Dr. Manuel Kelley missed a lot of classes before graduating high school because he was needed on the family farm, but he was an excellent scientist and wanted to help people.
Kelley, 75, has had a long career as a family physician and continues to work part-time at Jefferson Comprehensive Care System in College Station.
When his mother became ill and could no longer care for him and his siblings, he moved from Memphis to a farm near the community of Turkey Scratch to live with relatives.
“We actually went to school in Marvell,” says Kelley, who was just 4 years old when he moved to a farm in the small community on the border of Phillips and Lee counties. “We were raised by my father’s oldest brother and my grandmother’s sister-in-law.”
As a child, he helped with the 40-hectare farm, raising cattle and growing soybeans, and harvesting okra, cucumbers and watermelons, which the family brought to market by the truckload.
“Every morning before we went to school, we had to milk two cows. That’s how we got our milk and butter. And sometimes we had to go out into the fields and work before we went to school,” he says. “Back then, we had two school years. You had a summer term and picked cotton and then you went back and had a fall term in November.”
He graduated from Marvell High School in 1966, shortly after the integration of schools, and attended Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff).
“I originally wanted to be a pharmacist or even an architect,” he says. “By my second or third year of college, I knew that general practitioners were in particular demand. I knew that you could always be good at it and that there would always be a need for it.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in chemistry in 1970 and then completed two years of graduate study in science and economics at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
“When I started there, I was the only black student in the business classes,” he says. “After two years, I applied to medical school and was accepted to the University of Colorado in Denver.”
His training was funded through financial aid and scholarships, and in return he committed to practicing for four years in an area where there was a shortage of physicians.
“Phillips County and Lee (County) were considered to be areas with a shortage of physicians,” he says. “After that, I went back and did a residency at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in family medicine.”
At that time, Kelley was already working as medical director of the Lee County Cooperative Clinic.
“The Lee County Cooperative Clinic was probably one of the first health centers in Arkansas,” he says. “I came in as a primary care physician and the medical director left right when I got there, and they needed me as both a physician and medical director. This was just after my internship. There were a couple other physicians working with me. I learned as I went along how to be a medical director while also caring for patients.”
At that time, he was a staff physician at Lee Memorial Hospital in Marianna and worked in emergency rooms in Clinton, Fordyce, Forrest City, Mena, Paris, Pocahontas, Osceola, Prescott and Wynne.
“Until 2004, I also worked as a campus physician at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, my alma mater,” he says. “Some of the students I visited were the children of students I had gone to school with.”
Some of Kelley’s colleagues retired from medicine at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I was at the point where I could have retired at that point, but I felt called to just stay there,” he says. “I was a little scared, but you have to kind of fall back on your faith.”
Despite advances in treatments and technology over the years, the reasons for most patient visits have remained the same.
“There are a lot of cases of high blood pressure and diabetes, chronic diseases like heart and lung disease and arthritis, so a lot of the same diseases,” he says. “Changing lifestyle – eating habits, exercise, things like that – has always been a struggle. There’s too much sugar, too much salt and tobacco products that are on the market today that still cause these problems.”
In the 1980s, Kelley took part in traditional medicine tours of Egypt, Ethiopia and Kenya.
“I was also with a team of surgeons in the Soviet Union. We were in Moscow, Leningrad and Sochi in the 1980s, where the Olympic Games were held,” he says. “Last year in December we were in Ghana for a week around Christmas. This year we were in Dubai.”
When he’s not working, Kelley enjoys woodworking, photography, and traveling. He and his wife, Charlene, have three sons. He also makes time for regular visits to the Hays Senior Center in North Little Rock, swimming, working out on the exercise equipment, and occasionally taking classes.
“I’ve been taking one of the yoga classes,” he says. “As for eating habits, I try to eat more whole foods. So I talk to my patients about healthy eating and exercise and work with their schedule.”
If you have an interesting story about an Arkansas resident age 70 or older, please call (501) 425-7228 or email:
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