Paul C. Marston was born in Brownfield, ME April 16, 1900 to Dr. Clarence H. and Lula (Richardson) Marston.
He graduated from Fryeburg Academy in 1917 and Bowdoin College in 1921.
He taught for a few years at Franklin High School, Bean Memorial High School in Brownfield, Potter Academy at Sebago and Kennett High School in Conway, NH.
It was during this period in 1924 he married Sylvia H. Brooks. They had two daughters, Sylvia (Marston) Garner and Mary (Marston) Waye.
In 1928 he decided to become a doctor and enrolled at the medical college of the University of Vermont graduating cum laude in 1932. He interned at the Maine General Hospital in Portland, ME and set up practice at Freedom, NH for four years. In 1937 he came to Kezar Falls where he practiced for the remainder of his career.
During WWII Dr. Marston joined the 67th Maine Medical Unit and served for three years in a Taunton, England hospital. He left active duty as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps and resumed his practice. His offices were upstairs from the living quarters of his modest white house in Kezar Falls, a small village of some 2,500 people. His wife, Sylvia, answered the phone when he was out and helped in his office.
Dr. Marston was an old-fashioned country doctor, one of the few left by the 1970’s and ‘80s. Several articles were written about him at that time. One written in 1981 had the following to say about him. -----
“Paul Marston is an 81-year-old doctor who still goes out in the dead of night to make house calls. This feisty great grandfather is the only doctor in a rural area to thousands of patients who have come to depend on the kindhearted man as a lifeline to health.
Despite blizzards and freezing winter nights, despite knee deep snow, they know when somebody’s sick the Doc will always show up. ‘I always go when I’m called’, said the kindly country doctor who has been looking after folks around Kezar Falls, Me for more than 40 years.
‘Medicine should be practiced the way I practice it’, he said. ‘The public wants a little tender loving care and I give it to them. When people are sick and call at night I’ve got to go see them. What else are they going to do?’….. ‘A doctor works for the benefit of his patients and you can’t do it without making house calls.’
So, half a dozen times a day or more, Dr. Marston grabs his weathered black bag and hops into one of his 3 cars – all equipped with 2-way radios, so he can keep in touch with his office in case of an emergency.
He winds his way up and down mountain roads until he arrives at the home of a woman too ill or too old to drive to his office or at the bedside of a little boy two feverish to leave the house. And even if the drive is 20 miles long and the freezing wintery New England wind howls outside, he still only charges $20 for a house call. ‘I’ll never get rich, but I have a lot of fun and I was able to educate my daughters’, says the man who has 2 daughters, 8 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren.
Dr. Marston has delivered thousands of babies and treated three generations of the same families. Patients never forget the incredibly caring man. He gets many letters a year from grateful patients who have long since moved from the hills Maine.
Doctor Marston was active in local affairs, was a past president of the Cumberland County Medical Association, the American Academy of General Practitioners and he was on the staff of the Maine Medical Center.
When time permitted, he enjoyed fishing, hunting and gardening and his camp in West Baldwin.
He died Oct. 4, 1985. His wife died in 2004. Both are buried in the Kezar Falls Burial Grounds.
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