Via Community News Service, a VTSU-Castleton internship, for the Poultney Journal
POULTNEY — Dr. Michael Scovner officially retired last month, marking an end to a medical career spanning nearly 40 years.
“The medicine has been fun and I’ve enjoyed it, but this was always my dream,” he said. “I got to live out my dream, and now my dream is starting to end. I really don’t like that part.”
Audrey Tilden, Scover’s administrative assistant, worked beside him for years in his practice on Main Street. That central location was unintentionally poetic, she said.
“He was a treasure to this town,” she said, calling Scovner’s work “central to the health and well-being for two generations of locals.”
Scovner began practicing in Vermont in 1988 and in Poultney the following year, specializing in internal medicine and pediatrics. Scovner said he came back to New England after graduating from Ohio State because he and his wife, Myra, whom he met while in school, loved New England. He said his parents also lived in New Hampshire, which helped his decision.
“My parents told me if I wanted to stay in rural New England that I had to take Vermont because they’d already taken New Hampshire,” Scovner said.
Scovner comes from a family of doctors. His paternal grandfather chief of pediatrics at a large, New York City hospital, and his maternal grandfather was a cardiologist. An uncle was a urologist in Maryland.
His daughter, Catherine, is a kidney specialist who teaches medicine at Harvard. Scovner’s father, however, was famous for something else entirely: writing TV commercials. Scovner said although his father hated the work, he was very good at it and wrote ads for Folgers coffee and the Yellow Pages in the 1960s.
He said his father’s hatred for advertising led Scovner to try his hand at it, writing advertisements for pet food company Fresh Pet for the fun of it, aiming to give the brand the name recognition he felt it deserved.
“My best friend is my poodle,” he said. “His name is Pippin by the way, and so I wrote four commercials for Fresh Pet.”
Scovner said he would like to continue bringing his ideas to fruition over his retirement. But he also said he’ll miss medicine, particularly the many patients he adored.
“I never really thought I was going to retire,” he said. “I thought I’d just do this job forever.”