Luis N Zumarraga

 

10-08-2023

Keeping up with Panama City events, as I do while living elsewhere, I learned that a retired psychiatrist in Panama City, Florida, recently died, and I was sorry to hear it. I was an intimate part of the mental health community in Panama City from the mid-eighties to 2020.

Dr. Zumarraga was kindly, competent, well organized, and sturdy in disposition and personality, and a stalwart in that community. He helped me along with my career and referred hundreds of clients for therapy or psychological testing over the years. He seemed to take a personal interest as well and truly had the Rogerian quality of genuineness. He looked a bit like the actor Desi Arnaz. He raised a happy and successful brood of children, had a loving and pretty wife, had a very well-run and ethical practice, knew his medications very well, had a great understanding of general medicine, and attained wealth, with a home with a great lush garden he manicured himself. What else could you ask for in a life, in a person?

That said, the passing of old friends and mentors and acquaintances proceeds at an accelerated pace after 60. The world stays much the same, but with a new set of actors, hopefully more skilled than the last cast. In any case, I had thought about Dr. Zummaraga many times, and he certainly was one of the very memorable mentors I had had. In retrospect, some people seem more impressive than they did at the time you knew them, since the energy, confusion, and ambitions of those years dimmed objectivity, and anyway, elders are not really given much credit by ambitious up and comers.

I first met Dr. Zumarraga at the Life Management Center in 1986. He attended weekly meetings to provide psychiatric coverage. Well-liked, he had none of the officiousness that, in those days, you might associate with a psychiatrist when you were a psychologist. The psychiatrists held a higher rank within the field, having the ability to prescribe, and though officially psychologists had doctorates, in the eyes of staff, and of the public, there was a definite ranking differential. Some psychologists rebelled against it, but I didn’t care. I had been surrounded by MDs since birth and regarded art as the highest calling. Anyway, Dr. Zumarraga was very egalitarian, always very human, genuinely so, without any artifice in doing so.

Part of my early recollection is Dr. Zumarraga driving to the clinic in a BMW. He drove a new BMW in, and the Bay County Guidance staff oohed and ahhed about it. At that point the staff used to go to Wendy’s to eat, dreary potatoes that were on the low end on the menu. That BMW stayed in use for 30 years by Dr. Z, and then by his office manager, Ted Winscheif. Ted was a combination office manager, hatchet man, and financial advisor. As an apostrophe, Dr. Z did help a number of people escape the serfdom of that job into private practice.  I am sure salaries must be better now.

I rented from Dr. Zumarraga, who had a new office on the land next to a psychiatric hospital named Rivendell, an organization that came to no good. I had my own suite of rooms. Everything was new, with that new-building smell, and it was kept up meticulously. Lunchtimes with coffee were served in a dedicated room. His wife, Serafina, who had been the daughter of a Filipino political leader, kept the office sparkling.

Dr. Zumarraga was born in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation, and I happened to know a lot about that since my Dad was in the Philippines during the war. Dr. Z described a kindly Japanese officer who rode him on his horse. Then came a wave of crueler Japanese officers not so nice, and family had to adapt to very dire circumstances. He nonetheless went to medical school, with a recolleciton of having to sleep with a medical cadaver in the room. He had, thereafter, a stint of gynecological plastic surgery, with wealthy Asian women flying in to the Philippines to correct physical effects of age.

Dr. Z had a knack for finding competent people to surround him. The aforesaid Ted ran his office rather ferociously, which could be good or bad based on what side of Ted you were on. Though I forget the details, Ted had a military past, and a sort of Prussian demeanor, and was excellent at books—a type of bureaucratic green beret. There was always a sense of solidarity within the office.

At one point, I took golf lessons with him. Steve Barnhoft, who was then the editor of the Panama City News Herald, joined us. Our teacher was an infinitely patient 20-something-year-old named Dan, whose best teaching attribute was total non-reactivity to our level of play. He had an Eagle Scout sincerity, tall and blond. Dr. Zumarraga could hit the ball with a reasonable degree of frequency, though one shot, I recall, careened off a nearby golf cart and nearly hit Dan. Having Steve in the trio was infinitely enjoyable, given his ability to create quips and observations on the spot, and there was opportunity for many.

Dr. Z tended to be medical-model-oriented and commonsensical. He was less interested in theoretical discussions of personality or pathology, and never got caught up in fads. His notes were complete, with a finely aristocratic handwriting style. One got the impression that he could have chosen various fields—public administration or service, medicine, engineering, government or military—and displayed equal finesse. That easy grasp of medical and biological concepts worked well in situations where patients had multiple physical problems, since he could address all the interacting systems, not just psychiatric, and do so reliably and consistently.  

At a personal level, Dr. Z was simply a very nice person. There was no need for him to help a fledgling psychologist or provide the ongoing personal and professional help he did, nor any particular advantage he derived from having me in his office. He seemed to operate more out of a sense of commitment and goodwill than self-interest, and, by and by, it was a stroke of luck to have known him.  Time, like those box like machines used by prospectors, does have the effect of clarifying the past, sifting through memories for the best parts.