Edward Brundick turns 92 on Dec. 28, but he’s been fully retired for only seven years. The surgeon, who long worked for Orthopaedic Associ- ates, Inc., and also as a University of Southern Indiana athletic department physician, remains active and involved with the cause on which he first built his career — a devotion to veterans.
Raised in Pacific, Missouri, Brundick studied medicine at the University of Missouri in Columbia and was drafted into the U.S. Army at age 29. He practiced medicine for nine years at military facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Denver, Colorado, then ran the orthopedic department at the former Bitburg Air Base’s hospital in Germany. It was at the middle of those three stops where Brundick was at the bedside of hundreds of young servicemen who had lost limbs in the Vietnam War. “We had such a problem with depression,” Brundick recalls. “If you let them, they would stay in bed all day with the lights turned off.”
Guest speakers, comedians, and models visited the wounded military members at Denver’s former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center. But Brundick says nothing raised their spirits like an amputee skiing club that he and other physicians there started in 1966 with a boost from Willy Schaeffler, an accomplished German-American skier and well-known coach in Denver. “He was known internationally,” Brundick says. “We didn’t have any clothes or skis, and he got on the phone with a guy who was CEO of (sporting goods company) HEAD, and he sent everything free.”
Brundick left the Army in 1971 and looked for stateside opportunities. He turned down an offer from the University of Colorado to work at Evansville’s Welborn Clinic and settle here with his wife, Holley, and their three children. The transition from military to civilian medical practice wasn’t difficult, but now out of uniform, “I had to think about what I was going to wear in the morning,” Brundick recalls. He stayed at Welborn Clinic for 16 months before joining Deaconess-affiliated Orthopaedic Associates. He retired the first time at age 72, resumed work at 76 at the local Veterans Affairs clinic, then stepped away from practicing for good at age 85.
In retirement, Brundick enjoys golf, family, and supporting the Evansville Wartime Museum. Although joining the military wasn’t his initial impulse, Brundick says he is proud of his service and wants all veterans to be honored appropriately. He says many military members returning from Vietnam were treated badly, and that never should be the case.
“When I was drafted, like all draftees, I would have said if I didn’t have to go, I wouldn’t have gone. I’m not that big of a hero,” he says. “But it was one of the greatest opportunities of my life to serve my country. It was fortuitous that one of the things I was forced to do turned out to be so good.”
