Ralph Emerson INABNIT

14 MAR 1944 - 11 DEC 2020

• BIRTH: 14 MAR 1944, Brownsburg, Hendricks, Indiana
• DEATH: 11 DEC 2020, Granger, St Joseph, IN

• MARRIAGE: 22 JUN 2012, St Joseph County, IN

INDEX

[N26670] Dr. Ralph Emerson Inabnit
March 14, 1944 - Dec. 11, 2020

GRANGER, IN - Dr. Ralph Inabnit Jr., 76, passed away on December 11, 2020. He was born on March 14, 1944 to Ralph Inabnit Sr. and Thelma Christine Lively of Brownsburg both of whom preceded him in death. He is survived by his wife, Beth (Katona) Inabnit of Granger, IN. They were married on June 22, 2012. He is also survived by two children, Brent (Lisa) Inabnit of Granger, IN and Melinda (James) Higginson of Osceola; grandchildren, Katelyn (Steven) Bell, Hannah Inabnit, Grace Inabnit, Lizbeth Jansen, Alex and Nathan Ehmer; two great-grandchildren, Lucy and Annie Bell; stepchildren, Angela and Kenny Katona of Crown Point, IN and their four children, Jillian, Benjamin, Gabrielle and Noah; siblings, Bill (Nina) Inabnit of Avon, IN, John (Carol) Inabnit of Brownsburg, IN, and JoAnn (Bob) ONeal of Illinois; and half sisters, Betty Scott and Wanda Branch of Florida. Dr. Inabnit attended Andrews University and graduated in 1970. He worked as a pharmaceutical representative and started a construction company (Village Contractors) with his good friend, Bob Loudin. He went on to the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and graduated in 1982. He was the first Osteopathic doctor ever to serve as a resident at Memorial Hospital. Dr. Inabnit was a true icon. He served as a family physician and as the “town doc” for more than 30 years in New Carlisle, IN. He was recently described as a “true country doctor.” He began his day in the early hours of the morning and worked well into the evenings administering love and care to his patients. He would never, ever turn a patient away, and if a patient was unable to drive to his clinic, he would drive to their home to make a house call. Every summer, Dr. Inabnit was excited to host his annual New Carlisle Picnic. He invited every patient to come and enjoy Nelson's chicken, listen to music, win raffle prizes, and enjoy fellowship. He was a true “entertainer” and loved to energetically talk to his patients on the microphone at this particular event. He was the true model of a dedicated servant to his clinic and he valued hard work. He served as the team doctor for the New Prairie Football team for many years and could often be seen on the sidelines running up and down the field, yelling and cheering for the players. In his later years, Dr. Inabnit served as a physician for the South Bend Clinic. During that time period, he was also a medical director at various nursing homes in St. Joseph County. Dr. Inabnit also spent his time building and developing long term care facilities. Dr. Inabnit treated and saved thousands of patients during his career. He was known by his family and friends as Dr. I or simply “Doc.” Doc was a truly dynamic person. He loved to dance and had many of his own made up ballroom dance moves. It was very hard to drag him off the dance floor. He also loved spending time with friends and family. He often took his children and grandchildren on energetic shopping sprees and enjoyed having “tea and crumpets'' during these great trips. Doc was also very animated. He created his own special sayings which we will always remember: “What caused it?,” “We are writing historical chapters,” and “I love you like a brother.” He loved being on the water and spent a great deal of time in Cabo San Lucas sailing, driving around in his Jeep, and eating fish at his favorite restaurants. He also loved collecting old fashioned cars, watching Notre Dame football, “diagnosing” and “treating” his pool every summer, powdering his rose bushes, working out at the gym, eating at his favorite local restaurants and going to the movies. Anyone who spent time with Doc knows how much he loved telling stories about his life in great detail and with great animation. He also loved singing the song, “My Way” by Frank Sinatra. Perhaps one of Dr. Inabnit's greatest qualities was his generosity. Dr. Inabnit gave unselfishly to his family, friends, patients, and even those he did not know. The New Prairie Cougars Touchdown Club recently posted that many people were not aware that Dr. Inabnit sponsored the end of the year football banquet and purchased ankle braces for all of the players for many, many years. During the holidays, it was not uncommon to observe Dr. Inabnit giving out gift cards, meals, coats, and clothing to his patients at the clinic. When a close friend was in need, Dr. Inabnit was always there to help. When it came to supporting his children and grandchildren, his love knew no boundaries. We all received bountiful gifts throughout the years but our time spent with him during many family occasions was invaluable. He loved the holidays and enjoyed carving our Christmas turkey every year. Due to current public health and safety standards for COVID-19, a small service with immediate family and close friends will be held on Thursday, December 17 at 12:00 p.m. A private burial will follow at Saint Joseph Valley Memorial Park. McGann Hay Granger Chapel, 13260 SR 23, entrance off Cherry Rd., will be handling all of the arrangements. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to St. Margaret's House, 117 N. Lafayette Blvd., South Bend, IN 46601. A zoom service will be provided for those unable to attend. To send private condolences and receive zoom meeting information please visit www.McGannHay.com.

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He died doing what he loved.' Ralph Inabnit kept helping patients until his own COVID fight

Brent Inabnit remembers telling his retirement-age father, Dr. Ralph Inabnit, to slow down. The concept was foreign to “Dr. I.” In his father’s prime, Brent said, the primary care physician worked at least 65 to 70 hours a week. Over the past three years, Inabnit finally cut back, but even in his mid-70s he kept seeing patients at his office at South Bend Clinic and making rounds to see patients at several nursing homes where he served as chief doctor.“For him, cutting back significantly, at a minimum, is 30 hours a week, sometimes 40,” Brent said. “Being a doctor for him was not a job, it wasn’t five days a week, it was 24/7. It was in his blood.” Inabnit kept visiting his patients at nursing homes amid the COVID-19 pandemic, suited up head-to-toe in protective gear.
He said, ‘You should see me. I look like I have on a space suit,’” his daughter, Mindy Higginson, said, though she still worried. Higginson said one of her father’s close friends, also a doctor, suggested he stop making his rounds. “He said, ‘Nope, I need to do this.’” Inabnit began to feel tired the weekend after Thanksgiving. That Monday, Nov. 30, he started having trouble breathing and tested positive for the coronavirus. He was hospitalized that Wednesday or Thursday, family said, and died just over a week later, on Dec. 11. He was 76.
With Inabnit’s death, his family said, they lost a loving husband, devoted father and doting grandfather who delighted in teaching hard work, making special memories and showering his children with gifts.
But the community also lost an old-school family doctor whose relentless drive was matched only by his seemingly boundless generosity and who, after building a small-town practice from the ground up in New Carlisle, achieved an almost mythic status among locals. “He had a way of making you feel like you were the most important patient there ever was,” said Bart Curtis, the former head football coach at New Prairie High School. “He treated every person like it was the queen of England or the president of the United States.”

‘Legend of New Carlisle’

Ralph Emerson Inabnit Jr. was born March 14, 1944, in Brownsburg, a small town just west of Indianapolis. He grew up poor, according to his family, and dreamt of becoming a doctor. He started his own homebuilding company, earned undergraduate and master’s degrees from Andrews University and worked as a pharmaceutical salesman. He was 32, with two young children, when he got into medical school.
“We sold everything we had, which wasn’t a lot, got in a U-Haul and went to Philly,” Brent said.
With his D.O. degree in hand, in the early 80s, he brought his family to South Bend and became the first osteopathic resident at Memorial Hospital. When it came time to decide where to practice medicine, he settled on New Carlisle, and stayed there for almost three decades. Inabnit’s first office in New Carlisle was nothing but a tiny reception area and two exam rooms, Brent said. He later built a larger office, where he saw patients dawn to dusk and sometimes ran hours behind, according to those who knew him, because he refused to turn anybody away and spent extra time chatting with patients about their lives and families. Inabnit was an old-fashioned, jack-of-all-trades “country doctor,” Higginson said. He stitched up wounds. He set broken bones. He delivered babies. He made house calls. “He just became the legend of New Carlisle,” Higginson said. “Everybody knew my dad.” Inabnit expected hard work from his staff. He dictated orders so fast his assistants could barely keep up. He even expected a lot from his patients, sometimes getting angry when they canceled appointments or good-naturedly scolding them for going too long between checkups. But he held himself to the same standards. It wasn’t uncommon for him to take calls from patients while at dinner, his family said. “He loved it and he lived it,” Higginson said. Soon after opening his office in New Carlisle, Inabnit began throwing an annual summer picnic that started as a modest cookout but grew to a bash that drew hundreds and featured live music, catered chicken and door prizes from area businesses. The picnic was ostensibly for Inabnit’s patients and their families, but everyone was welcome. When Curtis took over as head football coach at New Prairie, he asked Inabnit to serve as team doctor. He said Inabnit, feeling he lacked expertise, read up on sports medicine and eventually traveled to all the team’s games. Anytime a player got hurt at practice, Inabnit dropped what he was doing and made time to look at the injury, said Curtis, a hall-of-fame coach who went on to lead successful programs at Mishawaka and Warsaw. As a fan, the doctor brought the same energy that marked his work. One of his granddaughters, Grace Inabnit, 21, recalled he would make such a ruckus at her basketball games, yelling and stomping, that her teammates at first wondered “who’s that old man in the bleachers.” At New Prairie football games, Inabnit ran up and down the sidelines during plays and had to be restrained from charging onto the field after touchdowns. After one big win, Curtis said, the doctor started handing out high-end cigars to the coaching staff, until Curtis reminded him they couldn’t light up the Macanudos at a high school event. “I said, ‘Doc, put those away,’” Curtis recalled. “‘This is not the NFL.’” Inabnit bought ankle braces for the football team, Curtis said, and when the year-end banquet neared, the doctor would whip out his personal checkbook to pay for the event, though he never wanted anybody else to know. ‘He was just a blast’ While pushing his family to work hard, Inabnit demonstrated lavish generosity. When Higginson was in high school, she said, her father bought her a car but required her to earn it by working at his office. He held report-card conferences with his grandchildren, asking about their grades class-by-class and doling out both praise and suggestions for improvement, Brent said. Every year, as summer waned, Inabnit would take all the grandchildren to Michigan City for back-to-school shopping. For birthdays and Christmas, he took each of his children and grandkids on a shopping spree at the mall. Christmas and birthday trips ended with a visit to Starbucks, a tradition he called “tea and crumpets” because he was fond of nicknames and pet phrases. “He was just a blast. Energetic and animated and funny and smart,” said Inabnit’s wife, Marybeth. “Just a dynamic, beautiful person.” ‘Love you more’ Higginson said her father only semi-retired when, in his later years, he stopped commuting from Granger to New Carlisle and instead began seeing patients at the main South Bend Clinic building. A colleague at South Bend Clinic, Dr. Jim Harris, said Inabnit remained “one of the hardest-working doctors I’ve ever met.” “He was so dedicated that, when his patients had surgery, he went to the operating room with them to see what happened,” Harris said. “That’s really unusual for a primary-care doctor.” Harris said Inabnit had a special commitment to seniors. He started each day with rounds at nursing homes, typically not arriving at the office until well after 10 a.m.Late in his career, Inabnit combined his construction experience and medical expertise to build five nursing homes in Granger, Mishawaka, Fort Wayne and Chesterton. Inabnit held holiday parties at BellTower Health & Rehabilitation Center, in Granger, bringing in a piano player and mingling with residents. “My dad brought electricity wherever he went,” Brent said. “He would walk into whichever nursing home it was, and you would just see people smile.” He later sold all the nursing homes except for BellTower. But his dedication to older patients didn’t waver. Inabnit’s loved ones don’t know exactly how he contracted the coronavirus. But some family members believe he was likely infected while seeing patients at the nursing homes. Marybeth said he was seeing COVID-19 patients up until his own diagnosis. She said the couple dined out for Thanksgiving, but kept to themselves and went to a restaurant that had partitions separating tables. Family members said Inabnit had no underlying conditions other than being 76. Marybeth said she thought he would survive the virus because he was so strong for his age. He was a “beast at the gym,” she said, and kept up with her even though she was a marathon runner and 13 years his junior. But by the time Inabnit was admitted to Memorial Hospital, he had developed double pneumonia, with fluid filling both lungs, Higginson said. The last time Higginson communicated with her father, over FaceTime, he couldn’t speak. He could only give her a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. She tried to encourage him, but had “such a pit in my stomach” after the call. On the morning of Dec. 11, Brent texted his last three words to his father: “I love you.”
Inabnit replied with three words of his own: “Love you more.” Dr. I’s heart stopped that afternoon. Inabnit’s family has mixed feelings about the rounds he kept making. On one hand, his death seems like a profound injustice. “The horrible thing is this man died alone,” Marybeth said. “This man who gave up so much for other people.” But they know there’s nothing they could have said or done to persuade him to stop working.
“He’s a hero. He died doing what he loved,” Higginson said. “As much as it hurts, I know he was helping people to the very end. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.”