The memories take place in a car or a hospital.
Birthdays. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Packing up leftovers, paying the bill and jetting out of a restaurant. Eating from a to-go box in a hospital waiting room. Coloring books while sitting in the car.
When Dr. David Ruiz came to Vancouver in 1980, he practiced family medicine in the only way he knew how: by making his patients feel like family, too.
That meant Ruiz, who practices family medicine at PeaceHealth’s location on Main Street in Vancouver, was always on call. It didn’t matter the occasion. Ruiz liked to spend the day with his children on their birthdays, and he remembers, on multiple occasions, cutting their birthday breakfast short to deliver a baby.
“If the call came for me to get to the hospital and deliver a baby, our children will tell you that on more than one occasion, they had their birthday breakfast in a Styrofoam container while they were waiting for me to complete a delivery,” Ruiz, 68, recalled. “As the beeper went off, my wife would say, ‘OK, kids. Pack up what you have. Go find a dessert. Pack it up, too. We’re on our way.’ Those were the early days.”
Earlier this month , Ruiz, a Ridgefield resident and the medical director of PeaceHealth’s Family Medicine of Southwest Washington clinic, was honored by the Hispanic Metropolitan Chamber with the Bravo Award, which celebrates the contributions of Latinos locally and nationally.
Ruiz received the award for his contributions to improving the health of the Latino community. Erin Clinton is one of Ruiz’s three kids, born to Midge, his wife of almost 43 years. Clinton remembers waiting on her dad in the car or waiting rooms as he visited patients. Sometimes Clinton would even get to do in-home visits with her father.
“What I learned is that there’s more to life than myself and the people nearest to me,” Clinton said. “People are important, and having compassion is important. It’s about creating a community where everybody helps each other.”
Early life
Growing up in Tucson, Ariz., Ruiz gravitated toward healing at a young age. He remembers seeing a kid with hydrocephalus, a large head from fluid buildup, in the hospital, crying out. Ruiz said that sight evoked a deep sense of sadness, but also compassion. When he was about 6, his grandmothers predicted he would become a doctor.
Ruiz’s grandparents all came from the state of Sonora in Mexico and settled in Arizona. Ruiz’s dad was from Christmas, Ariz., a small mining town that’s now a ghost town, and his mother was from Tucson. Ruiz’s mom worked for an insurance company, and his father, after serving in the Air Force, became an aircraft mechanic and worked in a boneyard, where they stored decommissioned airplanes at Davis Monthan Air Force Base.
Ruiz’s sister got a master’s degree and went on to become the director of human resources for the city of Tucson, and his brother spent time as a Spanish teacher and baseball coach, as well as performing professionally in the house band at the Mexico Pavilion at Epcot Theme Park. After high school, Ruiz moved farther northwest to Stanford University in California, and then attended medical school at the University of Washington before settling in Clark County.
While his wife is from Southwest Washington, Ruiz was initially professionally disappointed with the move because he felt like he couldn’t serve the Latino community in a particularly white Clark County.
Within the first month, however, he noticed there was a Latino community in the area.
“I discovered that in this really homogeneous, white neck of the woods, there was diversity. It was just really hidden,” Ruiz said. “There was a flood of patients into our practice to see me.”
Ruiz said those patients didn’t necessarily speak to him about barriers to care or discrimination, but they did extend gratitude for having a doctor who spoke Spanish.
“They were grateful to connect in their native language with someone who looked like them, una cara familiar, a familiar face,” Ruiz said. “It’s a lot easier to communicate with somebody who can speak the language, even try to speak the language.”
Elizabeth Gomez, now 41, remembers that feeling. She started seeing Ruiz when she was 7. He would do in-home visits for her grandmother, and at one point Gomez’s whole family was under Ruiz’s care. She remembers thinking, “He’s just like us” when first meeting Ruiz.
“There wasn’t a lot of people helping underserved communities here,” Gomez said. “He’s been serving the marginalized for decades.”
Ruiz said serving the Latino community was important to him, because those are his roots.
“In my culture, you don’t forget your roots. You don’t walk away from your roots. You are part of the neighborhood, the family, the culture,” Ruiz said. “You just can’t forget where you come from. There should always be gratitude. Others sacrificed to get me where I am, and giving back is just part of who I need to be, always.”
Musical roots
Ruiz’s roots also rest with music. He was an original member of Los Changuitos Feos (the Ugly Little Monkeys), the first youth mariachi band in the U.S., which was formed in 1964. Ruiz went to Chicago and Mexico with the band. He played on a float in President Richard Nixon’s inauguration parade in 1969. The band once played for an hour with famed jazz musician Herb Alpert at A&M Records in California. He almost appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he said a musician’s union blocked the band from playing because their members were so young, and not part of the union.
Ruiz said his time in the band, which lasted about five years, coincided with a time of unrest and hardship in the Latino community across the U.S. He said their music meant more than fun. The band did community outreach, and its scholarship fund helped musically educate hundreds across the nation.
“It was a mission more than anything else,” Ruiz said. “When most people think about mariachi, they think about three guys playing music in a cantina, and you can enjoy some music while you have your tacos. No, this was way more than that. This was about cultural awakening, connectedness, learning about discipline, playing in groups, being part of an ensemble, being part of something bigger than yourself. We were helping to change our community, and in essence, change the world.”
Los Changuitos Feos was started by The Rev. Charles Rourke, a jazz-pianist priest from New York. Rourke would eventually be found to have sexually abused members of the band. Ruiz said during his time, people knew Rourke had issues with alcohol use and his temper, but he said he wishes he and others could have been more vigilant about investigating the behavior. He said that at the time, awareness about pedophilia, particularly with priests, was much lower than it is now.
Overall, Ruiz considers the experience meaningful to himself, even though he regrets not doing more.
“The total musical experience, no,” I don’t regret that, Ruiz said. “Being part of something that was so unique and that started something so big, no. Not being aggressive with calling out behavior, calling out the sins of the priest. Yeah, I have regrets. I often ask myself if I could have, by really acting boldly …if I could have helped to prevent some of the behavior. It’s still with me, but I think all of us had to figure out how to learn from the experience and be better the next time around, and be vigilant on behalf of others.”
