Santa Rosa doctor’s retirement means end of makeshift museum

It’s a challenge quite enough for old-style doctor Kenneth Stein to shut down his practice after 41 years, but what on Earth will he do with his museum?

Lining the waiting room at Stein’s Santa Rosa’s Sonoma Avenue office, and also the hall and the exam rooms are artifacts of Sonoma County history, vintage medicine boxes and tins and bottles and such, old calendars and newspaper clippings and, nearest to the dermatologist’s heart, simple tributes to World War II veterans.

You could spend several hours perusing his collection. Here are wooden chairs from Santa Rosa’s The Strand theater, and the heavy, door handles, engraved with a stylish “R,” salvaged from the former Rosenberg’s department store.

Among Stein’s memorabilia honoring members of the Greatest Generation are a posted news story about the late Frank Kappeler of Santa Rosa, a Doolittle Raider. The ceiling fan above the doctor’s desk is laden with baseball caps bearing the names of ships and given to him by patients who served at sea.

Stein traces his reverence for veterans of World War II to his birth in March 1943, in the middle of the global conflagration. It dawned on him as a youngster in history-rich South Philadelphia: “I’m lying in my crib and look at what these guys are doing. I just found it so extraordinary.”

So, for most of the past four decades Stein has thanked those patients who served, and asked if they might have a remnant of the war that he could attach to a wall or place on a shelf, or on his ceiling fan.

One day last week, 35-year patient Russ Kelly, a retired ?Air Force colonel who’d flown 35 bombing missions over Japan as navigator on a B-29 Superfortress, was in to see Stein. Their mutual respect was unmistakable.

“I celebrate these guys,” the doctor said. “Can you think of a greater effort to preserve freedom and liberty?”

For his part, Kelly said Stein is a good doctor. “An excellent doctor in fact. He kept me from getting cancer. He knows what he’s doing, and he talks to you and takes care of you.

“I hate to see him retire, but we all retire some day.”

Stein said he’s sorry to shut his practice, but he is 72 years old and getting by as a paper-files solo practitioner in the age of electronic records and medical groups is getting tougher.

“We’re from the old school,” he said. “The solo practice, I think, is on the way out.”

His practice has been located all these years in one of the big medical office parks on Sonoma Avenue. It clearly tickles the Pennsylvania native to recall how he came to discover Sonoma County.

As a young dermatologist out of the University of Pennsylvania in 1972, he was serving a two-year commitment in the Army. He and his wife, Sandy, were giddy for him to be assigned to Letterman Army Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco.

“We treated a lot of Vietnam casualties,” he said.

The Steins came to love California. They were introduced to Sonoma County by late Santa Rosa dermatologist Walter Weber. He told Ken Stein the city could use another skin doctor.

So up the Steins came in 1974. Ken Stein hadn’t been in practice in Santa Rosa long when he started placing collectibles, odds, ends and tributes to World War II veterans on display. At this moment, he’s really not sure what he’ll do with them all after he takes them down.

Regardless, the exhibit has obviously added a delightful element to his work. Patients are able to take a last look prior to his final day in practice on Sept. 30 and at a farewell open house on Oct. 1.

Stein figures his collection “is like a big welcome sign to put my patients at ease.”

“It’s like inviting them into my house: Please stay for a while. Look around.

“It’s like the good old days. You’re bringing back the good old days.”

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @CJSPD.