened woods of the farm where the family raised row crops and livestock. In addition to farming, his father served as road commissioner for 12 years in Trezevant's Second District.

His lineage in Carroll County goes back to the days of the Civil War when his great-grandfather, William Marshall, was an officer in the Confederate Army, earning the title "Captain Bill".

Captain Bill is distinguished as the gentleman who donated the land for the churches that stand in a row along Highway 79 in Trezevant, as well as for the common graveyard that lies behind the churches. Captain Bill helped build the Baptist church that now seems destined for status as a historical monument. Along with the Missionary Baptist Church, the Church of Christ; Cumberland Presbyterian; and Methodist Churches occupy the site.

At the age of 15 the adventurous youth began taking flying lessons at Milan's old airport. A few years later, his love of aviation gave him hopes of entering the Navy's aviation program, but a physical revealed that he was colorblind, a condition that kept him from that dream.

"I was going into the service anyway," he said, "so I enlisted." He became a storekeeper in a supply depot aboard the U.S.S. Randolph, one of the Navy's giant aircraft carriers.

His two-year tour of duty started at the "tail-end" of World War II. The crew made two trips to the Mediterranean and also traveled to Scandinavia and Brazil in South America.

"I got to see a lot of the world and do a lot of things I never would have done," he said of his time in the Navy.

After the service, he began studies in engineering at what was then called Murray State College. He soon decided, however, that he wanted to pursue a career in medicine and switched over to Memphis State where he was a pre-med major.

"At that time everything was pre-med," he said, referring to every medical specialty. "I wanted to get into the healing arts but did not want to be an M.D. - I thought dentistry would give me more freedom - I didn't realize what it was going to be like," he says of the demanding profession.

"My father tried to explain to me that I wouldn't be happy hemmed in for years in these little walls," he continues. "He was also right about a lot of other things; the older you get the wiser your parents get."

One should not assume from these words that Dr. Marshall regrets his decision to become a dentist. In fact, since retiring in December last year, he heartily misses the patients with whom he formed close relationships over the years.

"I saw the children of the children I saw," he reflects with satisfaction, "I probably saw the grandchildren of the children I saw. I enjoyed a good time practicing dentistry in Huntingdon; I had one of the best families of patients I guess anybody ever had. That's what I miss - I don't miss the work very much but I miss the people."

He enjoys reminiscing about the coffee room that was an important part of his clinic. "When I came in I never knew who was going to be in the coffee room," he chuckles, "A lot of the time patients were in the coffee room."

While attending Memphis State, Marshall met a smart and pretty fellow pre-med student, Jo Anne Griffin, who was a native of Memphis.

Says Jo Anne, who became his wife on December 16, 1949, "I was pre-med at the time but that kind of fell by the wayside." Nonetheless, she has enjoyed an interesting career as an X-ray technologist at McKenzie's hospital from 1977 through December 1993, and continues to work there on an as-needed basis.

Following his pre-med studies, Marshall completed his education at the University of Tennessee College of Dentistry, participating in the school's accelerated quarter system, in which studies continued without a break between quarters. The system had been developed during the war years as a way of producing more doctors in every field in order to meet the needs of the country.

While living in Memphis, Marshall struck up a friendship with Sonny Lott, who, like Jo Anne, was native to Memphis. He and Sonny shared a love of aviation and joined forces as co-owners of a crop dusting operation. In a unique offshoot of their aerial enterprise, he and Sonny outfitted one of their planes with neon signs for a most unusual method of advertising.

Jo Anne explains that the frame for the neon tubing was fitted on the underside of the wings so that the advertisements were easily viewed by observers on the ground, who were first attracted by the sound of the airplane and then by the brightly lit ads of customers like Baby Links Sausage and Hart's Bread. Resourceful Sonny built the mechanism by which the two controlled the signs from the interior of the airplane.

Interestingly, the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Trezevant provided the financing for the advertising contraption.

In those days, Marshall explains, business in Memphis was concentrated along Madison and Union Avenues, two parallel streets in Memphis that extend at right angles from the river with Crump Stadium off to one side. The youthful entrepreneurs would fly over Crump Stadium, then go up one side of a street and down the other before looping over the river to come back the other way.

Sonny went on to attend Ole Miss, obtaining a degree in aeronautical engineering. He later established a successful aviation supply business and is now retired.

After obtaining his license to practice dentistry, the young doctor first set up a clinic in Trezevant, a move that Dr. Marshall knew would be temporary. "I wanted to stay in the area but I knew Trezevant could not support a dental practice," he explains.

Small town living was a new experience for Jo Anne, who says, "It took me awhile to get used to Carroll County but it is home now - definitely home! - I wouldn't want to live anywhere else."

In 1957, Dr. Marshall opened his office in the Kennon Building across the street from the First Baptist Church in Huntingdon. By that time, the couple had started a family, in time becoming a family of four with children, Mark and Lea Ann.

Dr. Marshall explains the history of dentistry in Carroll County in a way that illustrates the benefits of cooperation. Before his move to Carroll County, he advises, there were two dentists practicing in McKenzie, Doctors Caldwell and Gallimore, and two other dentists, Doctors Hogan and Massey, in Huntingdon.



 

Dr. and Mrs. A.D. Marshall

Shortly before Dr. Marshall set up his practice in Huntingdon, Dr Stroup arrived in the town, giving Huntingdon two more dentists. Likewise, in McKenzie, Doctor Headden had set up his practice not long before Dr. Russell (who was married to Dr. Marshall's sister, Faye) opened his clinic.

"We all knew each other real well, so we all got together, and we've had good relations and good dentists (in Carroll County) - the new ones have been good, too - everybody covers for everybody else."

He credits good ethics among the doctors as a fundamental quality of their good working relationships. "A lot of small-town doctors don't ever want patients going somewhere else," he says, explaining that less ethical doctors in other localities have at times encouraged patients seen on an emergency basis to change their dental affiliation to their own office, for example. "As far as taking emergency patients and taking them into our patient rolls, we had better ethics than that."

The cooperation that Marshall has enjoyed as a member of the dental professionals in Carroll County is one that he hopes might develop among Carroll Countians as a whole. Says he, "If all Carroll County would pull together on projects to be included within the county, efforts would be more productive."

This view comes after years of progress in a county where some said, upon his setting up practice in the rural county, "Nothing ever happens here."

He disagrees: "A lot has happened in this county in those 40-something years. The interest just wasn't around in those days. Now, we have a four-lane highway that runs all the way from Martin to I-40 along Highway 22 and are in the process of building another four-lane down Highway 70 from Paris to Milan. We have a new jail, a new county government complex, hospitals in both Huntingdon and McKenzie, and factories - large factories! We've gone from cut and sew to what we have now. And farming - I was raised on the farm and I couldn't hook up what we've got now."

The dental profession has also experienced significant changes over the years, including the evolution of dental medications which have increased the safety of local anesthetics. Dr. Marshall illustrated the advances, saying, "It used to be when we would inject, we would have to be there a little while to be sure the patient didn't have a reaction. Local anesthetics are probably not as potent now as they used to be but they are safer; we don't have to be quite as concerned."

Another important change is that from old belt driven "hand pieces" (drills and the like) to air driven instruments. "They're much, much faster and much, much easier on patients," says Marshall who further explains, "there's not near the trauma on teeth."

Along with improved antibiotics has come dental materials that are "more aesthetically pleasing" than what was available in earlier years, including false teeth materials, and advancements in porcelain crowns and other prosthetics. "All the material substances better and easier on the patient to use, and most recently there is light-cured acrylics and implants. And although implants are not where we'd like to see them at this time, they continue improving every year and are far better than they used to be," concluded Dr. Marshall.

Although Dr. Marshall may be a small-town doctor, his expertise rivals and surpasses that of doctors in many larger towns, even those in Nashville; a fact that was established when patient, Stanley Cole consulted Dr. Marshall about his need for dentures that would fit his altered jawline. In surgery to repair his weakened jawbone (that had broken when he sneezed following a biopsy of the bone as a part of his treatment for cancer) much of the bone was removed and replaced with bone taken from Cole's shoulder blade which was reinforced with a titanium strip that also forms the hinge of his jaw.

Said Cole in an interview last year, "They told me when they first implanted the jawbone that I would never be able to wear dentures."

Dr. Marshall accepted the challenge to the amazement of the Vanderbilt physicians who Cole said "were tickled to death" when they saw the prosthesis he constructed. According to Cole, they had never seen dentures fitted to a reconstructed jawbone without more extensive surgery to prepare the jaw for the fitting of dentures.

"That's what I like to do anyway; do the ones the other ones couldn't do or wouldn't tackle," he says.

Pete and Jo Anne moved to their current home on the outskirts of Huntingdon in 1961. The home affords Dr. Marshall with the convenience of living near the heart of town and the freedom of a country atmosphere that is enhanced by the fact that his land stretches back to encompass some 99 and four-tenths acres. "I've been trying to steal six tenths of an acre off somebody for years," he laughs.

Another way in which he has continued his lifelong love of the country is in his pastime pursuits of deer and duck hunting and fishing. He spends some time as well in his shop where he built an airplane a few years back.

As for Jo Anne, she says, "A woman's work is never done; there's not really enough hours in the day." She enjoys working with flowers and keeping the couple's beautiful home as well as working from time to time at the hospital.

Both Dr. Marshall and Jo Anne love to read, reading two or three books per month when time allows. Dr. Marshall prefers history or history-related works as well as some biographies. "I read a few novels but not I'm not novel-oriented," he says. In fact, his interests extend to the philosophical works of Darwin and other books seldom tackled by many readers.

Another activity shared by the couple is their work in the First Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in Huntingdon. Both are inactive elders, having previously served two three-year terms each in active status. In the Presbyterian Church, a person who is ordained as an elder assumes the position for life, periodically accepting a three-year term as an active member of the governing body. When his or her three years are up, he or she rotates into inactive status while other, previously inactive, elders rotate into active status. Jo Anne is in her third year on the Deacon Board.

Dr. Marshall is Past-President of Seventh District Dental Society and is a member of the Tennessee Dental Association and the American Dental Association.

In 1999, he was awarded the Tennessee Dental Association Fellowship Award, an award that is presented annually to Tennessee dentists who are exemplary in the eyes of their fellow professionals. Dr. Marshall expressed great honor in receiving the award, especially because he was deemed worthy of such recognition by other Tennessee practitioners.

As a member of the Tennessee Dental Association, Dr. Marshall served as a liaison to the TennCare Bureau. He is also a member of the Tennessee Dental Forensic Team and serves on Board of Delta Dental Plan of Tennessee.

He enjoys membership in the Experimental Aircraft Association as well as Ducks Unlimited and is a 32nd degree Mason; one step removed from the highest station attainable in the institution.

The couple's son, Mark Marshall lives in McKenzie with his wife, the former Mignon Dill of Huntingdon and works at H & M Construction in Jackson.

Their daughter, Lea Ann Scates is the wife of Kenny Scates. Lea Ann and Kenny live in Bruceton and are the parents of two girls: Amy graduated from high school this past year and Angela is in her third year at the University of Knoxville where she is a consumer retail science major.

Lea Ann followed in her father's footsteps, choosing a career as a dental hygienist. Dr. Marshall says she worked all her life in his office, starting at the age of twelve seating patients then serving over 20 years as his hygienist.