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ACCENT 4The Orange County Register HOME AND GARDEN Saturday, Jan. 13, 1996HISTORY: O.C.’s first female doctor shares a bond with the woman who thought her story worth preserving.By JOHN WESTCOTTThe Orange County RegisterDr. Willela Waffle gave her life for medicine. Adeline Walker saved it for history.From the nights she slept on her narrow porch so patients could call up to her, to the many occasions when she treated poor patients without pay, up to the day she died — collapsing just before delivering a baby — Waffle invariably placed her patients’ health above her own.That final surgery was performed in 1924. Six decades later, Adeline Walker dedicated the rest of her life to preserving the legacy of Orange County’s first female doctor, almost single-handedly saving Waffle’s dilapidated 1889 house and restoring its splendor.Today the Howe-Waffle houseis a splash of Victorian color in a gray urban landscape and a monument to the tenacity of both women.The halls of the Howe-Waffle house are colorful and ornate, but it’s the stories that breathe life into them.two feisty women: Howe-Waffle\ ’;*-Vter®»pTHE DOCTOR: Married twice, Dr. Waffle often worked without pay and even took needy patients into her home.The tale has pioneering spirit, hardship, triumph — even a touch of unspeakable scandal.The doctor was born Willela Earhart in 1854 in Virginia, the eldest of eight. The family migrated to California, where she studied literature and medicine in San Francisco and married Dr. Alvin Jared Howe in 1874.She taught briefly at Bolsa School in Santa Ana, then returned to Chicago to finish her medical degree. She opened her Santa Ana practice in 1886.The doctors forged a life together, completing their 2£-sto-ry, 12-room house at Bush and Seventh streets the year OrangeHOUSE OF HEALING: The Howe-Waffle home in Santa Ana's Nob Hill neighborhood, pictured in 1889, served as home and occasional infirmary during Willela Waffle's years as a doctor in nascent Orange County,County was born: 1889.Howe is largely a mystery, though he served as Santa Ana’s second mayor. Most accounts say only that he left for San Francisco, Waffle divorced him and he died a few years lat er.There was more to it.A year after the house was finished, the county’s first grand jury indicted Howe on charges of performing an abortion. He was acquitted, but the event left such a taint he moved north. His wife divorced him on grounds of desertion in 1897, later marrying Edson Waffle.Dr. Waffle had already proved her hardiness in her choice of a “male” profession. Tending to cracked heads, snakebites and contagious diseases in a frontier atmosphere required hard-boiled mettle.Orange County had only13,500 residents in 1890; barely 3,000 lived in Santa Ana. Reaching patients often meant treacherous journeys by horse and buggy over miles of rutted dirt or mud that passed for roads.“I can recall the days when a doctor, in order to drive to Los Angeles from Westminster, had to break his own road through the cactus, the willows and the mustard,” she told the Santa Ana Register in the early 1920s.“The winter rains brought floods that were too awful to recall. Many is the day I have driven my horses through mud and water up to their waistswith the flood creeping in at the bottom of the buggy.”Calling on patients was even tougher when epidemics raged. She figured her buggy covered 1,000 miles during a bad case of “grippe,” or influenza.She frequently treated the poor without remuneration, even taking patients into her home if they had no place to stay.Waffle’s love of gadgetry is everywhere in evidence, from the “hearing tube” strung from her office to her bedroom, to the vent wafting the oven’s warmth to the bathroom.She administered so many births that the progeny were affectionately called “Waffle babies.” More than 1,000 people fit that description, many of whom still live in Orange County.Adeline Walker was just a girl in Waffle’s last years. Shenever entered the doctor’s house but often looked at it.Its history was about to be dashed to splinters in 1974, when a planned street widening drew Walker, then 70, into the house’s cause. A year of negotiations saved it under Walker’s new Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society.Over the next 10 years, Walker oversaw the house’s restoration.Walker died in 1985 at 81, but her legacy lives on, just as Waffle’s does.“She admired the doctor very much,” Marsh said. “This house was her whole life.”
Newspaper Details
Santa Ana Orange County Register
Santa Ana, California, US
Sat, Jan 13, 1996
Page 33
Full Page
Clipped by
Ross T.
CA, USA 31 Mar 2022
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