Joe Olive’s Wealth & Wisdom: The Doctor Who Stayed: Dr. Raymond Reese and a Life of Service
The Doctor Who Stayed: Dr. Raymond Reese and a Life of Service in Cuero
Before sharing this article, thank you to Dr. Reese and his family for welcoming me into their history. Their openness made this piece possible, and inspires me to continue visiting with our community to preserve the stories that make Cuero so special.
Walk into the HEB in Cuero on any given morning and chances are someone will stop the unassuming man making his way down the aisle. “Hey, Doctor Reese.” Dr. Raymond R. Reese has been a fixture in DeWitt County for more than sixty years, delivering babies, setting bones, making house calls down dirt roads, and sitting up with patients through long Saturday nights at the old hospital. Not long ago, a woman at DeTar in Victoria looked up and said, “You delivered my boy. He’s 35 years old.” In a small town, a doctor’s legacy doesn’t sit in a file cabinet. It walks around.
Roots on French Street
The Reese family’s roots in DeWitt County stretch back at least to Dr. Reese’s grandfather, who worked for the City of Cuero in the street department, leading a crew that patched holes in the roads. He and his wife raised seven children in a two-bedroom house on French Street. Grandmother Reese walked to the Baptist Church every Sunday with white gloves, a hat, and a purposeful stride. They didn’t have a car.
Dr. Reese’s father, Clarence Randolph Reese, was the oldest of four boys. He had an eighth-grade education, drove trucks — freight lines, Coca-Cola, transport — and eventually became a city fireman. His mother, Alta Mae Johnson Reese, grew up in Yoakum and was the pusher in the family, the one who kept saying, you got to do this, you got to do that. She worked her way up to Cuero Federal Savings & Loan and was still doing bank deposits at the clinic at eighty-five. Raymond was born in 1934, an only child. There was no money to spread around, but his parents valued things they couldn’t easily afford, and they paid for piano lessons for years. He rode a bicycle to school through high school.
A Gobbler, Class of 1953
Dr. Reese was a quarterback for the Cuero Gobblers. He also played basketball and baseball, ran track, and played golf. But his talents weren’t confined to the field. He was 2nd place at the UIL State in Extemporaneous Speaking and received the Honorable Mention award as a cast member of the UIL One-Act Play State Championship cast from Cuero. A quarterback who could hold a stage from humble roots.
The locker room was in the basement of the old junior high. A sign on the door read: Winner never quits. Quitter never wins. They were still wearing leather helmets. A new coach started football season by putting the team in the gym on cots for a week, three practices a day, no water. “We didn’t all die from heat,” Dr. Reese says drily.
Cuero was still segregated, but Dr. Reese lived long enough to see the teams integrated and transformed. He served on the school board and as the Gobblers’ sideline doctor during Buster Gilbreth’s dynasty — 107 wins, back-to-back state championships in 1973 and 1974, a 44-game winning streak. He watched Arthur Whittington play his way to the Oakland Raiders and a Super Bowl ring. “I asked Arthur once, how many coaches did you have? Six or seven. Today’s teams carry seventeen.”
The Path to Medicine
The first person in the Reese family to attend college was one of Clarence’s younger brothers, who became a school superintendent. He handed young Raymond a pharmacy catalog. But it was Dr. A.J. Bohman who planted the deeper seed. Bohman was Cuero’s senior physician — a surgeon, hospital builder, and a man who drove Cadillacs at alarming speed and wore alligator shoes to the golf course. Raymond earned his spending money carrying Bohman’s bag for two dollars a round, the biggest bag in town. And Bohman kept asking: What are you going to do?
To pay for college, Reese worked summers at Alcoa’s smelting plant in Point Comfort — what felt like 120 in the shade, a dollar-fifty an hour. Tuition at the University of Texas was twenty-five dollars a semester. He earned his pharmacy hours at Klecka Drugstore. He had known Cherie Kay Holloway since about the third grade — her father, Harwell Beron Holloway, ran the local ice house after Central Power & Light divested. They married in 1956. Kay looked at him one day and said his friends were all going to medical school. Do you want to go? He did. He got accepted to UTMB Galveston, having never visited the island until the day they moved there in a pickup truck and cattle trailer.
Medical School and Coming Home
Medical school was a different world — gross anatomy every day, three quizzes every Saturday morning. Kay taught in the Galveston schools to keep them afloat. Their daughter Rebecca was born between his freshman and sophomore years; their son Raymond H. during his internship at Scott & White. He was accepted into a surgical residency. His wife said, “I want to go home.”
So they came home. In 1962, Dr. Reese began his practice at Bohman Clinic. There were about six doctors in town. Everybody worked. Everybody made house calls.
Country Medicine
He delivered roughly two thousand babies. Malpractice insurance was $165 a year when he started; $39,000 by the time he stopped. He made house calls to places most people never saw. One summer noon, he examined a crippled man in a tin shack who made charcoal for a living. He told him he needed the hospital. He turned to put his instruments away. When he turned back, the man had a pistol pointed at him. “I’m not going to the hospital.”
Before the new hospital opened in 1970, there was no ambulance. You called the funeral home. They’d put the patient in a hearse — no monitors — and you’d ride in back with your finger on the pulse for thirty minutes. One night, after transporting a cardiac patient to Victoria, the hearse driver came up: “Doc, can you stay a few minutes? We threw all the rubber off the right rear tire coming down here.”
It was Dr. Bohman who drove the seven-year campaign for a new hospital. Cuero Community Hospital opened September 8, 1970, funded by a million dollars in Hill-Burton money and roughly seven hundred thousand raised locally. Dr. Reese saw the whole arc, from no ICU and no CT scanner to the arrival of every modern technology. Today, Cuero Regional Hospital bears little resemblance to the place he helped build. Specialists have replaced generalists, hospitalists manage inpatient care, and a patient calling the clinic may wait weeks for an appointment. Dr. Reese watches the changes with the complicated affection of a man who remembers when six doctors handled everything and the back door never closed.
Kay
Cherie Kay Holloway Reese was born May 3, 1935 in Corpus Christi. She served as PTA President and helped secure the bond issue that built John C. French and Hunt Elementary schools. At First Baptist Church, she founded the graded children’s choir program. Kay developed Parkinson’s and later dementia; they kept her at home for five years. She died February 15, 2005. The Kay Reese Memorial Scholarship, administered by the Cuero ISD Education Foundation, honors her belief in the power of education.
Faith and Music
Dr. Reese served as First Baptist Church’s Minister of Music, conducting the Sanctuary Choir and leading congregational singing. He founded The King’s Proclaimers, a children’s choir for fourth through eighth graders. He served as a deacon, sat on the Executive Committee, and helped build the current church facility. He has taught Sunday school continuously since 1962 — longer than he practiced medicine. Additionally, Dr. Reese served 18 years as a trustee at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.
“Like school teachers,” he says. “The teachers that teach for fifty or sixty years — how many people do they impact?”
The Next Generation
Their son, Raymond H. Reese, went to Baylor for accounting and law, served as county attorney for twenty-five years, and as president of the Cuero ISD Education Foundation, which has grown its endowment to roughly six million dollars. Ray and his wife, Helen Elizabeth Pearson Reese, raised three children: Jordan Elizabeth Reese Swann, a CPA in Waco; Emily Kay Reese Truss, a classroom teacher and Math Department Chair in the DFW area; and Pearson Holloway Reese, a Baylor computer science graduate who works for Accenture. Their daughter, Rebecca Reese Dawson, pursued a distinguished thirty-two-year career in music education. Today she is a retired educator and Realtor in Cuero, married to James Edward Dawson, serving on the Cuero Community Foundation board. Both children serve or served on foundations in the town where they grew up — the same civic thread that runs through the Reese family like a quiet current. Between them, they have given Dr. Reese five great-grandchildren.
How Many People Did You Impact?
One Christmas Eve in the 1970s, a man drove into the rock pillars at Riverside Park in Victoria and was brought to Cuero. He didn’t look badly hurt. By morning, his amylase was climbing fast. No CT, no MRI. Dr. Reese called a surgeon in Victoria named Bob Johnston. “Bob, I’ve got a guy I think has a fractured pancreas.” Johnston said, “Sure you do.” But he drove to Cuero, opened the man up, and found the pancreas broken clean across the vertebral body. They removed the back half and a nicked spleen. The man lived another forty years.
Asked what he is most proud of, Dr. Reese gives two answers: his family and the time he has spent at church. He does not mention the state-level competitions in speaking and drama, the years as quarterback, the two thousand deliveries, the house calls at gunpoint, or the patients he transported in hearses. The legacy, as he frames it, is not his. It belongs to the people he impacted.
If he walked downtown today, three or four people would stop him. Hey, Doctor. He doesn’t always remember right away. But the connection is there — written not in charts or records, but in the lives of a town that still knows his face, his hands, and the quiet faith that kept him here.
Joe Olive, CFP®, MPS, is a 10-year Air Force veteran who works as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® with Sather Financial Group, a fee-only strategic planning and investment management firm. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia University.
