Dr. Stanley Truhlsen will probably celebrate his 100th birthday Friday by cutting a cake and maybe watching a football game.
A professor emeritus and former chairman of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s ophthalmology department, Truhlsen grew up in Herman, Nebraska, during the Great Depression. It was a time when people bartered garden produce for nails and other goods at his father’s hardware store.
A nationally recognized ophthalmologist and namesake of the Truhlsen Eye Institute, Truhlsen said he has had some of what he calls “Truhlsen luck” throughout his life. That includes the connections that helped get him into an already full medical school class and being among a group of physicians recruited to attend a meeting with a then-30-year-old investor named Warren Buffett.
At the time, Buffett was already a patient and friend of Truhlsen’s.
“I liked the way he talked, and that he was smart,” Truhlsen recalled. “So I, along with a few others, invested with him. And he did well. That was Truhlsen luck that I met him.”
Investing with Buffett, he said, allowed him to do some things he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do.
Those things include providing support for Omaha institutions such as the Henry Doorly Zoo and the Durham Museum, as well as making contributions toward several initiatives at UNMC and its clinical partner, Nebraska Medicine. Key among those is the eye institute, which opened in 2013 near 40th and Leavenworth Streets. Patients are treated at the institute, and new ophthalmologists are trained there.
“That’s an important part of carrying on my chosen profession,” Truhlsen said. “It’s very satisfying.”
Buffett, in a statement provided by UNMC, said his relationship with Truhlsen means a lot to him.
“I particularly admire what Stan has done for his community,” he said. “I just hope when I hit 100 that I can be the same cheerful and useful citizen that he is.”
Truhlsen recalls the struggles of the Great Depression. His father’s hardware store was dependent on trade with small businesses and farmers.
“But the farmers were all having trouble because their wheat and corn was of little value,” he said. “Some of them even burned it instead of coal.”
After Truhlsen graduated from high school, a friend of his father’s urged more schooling. The friend was the president of a bank that had folded during those hard years.
“He said to my dad, ‘You send that kid to school. You send him to college.’ My dad cashed in on some of his life insurance,” Truhlsen said.
In 1937, his first year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, tuition, room and board and other expenses cost about $500.
Truhlsen earned his degree in 1941, then applied for medical school at UNMC. But the class had just filled.
“I didn’t know which way to go,” he said.
He then had another bit of luck. In college, he had met and begun dating Ruth Haney, whom he would marry in 1943. Her father was Dr. W.P. Haney, an Omaha ophthalmologist.
Haney advised the young Truhlsen and his father to speak with a doctor in Blair whom Truhlsen’s father knew.
They drove to the doctor’s office and explained their predicament. The doctor picked up the phone and dialed the dean of UNMC’s College of Medicine. Truhlsen said he didn’t know it at the time, but the doctor and the dean had been classmates in 1902.
“He hung up the phone, turned to me and said, ‘OK, be there Monday morning at 8 a.m. for medical school.’ So there I went, another piece of Truhlsen luck.”
Barb Mitchell of Dallas, the youngest of Stanley and the late Ruth Truhlsen’s four children, said her father’s positive attitude has also contributed to his success.
“He’s so positive all the time,” she said.
Mitchell said she has asked her father how he maintains that attitude. “He said, ‘Well, it’s a choice.’ ”
Because of World War II, Truhlsen’s medical school class was the first to finish in three years instead of four, with no summer vacations. Medical students were allowed to continue their education because doctors would be needed after the war. But the Army also recruited those who could pass a physical, paying their tuition in return for two years’ service.