From an early age, Dr Donald Hartley had an interest in medicine. Growing up in Adelaide, he remembers catching the tram to town and as it trundled passed the Calvary Hospital, he would gaze up to the theatre windows thinking how he’d like to be involved in whatever was going on behind those big frosted glass walls.

“Dad used to give me a few shillings and I’d catch the tram to go into Adelaide to the pie cart in King William Street and purchase a billy full of pea soup and a few pies which I took home and made into ‘pie floaters’,’’ Don recalled.

“Pea soup in the bowl, the pie upside down in the soup, then tomato sauce and white vinegar – beautiful – I still go there 50 years later,” the 64-year-old GP laughed.

After graduating from Woodville High School, Don enrolled at Adelaide University to study medicine.

After seven years, including one year of residency at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH), he moved to Mildura.

“Vasa Skorupanovic and I did our residency together and drove up to Mildura one very hot day at the request of Dr Bob Koehne with a view to joining him in his Langtree Avenue practice.

For more of this story, purchase your copy of Tuesday’s Sunraysia Daily 22/9/2009.