Clark County's Dr. Harold Moberly decides it's time to end his practice

Winchester and the world has changed quite a bit since Oct. 15, 1958, when Dr. Harold Moberly started practicing medicine on Lexington Avenue.

When he retired at the end of 2012, Moberly had practiced medicine for 57 years and been the family doctor for Clark Countians for 54 years.

Moberly was raised in Madison County on a farm between Waco and a community called Moberly. He excelled at sports, notably baseball, basketball and football while attending Madison High School.
Former George Rogers Clark High School boys’ basketball coach Guy Strong competed against Moberly while attending school in Irvine.

“We were both in the old 11th region then,” Strong said. “He was a great basketball player, excellent baseball player and a fine football player, too.”

Moberly made use of his athletic skills beyond just forging friendships like the one he still shares with Strong. He converted an all-state basketball talent into a scholarship at Eastern Kentucky University, playing for Paul S. McBrayer.

The next stop was medical school at the University of Louisville, then a turn as the division surgeon for the 33rd Air Division Air Defense Command at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma.

Finally, Moberly settled in Winchester, where he would be for more than half a century.

A new home

In many ways, the marriage of Moberly and Winchester has been perfect from the start.

He was looking for a place near home that wasn’t exactly home.

“I was a little hesitant about going back to my hometown,” Moberly said. “But I wanted to be close enough. My parents still lived on the farm.”

Enter Bill Denner, a family friend and a pharmacist, who mentioned two doctors in Winchester who were looking for a third to join their practice.

“I always liked Winchester,” Moberly said. “So I came over.”

So in 1958, Moberly arrived at what would be the home of his practice for 54 years. He joined Dr. John

Hummel and Dr. Robert Brashear.

It wasn’t long before Hummel left the practice. Brashear and Moberly opted to keep the two-man operation, and that’s how it stayed until Brashear’s death in the late 1980s.

“Dr. Brashear and I were pretty compatible and we just continued on,” Moberly said. “It was working pretty good, and we just didn’t want to change.”

50 years of stories

“You see about everything,” Moberly said. “I think I’ve seen everything.”

And Moberly is quick to share a story about it. Whether it’s the wild locations of tattoos or sharing a quick anecdote about growing up in Madison County or even retelling an episode involving one of his patients, Moberly has a host of stories.

One in particular comes from something Moberly did quite a bit of, namely delivering babies. While Moberly says Brashear handled most of the deliveries, he still believes his own tally numbers into the thousands.

During a two-week period when Brashear and his family went to the Seattle World’s Fair, Moberly was tasked with dealing with all the deliveries.

“It seemed like every one we had to deliver came late at night. I finally got home at night, and I laid down and went to sleep and at 2 in the morning,¿I got a call,” Moberly said. “I got in the car and backed right through the garage door. Wham!”