Anyone who has been around for 100 years has certainly had an impact on those around them, but as one retired Thomasville doctor joins the ranks of the centenarians, his impact and influence have no doubt been spread a bit wider.

Dr. Oscar M. Mims, who celebrated his 100th birthday on Tuesday, graciously  — and humbly — allowed this writer to sit down with him for 90 minutes to reminisce and reflect on a life well lived.

“I’m nothing special… I just happened to live a long time,” Mims said.

But many in the community who have known him for various roles — physician; friend; neighbor; colleague; bridge partner; Rotarian; past golf or tennis buddy; fellow lover of great music; father, grandfather and great-grandfather; and more  — would disagree. Beloved, admired and respected both personally and professionally, Oscar Mims is the epitome of what a physician should be, truly focusing on patient care first and foremost, then enjoying a 40-year retirement gracefully but also with gusto.

Following his undergraduate pre-med degree from University of South Carolina and his medical degree from Duke University, Mims met Thomasville native Edythe “Candy” Cannady, who was working toward her Bachelor of Nursing degree at Duke while he was completing his internship there in internal medicine. The couple were married on the day Cannady graduated, “so she got her BSN and her Mrs. on the same day,” he laughed. 

After a stint in the Navy, the couple moved to Thomasville in 1952, where he joined the adult medicine practice of Dr. Ernest F. Wahl Sr., and they raised three children. To be close to the hospital, they built a house just a block away in 1955 where he lived for the next 65 years.

While his wife and many of his colleagues and friends have passed on, Mims has stayed active, physically and mentally.  Despite his advanced age, he still lives independently, plays bridge at least once a week (and more often online) and makes sure to get exercise (albeit at home and at a slower pace than before). He is the most senior season ticket holder for Thomasville Entertainment Foundation, having enjoyed and supported its concert series since at least the early 1960s, and he is the senior member of the Thomasville Rotary Club, which also recently celebrated 100 years. 

He has a regular Wednesday lunch date with his fellow ROMEOs, the acronym for Real Old Men Eating Out, and still drives nearly every day. In fact, it was on his 99th birthday last December that he renewed his Georgia driver’s license. Mims recalled being as surprised as anyone that his new license was valid for another seven years, expiring on his 106th birthday!

As his across the street neighbor for nearly 30 years, beginning when he was already 70, I personally witnessed him mowing and raking, chipping golf balls in his yard and leaving home dressed for tennis, activities he maintained well beyond his retirement from active medical practice in 1991. He made holiday visits to his neighbors and has maintained closed relationships with longtime co-workers and colleagues.

Unlike some members of his family, he seldom stepped into a visible leadership role; his wife served a number of organizations, including TEF, as a trustee and volunteer, and his daughter, Frances Mims Parker, has served as president of both TEF and the Rotary Club. 

But it would be a mistake to characterize Mims as anything other than a leader. His was a quiet, behind-the-scenes servant leadership, mostly on behalf of Thomasville’s medical community to the benefit of patients throughout the region. A longtime member of the Archbold Board of Trustees, he served as Chief of Staff for Archbold in 1968. Along with Dr. Huddie Cheney, he helped Archbold develop and build a cardiology program, and he was known for seeing patients on weekends and making house calls over the entire course of his medical career, long after most physicians had stopped that practice.

Well into his retirement, he came over to listen to what I could feel was an irregular heartbeat and, after correctly assessing I was suffering from atrial fibrillation, transported me to Archbold’s emergency department in his own vehicle for treatment.

“I really enjoyed the practice of medicine, treating patients who became my friends, building relationships, but it’s not that way much anymore,” Mims lamented. “The third-party involvement in the practice of medicine changed things, and not for the better.”

Archbold has long recognized his impact and the value of his life to the betterment of the local medical community. Dr. Oscar Mims is one of only three individuals ever selected as an honorary Archbold trustee for life (the other two being children of hospital founder John F. “Jack” Archbold), and an oil portrait of Mims was dedicated and hung in the halls of the hospital earlier this year.

The good doctor seems somewhat surprised and bemused to have reached his 100th birthday this week.

“The human body is divided into a number of systems – neurologic, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, rheumatic, musculoskeletal and others — and I’ve got something wrong in every one of them,” he said.  “But I’m still here!”