Paging Dr. Renshaw-Dr. Renshaw

Two doctors in family make Mother's Day special

By TOM CAMPBELL

Photo provided

Proud parents Max and Bonnie Renshaw flank son Scott after his graduation from the I.U. School of Medicine in 2000.

Best day ever? For Bonnie Renshaw, it's a lay-up, a no-brainer. No day before or since could ever compare to Mother's Day 2000. That was the day the Vincennes, Ind., woman felt like she had won the biggest lottery prize EVER.

It was such a great day, that May 14, that it took Mrs. Renshaw two days to celebrate, and it's a day she'll savor for the rest of her life.

Max and Bonnie's boy, Eric, had graduated from Purdue's School of Veterinary Medicine on Saturday, May 13. That made him, by a scant 24 hours, the Renshaw family's first doctor.

On the following day, Scott Renshaw, BS '95, cloaked in cap and gown and pumped full of the pride of personal accomplishment, made the long walk across the stage in the RCA Dome in Indianapolis and received his diploma from the Indiana University School of Medicine, earning the moniker "the second Dr. Renshaw."

Mother's Day? Surely, this was the mother of all mother's days.

It was a day that was a long time coming, fulfilling a dream that first took shape while Scott was a student at South Knox High School.

Bonnie Renshaw was a second-grade teacher, and Scott had taught some Sunday school classes at church. Scott easily could see himself becoming a teacher. He had toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor. And why not? Until he retired in 2002, Scott's father had been a department head at Good Samaritan Hospital in Vincennes.

Renshaw envisioned himself working in a remote, medically underserved area where his patients were as likely to pay him in material goods, like chickens or hogs, as they were money, the way he had seen in a television show. Sort of a Scott Renshaw, Frontier Doctor.

"That sort of thing really intrigued me," Renshaw says. What didn't intrigue him was the idea of spending another 12 years in school following high school just to get his medical license.

And that would have meant leaving his home near Vincennes to attend college on a large, intimidating campus that Renshaw felt he wasn't quite ready to face.

"I had taken visits to Purdue, Ball State and Indiana, but those places just seemed too big for me. We only had 78 students in my graduating class at South Knox. At Purdue and Indiana, they have that many people in many of their classrooms."

So Renshaw stayed home, literally, and enrolled at Vincennes University, where he earned a two-year degree in chemistry. "I got a Presidential Scholarship to Vincennes and lived at home with my parents. I earned a two-year degree and all it cost me was the gas money to drive to campus," Renshaw boasts.

He loved Vincennes University and its quaint environment. The school was small, and by the time he graduated in 1993, Renshaw felt that the students and faculty had become a part of his extended family.

He had tutored fellow students at Vincennes, and his self-confidence had grown by leaps and bounds.

Now it was time to start on campus visits all over again.

"I still really didn't know what I wanted to do," says Renshaw. "I came up to Purdue for another visit and met with people from biochemistry, biology and food science."

But there was something about his talk with Martin Okos, professor of biochemical and food process engineering, that got him excited about Purdue's School of Agriculture.

"It had everything I wanted in one package," Renshaw says, "all of the courses I really liked - biochemistry, physics and engineering - it was just what I was looking for."

Dr. Renshaw continued on next page