The Schilling family prospered with Dick`s successful practice. It prospered even more when Schilling got into an oil and gas exploration venture in southern Indiana and Illinois that started as a sort of hobby and became a lucrative business.
”Dick is not a run-of-the-mill human being,” says The Rev. Jim Tozer, pastor of the Covenant Presbyterian Church in West Lafayette, Ind., and a close friend of the Schilling family for nearly 30 years. ”He`s a man always going for another challenge, always trying to master something new. When he wanted to learn how to sail, he got books and studied the science of it and then mastered the art of it. The same thing happened when he wanted to learn photography, then skiing, then piano. He has this great intellectual need or hunger to understand. I expect that is why he was so successful in his oil ventures.”
Schilling got started in oil and gas exploration as a simple investor in the early 1970s. His curiosity got the better of him, however, and soon he was spending all his spare time immersed in geology books, trying to figure out the business.
”He`s an extremely dedicated man when he gets involved in something,”
says Ron Van Fossan, a wily, drawling, third-generation oil wildcatter with whom Schilling began investing in oil exploration ventures in 1974. ”When he got involved with me, he started going to night school and reading books so that he was not just a passive investor but a contributing investor–the kind you really like to have.
”And that wasn`t the half of it. The first thing I knew, he was coming down to the rigs when we were drilling, and sitting up all night nursing it along with the rest of us. He likes to be right in there participating, knowing what`s going on. He learned oil both academically and by the seat of his pants, and I ended up having a lot of respect for his opinions. He probably knows more about the oil business than half of the people who call themselves oilmen.”
Though his oil and gas exploration business eventually became very lucrative, Schilling`s family and close friends suspect that money was never a big factor in his getting into the business.
”He doesn`t have a great love for money, but he loves to put things together,” says daughter Nancy. ”If a person could live without money, that would be his ideal. He has always hated the way people step over each other to get more money. But Dad`s biggest pleasure in life is to work for a goal, to work for something worthwhile. He loves taking up a project and learning something new and useful, and that`s what happened with his oil business.”
About the same time he was getting into oil exploration, Schilling`s family, one by one, was undergoing a religious transformation. The family had always been faithful Presbyterians and regular churchgoers, but each decided to rededicate himself to Christian principles.
None of them is sure why it happened. When Dick`s transformation began, he, perhaps typically, went to see his old friend Jim Tozer, who holds a doctorate in theology from Northwestern University.
”My specialty is the intellectual aspect of the Christian faith,” Tozer says, ”and he is very intellectual. He questioned everything, read and reread everything and questioned it some more, and I began to channel him into this deep, deep faith he now possesses.” Betty, always an instigator, organized women`s Bible study groups in Bloomington during the winter and up at Glen Lake in the summer and was always on hand when somebody wanted to launch a benefit for a worthy charity.
In addition to working at his regular surgical practice and his oil-business sideline, Dick began spending more and more time treating people for free. He specialized in treating ”working poor people,” whose income barred them from Medicaid but whose insurance benefits were too meager to cover large medical expenditures. He also traveled with Tozer to Presbyterian mission projects in depressed rural areas, on Indian reservations and in inner-city ghettos.
The income from his oil business made the income from his surgical practice less and less a necessity. In 1981 he surprised everyone and retired early from medicine to concentrate on the oil business and his other interests. Less than two years later, however, he felt guilty about not using his God-given talents as a surgeon and resumed his practice in Bloomington.
After returning from their two-month stint in Kenya, the Schillings spent much of 1985 preparing for the marriage of daughter Nancy in early September. After the wedding, they accepted another two-month assignment from World Medical Mission, this time at Mattru Hospital in Sierra Leone in early November.
Mattru lacked even more vital equipment than the hospital in Kenya, operating without a respirator, X-ray facilities and medical laboratory. With just 70 beds and two doctors, it was a smaller operation and even more critically in need of basic items such as bandages and medicines than Tenwek. Forewarned, Schilling packed his own sutures and surgical instruments for the trip, along with a large supply of antibiotics. He also took along a portable respirator–a simple hose attached to a large rubber bulb to be squeezed by hand to force air into a patient`s lungs–just in case.
Betty Schilling, ecstatic to be leaving again for Africa and another new country and culture to explore, did the major organizing for the trip. She packed the clothes, personal items and little extras like trinkets for the Christmas they would spend away from home. And this time she included in her plastic bags some canned cranberry sauce for a Thanksgiving to be celebrated in Africa.
She didn`t dwell on it, but she also made a point before leaving of talking to her children, who now all have families, homes and jobs near Glen Lake, about what to do if something happened to her. She specifically mentioned that if she should die, she would like a sheaf of wheat placed on her casket at her funeral, though she didn`t say why. She also went so far as to designate which of her favorite possessions should go to which of her children–just in case.
But that was just her way, the super-organizer within her family. She had a bad bout with a bronchial virus a few weeks before leaving, but it cleared up in plenty of time for their departure early last November.
Once in Sierra Leone, both Schillings again were able to fit in immediately with the hospital routine at Mattru. It is a lovely complex of low tin-roofed buildings and wide verandas along a river surrounded by luxuriant tropical palms and flowers. Schilling busily began treating the infected tropical leg ulcers common to tribal people living in the region. Much of his surgery was removing pelvic tumors, also common in the tropics, in women.
The weekend after their arrival, Betty developed a nagging cough, and after a couple of days, Dick put her on a regimen of antibiotics. By Tuesday, Nov. 12, she was so exhausted that she spent the day in bed. On Wednesday she developed cold sweats. Dick, becoming more and more concerned, put her on an intravenous solution in the bedroom of the hospital guesthouse where they were staying.
At 2 a.m. on Thursday, Betty shook her husband awake, telling him that she was having extreme difficulty breathing.
”I can`t move my intercostal muscles,” she told him, using the technical terminology she had grown familiar with after a lifetime of living with doctors. Schilling examined her, alarmed at her quickly deteriorating condition.
”Honey,” he told her, ”I`m going to have to intubate you.” She understood immediately what that meant. He would have to push the tube of the emergency respirator he had packed for the trip down her throat, breathing for her by squeezing the rubber bulb. Schilling roused the rest of the hospital`s medical staff, and the other doctor concurred with him.
There are no phones in Mattru, so somebody got on the hospital`s short-wave radio and got through to Freetown, the capital city, asking for seats on the first available international flight to Europe for the Schillings.
Thus began a nine-hour, dusty, bumpy journey by van, the only transport available from Mattru to Freetown, about 180 miles.
Dick and three others–another mission doctor, an emergency-room attendant and a nurse–huddled over Betty in the back of the van as it lumbered through the tropical afternoon. They read Scriptures while taking turns pumping the rubber bulb. When the bulb broke, one of them frantically began repairing it while the others took turns breathing through the tube for Betty.
They were hoping against hope that they would find a mechanized respirator–a commonplace $2,000 machine in any American or European hospital –in Freetown to keep Betty alive until she could be flown out.
Betty was characteristically calm and courageous despite her pain and everybody else`s fear during the van ride. She seemed reconciled that she was going to die in a strange land far from Bloomington. At a moment when her husband wasn`t looking, she scribbled the word ”die” on a piece of paper and showed it to the nurse. She pointed to herself and then made an ”okay” sign with her fingers. Without alarming her husband, she wanted somebody to know that she was prepared to die, that she was at peace.
They arrived in Freetown at midday on Thursday, only to find that there wasn`t a single mechanized respirating machine there, either. They also discovered that the first available flight to Europe and modern medical facilities wouldn`t leave until Friday evening. The group continued to breathe for Betty by means of the rubber bulb. By 10 p.m. Thursday Betty`s condition had worsened so much that Schilling realized the end was near. He arranged to have a message sent to their children, warning them of the impending news. At 2 a.m. Friday, Nov. 15, Betty Schilling died in a small hospital in Freetown. Later in the day, Schilling boarded a flight to London to accompany his wife`s remains on the long journey home to the States. Dick Schilling buried his wife in a small country cemetery in Michigan near the homes of their children, on a hill not far from where he had first met her in 1948.
At the funeral Betty`s family and friends laughed warmly when Jim Tozer, the pastor who had married each of her three children, spoke of her ”holy spunk” and indomitable will to enjoy life. The children carefully selected the music for the funeral, mostly joyous hymns that were their mother`s favorites. Her daughters bought new clothes for the funeral, Nancy selecting an outfit of bright pink, her mother`s favorite color.
”We didn`t want her funeral to be a mopey affair but a joyous celebration of life. When we were kids,” Nancy says, ”Mother never let us feel sorry for ourselves for very long when things didn`t go our way. `You have five minutes to feel sorry for yourself,` she used to tell us. `I`ll give you five minutes to pout, and then get on with it.` We knew that`s how she would have wanted us to react to her death.”
The children also remembered their mother`s request for a sheaf of wheat on her casket. They were convinced that she had taken the idea from Scripture, but they were unaware of the meaning of the wheat. Kathy began poring through the Bible to solve the mystery, excitedly calling her sister several days after the funeral.
”I`ve found it,” she told Nancy, ”and it is wonderful!” The passage Kathy found was in the 12th chapter of John, in which Christ is speaking to his followers after raising Lazarus from the dead. In part, he told them: ”In truth, in very truth I tell you, a grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies, it bears a rich harvest.”
As he was flying home from Africa with his wife`s remains, Dick Schilling began to think about the idea he had once discussed with her. Certainly the circumstances of her death were a testament to the need in mission hospitals for simple life-saving machinery. On that trip home, he says, it began to dawn on him that few people were as well-equipped as he was to fill that need. Within two weeks after his wife`s death, he had formed the Betty Fink Schilling Memorial Fund as an arm of World Medical Mission.
Schilling has begun trying to track down the location of all mission hospitals around the world. As he finds them, he is sending out a
questionnaire he designed to find out their specific needs for machinery and supplies.
He is also designing a questionnaire to be sent out to American hospitals, asking what kinds of surplus equipment they have stored away, unused and unneeded, that could be used in mission work. In addition, he is beginning to canvass manufacturers of medical equipment and supplies, as well as pharmaceutical companies, feeling them out for donations. Schilling`s aim is to start an ongoing central stockpile in this country of donated equipment and hospital supplies. The stockpile would be available, free of charge, to mission hospitals anywhere in the world. The fund in Betty`s name is raising money to cover shipping costs of materials Schilling will be sending to the mission field. World Medical Mission is donating all administrative services for the Schilling fund so that all the money contributed will be used only for shipping expenses.
His knowledge as a doctor and his experience in mission hospitals, Schilling says, put him in a good position to know what is worthwhile to send abroad and what is not. His experience as a businessman, he says, will enable him to oversee the distribution of equipment and supplies and see that they are used with maximum efficiency. ”You don`t send junk to the mission field,” Schilling says. ”If anything, any equipment you send to those places has to be more usable than anything you would send to a hospital in this country. Shipping costs are very high, and it would be disastrous to send unusable junk.
”It also doesn`t make sense to send machinery so sophisticated and complex that nobody can operate it or repair it if it breaks. So we are looking for older, simpler versions of things. I`m going to take courses in maintenance of every type of machine we send abroad. I`ll be going to hospitals to make sure they know how to use it and to make sure somebody`s around who knows how to repair it if it breaks down.”
As his family and friends know, Dick Schilling moves fast once he makes up his mind to do something, and he has moved very fast, indeed, on the Betty Fink Schilling fund and his stockpile.
At a reception on the day of his wife`s funeral, he and an old friend and neighbor at Glen Lake, Carl Hoenecke, began talking about Schilling`s dream. Hoenecke, president and chairman of Federal Signal Corp. in Oak Brook, is also on the board of directors of Puritan-Bennett Corp., of Kansas City, one of the largest manufacturers of respirator equipment in the world. Hoenecke, always impressed with Schilling`s business acumen, was also impressed with his ideas for the memorial fund; he introduced Schilling to Puritan-Bennett`s president, Burton Dole, a few weeks later. Schilling walked away from the meeting with a pledge from Puritan-Bennett to donate $500,000 worth of new and rebuilt respirator equipment suitable for use in most mission hospitals. The pledge includes 50 mechanized respirators, 50 emergency respirators that can be operated on car batteries and 500 manual resuscitators such as the one with the rubber bulb that Schilling had used on Betty.
”This is just one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” says Dole, who is interceding with other medical machinery manufacturers on Schilling`s behalf. ”It`s unique in the sense that a man like this comes along, willing to make this sort of effort, a man who can identify and understand the needs of mission hospitals.” Equipment from hospitals that have heard of Schilling`s efforts is beginning to trickle in, as well, and World Medical Mission has received more than $30,000 as of February to begin defraying shipping costs. Donations for his work can be made to World Medical Mission Inc., P.O. Box 3000, Boone, N.C., 28607; contributions should be designated for the Betty Schilling Memorial Fund. Schilling has begun working with International Aid, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization in Spring Lake, Mich., that operates warehouses and freight forwarding services for overseas missions.
There are several other organizations that have been and continue to send supplies to overseas missions, though none has attempted as comprehensive a survey of needs as Schilling is now doing. Medical Assistance Program of Brunswick, Ga., collects and sends pharmaceuticals. REAP, a California agency, collects, rebuilds and sends radiological equipment. Interchurch Medical Assistance of Elkhart, Ind., and Direct Relief of Santa Barbara, Calif., also send medical equipment overseas.
Schilling is in the process of selling his home in Bloomington. He will settle permanently, he says, in the Glen Lake cottage, where he will be near his children when he is not traveling the mission-hospital circuit.
Though it was the lack of a respirator for his wife in Sierra Leone that was the impetus for his new undertaking, Schilling says he is uncertain now if he could have saved her had one been available. Indeed, he is not certain what the illness was that swept Betty`s life away so suddenly. He believes, however, that it was a rare variation of Guillain-Barre syndrome, an acute, rapidly progressive form of paralysis that can attack shortly after a bronchial infection such as his wife had suffered just before they arrived in Sierra Leone.
”It was a violent thing that just swept in,” he says. ”It probably would have struck her down even if we had stayed home in Bloomington. Even with the hospital facilities that would have been available to her there, we might not have saved her. And if we had saved her, she could have ended up on a respirator or on renal dialysis for life. I have no regrets. Betty was the last person on earth who would sit in a hole and mope after something went wrong. `Just get on with it,` she`d say, and that is what I`m doing. Her death has made me more grateful than I`ve ever been before for all the things I`ve had. It has given me such strength that I think I could go anywhere or do anything now.
”I think Betty would be very pleased with what is happening from this experience. This is something she had wanted to do herself. Not all your prayers are answered the way you hope they will be answered, but they are always answered. I`m going to do some tremendous things for those hospitals, and I`m going to spend the rest of my life doing it.”
Betty Schilling`s death, it seems, has planted a seed that is already taking root.
