Obituary of Oscar Prada

 

Oscar Prada, MD, father of four, local physician, and longtime Dublin, GA resident, died in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 29. He was 89 years old.

A native of Popayán, Colombia, where he was a surgeon and hospital director, Dr. Prada and his wife, Margot, immigrated to the United States in 1970, landing first in New York and then moving their way southward. In 1974, with four small kids, they settled in Dublin, the town they would call home for the next four and a half decades. 

Initially, Dr. Prada took over a downtown medical practice. After two years, he took a position at the local veterans’ hospital, where he treated patients for another two decades, retiring in 1995.

At home, Dr. Prada was not given much to discussing his work life. His family, however, enjoyed the smiles, greetings, and gratitude expressed by patients and their families around town. One appreciative patient, to the chagrin of the Pradas’ neighbors each daybreak for months afterward, delivered a rooster to the family home. 

Despite a strict and serious public demeanor, Dr. Prada was a warm, affectionate father and husband. A lover of science, nature, and art – and a proud immigrant who relied on discipline and education to escape a poor childhood – he and Mrs. Prada ensured that Nylce, their daughter, and sons, Oscar E., Paulo, and Julian, grew up to share the same values. 

Born in the countryside of southwestern Colombia in 1932, Dr. Prada at age eight lost his father, who died suddenly after a horseback ride. Sent by his mother to live with distant relatives closer to decent schools, he grew up with a variety of aunts, uncles, and cousins, before earning a scholarship to study medicine at the Universidad del Cauca. After certification, he won a World Health Organization grant to study hospital administration in São Paulo, Brazil. 

Upon his return to Colombia, he practiced all manner of medicine. 

As a family practitioner in Popayán, he made house calls and delivered babies, including his own first two children. As a surgeon, he treated bullet wounds and far worse for the local police, by then enmeshed in the drug violence and civil unrest that ultimately led him and Mrs. Prada, like many Colombians of their generation, to emigrate. 

Dr. Prada’s initial adjustment to the Deep South wasn’t always easy. 

When he acquired his first practice in Dublin, he was surprised to find the waiting room was still segregated. Some patients struggled with his Spanish accent. Klan rallies in Wrightsville during the family’s early years in Middle Georgia made him more wary around locals than Mrs. Prada, a born extrovert, could abide.

But soon, Mary Scarborough, a trusted assistant, and Ray, her husband, all but adopted the family, becoming close friends to Dr. and Mrs. Prada and surrogate grandparents for their children. If the Pradas remained in Dublin, and their four Latino kids grew up as southern as the children of families here for generations before, the Scarboroughs were the reason. 

Dr. Prada had his quirks.

Never part of the gang of fathers who ruled little league baseball and other area sports, he instead shuttled the boys, before cable TV, to Atlanta to watch closed-circuit World Cup matches. When Dublin schools finally introduced soccer, he watched from a distance, often alone, emerging only at halftime to give pointers for the second half. 

At times he struggled with Middle Georgia’s blue laws. He famously, in family lore, told a Western Sizzlin’ waitress, after she inquired about his hip flask: “This is medicine.” 

In 1986, as Haley’s Comet raced across the heavens, he made a point of waking the children, sleepy and reluctant, to see it from dark pastures halfway to Adrian. When Hale-Bopp passed a decade later, the kids now grown and far away, he made the pre-dawn treks alone, capturing vivid photos of the comet published on the front page of this newspaper.

His passion for learning was obvious to anyone who ever set foot in the room Mrs. Prada eventually surrendered to his heaps of magazines, medical literature, and scientific journals. That passion helped their kids flourish in fields as disparate as education, shipping, journalism, and engineering. Though they all left Middle Georgia, sometimes for other continents, they always came home, eventually with four grandkids to sit on his knee. 

As Dr. Prada aged, the onset of dementia complicating heart disease and other maladies that eventually claimed him, his children encouraged him and Mrs. Prada to move closer to one of them. He only recently did so, near Nylce in Minneapolis, and only because his illnesses left no choice. 

“Este es mi pueblito,” he always said, not wanting to leave. “This is my little town.” 

The family will hold a private celebration of Dr. Prada’s life later this year. Any memorial gifts can be made to the American Heart Association, UNICEF, or an environmental organization of the donor’s choice.