One plausible way of improving the civic energy in a small town is to encourage its sons and daughters — once grown — to go out into the world, marry outsiders, and then bring those spouses back. CHARLES WANKER was born in Bridgeport, W.Va, a small middle-class town 40 minutes down the road from the university. His father is a dentist, his mother a teacher. He has two sisters. And they all bleed gold and blue — for the love of their West Virginia University Mountaineers. DR. WANKER is currently accepting new patients at the Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas, in Iola, where he practices alongside doctors Glen Singer and Brian Wolfe. THE WANKERS purchased a large colonial-style home on the eastern edge of town. The front lawn is as green and seemingly endless as the backyard. Not long after the Wankers arrived, a neighbor appeared with a tractor and plowed the family a garden out back. The plants in it are now knee-high. (The green thumb is Christine’s, who, for the time being, has decided to stay home with her children, who range in age from 3 to 10.) WANKER’S attitude is a salve to the cynicism and reflexive self-loathing that can too easily choke the imagination of a small town. He knows more about the goings-on in Iola than do many of its natives, and he takes an admiring view of the people who make it all go.
“So, how did you end up in Iola?” an Iolan will often ask a newcomer. “My wife is from here,” answers the newcomer, or “my husband.”
One of Iola’s newest doctors — Charles Wanker, the husband of Iola native Christine Tholen — comes by his Buchanan Street address after a similar fashion.
But the Wankers’ story of young love, family, career accomplishment and homecoming charts an itinerary more eclectic than most young professionals’.
“I had season tickets starting in middle school,” said Wanker, who, come fall, will have to rely on DirecTV to beam the Big 12 football games into his Iola home.
One signal of Wanker’s devotion to WVU was his decision, after receiving his undergraduate degree, to stay on to complete his medical training at the same institution.
Because Wanker, a member of ROTC in college, received a military scholarship toward medical school, he was obligated — as a condition of the award — to attend one of the handful of military residency programs upon his graduation.
He chose the University of Nebraska Medical Center, which placed him in the 55th Medical Group, at Offutt Air Force Base, and put him in an ideal position to meet Christine, who had enrolled in the same program a year prior.
By 2004, the pair of future family docs was married, nearing the end of their residencies and, according to Wanker, itching to get overseas.
Hoping to be posted to Europe, the couple’s assignment deposited them instead on a base in Misawa, a comparatively small Japanese city on the rural northern tip of the main island, where they remained — very happily, says Wanker — for the next seven years.
“We actually had a small hospital on the base there. I’m a family practice doctor and my wife is, too. But we had an orthopedic surgeon there, a general surgeon, OB docs” — three of the Wankers’ four children were born on the base — “we had an internist, a couple of pediatricians, a couple optometrists. It was sort of like a mini Allen County [Regional] Hospital right on the base in Japan.”
For every year of schooling for which the military pays, the scholarship recipient owes a year of workplace service. Wanker’s obligation was for eight years; Christine’s was longer. By the end of their deployment they were eagerly eyeing civilian life.
“Work there was just so hectic. We were both practicing. We were on call a lot. We had three kids. You know, with all the deployments, it was just getting to be too much. … We had talked about coming back to Iola probably a few years ago, because we wanted to go somewhere near family.”
And while it wasn’t exactly a straight line — the couple left Japan in 2011 for the Azores, a tiny archipelago 800 miles off the coast of Portugal, where they practiced medicine for three years; and they spent last year on a base in Knob Noster, Mo. — the family eventually settled into their Iola home this past June.
“I wanted to be part of an organization. Some people like private practice, and that’s great. But what I really liked about the military was being a part of an organization. And I liked the CHC mission when I met with them. It’s to take care of the uninsured, which is obviously a huge thing in Allen County. I like the idea of serving the underserved. Not everyone who goes to CHC, obviously, is underserved. But I like their concept: ‘We’re going to try to take care of everybody regardless of their economic circumstance.’”
Although Wanker grew up in West Virginia, he doesn’t come from the black-dust section of Appalachia, and he didn’t grow up in poverty.
“Actually,” reflected Wanker, “if you want to know the whole ‘Why CHC?’ question, it’s probably because of our time in the Azores, where we first saw a lot of people struggling with deep poverty.
“When you see that with your own eyes — when you go to church with these same people — well, it really put a lot of things in perspective for me.”
Last Wednesday, the oldest Wanker children — Travis, 10, and Madeleine, 8 — were combing through the greens in search of leaf-eating bugs, especially cutworms. Travis held a plastic bowl crawling with caterpillars and squash bugs and cucumber beetles. Maddie poked at the leaves with the handle of a golf club.
“I smooshed the guts out of one,” exclaimed Maddie. “But then it came back to life and ran away.”
“It’s like living in the country, but in the city,” said Wanker.
“We’ve really enjoyed Iola so far. We found a great church that we like [Harvest Baptist]. And on the weekends, we do stuff around here with the family. We’ve gone swimming, gone fishing. I think when you come to a small town you pretty well know what you’re getting yourself into. Our thing has always been, when you do stuff, do quality-time stuff with the family. I don’t have to go up to Kansas City and do all the stuff up there. We’d rather have a cookout at [Christine’s] sister’s house and just have the kids run around the yard. I think those are the memories that the kids will take from here.”
“Matter of fact, one of the things that first drew me to Iola was that there seemed to be a good involvement among people in the community to try to improve the community as a whole. You had the things Thrive [Allen County] was doing, you had CHC — but there was also just a real good sense of community among the whole physician group itself. It wasn’t like the hospital and then private practice and then CHC — it was really everybody working together.
“And you’d be surprised, but when you travel around a lot, you don’t see that much. You don’t see a lot of different organizations in the community really coming together like it seems they have in this county.
“It’s like being on a small air force base. When you are there, everybody knows everybody. But you also knew that for the sake of the mission of the base, we can’t have divisions. We may disagree on a lot of issues, but we’re at least going to come together for the good of the common mission of the base.
“And I’ve seen that a lot here in this town. You know, you’ve got Thrive and Circles. But then you’ve got the Hooked on Fishing Tournament, for example. You’ve got the stuff out at Elks Lake. You’ve got the Mad Bomber Run. You’ve got a farmers market. You’ve got people building a disc golf course. You’ve got the Community Garden.”
A deeply devout man, Wanker frames his own responsibility toward his new town this way: “Ultimately, I’m going to stand before Him and He is going to say: ‘I put you in Iola. Now — what did you do?’”
Air Force doc joins Community Health Center
