It's still King Cotton here," says William Place, mayor of Wilmot, Ark., as he drives the short distance from his house to the aging Deyampert Gin. Most of the cotton trailers that are used to haul the bolls to the local gins sit idle in the fields, their fenced wire walls speckled with tufts of white. Route 165, running north-south through this part of the cotton belt, is littered with cottontail puffs left over from the fall picking season.
Wilmot (pop. 1,202), just five miles from the Louisiana border, is a farm town: cotton, beans, rice and some cattle. A railroad track runs down the main street past a pair of gas stations, an auto-supply store, Jane's Grocery, the Wilmot Bank, the Bennett Pharmacy and Aunt Martha's Antique Shop. Next to the police station (one chief, two patrol officers) on the west side of the street is Lake Enterprise, so low in this drought year that the tangled roots of the cypress trees are visible above the water line. One lone fisherman pilots his boat across the darkening surface. "It's best to keep on driving," a young Wilmot woman advises cheerfully, suggesting that there is nothing much in Wilmot to detain a passing stranger. But that has not proved true in the case of Dr. Thieu Bui.
Three years ago, Wilmot, like thousands of other rural towns, all over America, had no doctor. The last M.D. had moved off to Memphis (more profitable), and the nearest was 30 miles away. But on the other side of the world Saigon was falling. Among the thousands of refugees aboard the final military flights in April 1975 were hundreds of doctors, bound first for American bases in the Far East, then for U.S. camps. Bill Johnson, a wealthy farmer and president of Wilmot's doctorless Medical Center Board, saw an opportunity. In May 1975 he went to Fort Chaffee, Ark., on a recruiting mission. There he eagerly agreed to sponsor Dr. Thieu Bui and Dr. Ton That De, both former South Vietnamese army officers.
In June the two doctors checked out of the camp and moved with their families into a couple of rent-free houses owned by the Wilmot public school. Townspeople collected donations of furniture, clothing and kitchen items to help the new doctors and their families get started. Johnson helped them obtain temporary medical licenses. The town applied for funding from the National Health Service Corps, which provides needed health care in underserved areas of the country. "The first day the clinic opened again," recalls Mayor Place, "people were standing in line."
The Wilmot Doctors Clinic is situated in half of a shabby, cinder-block building just off the main street. In the other half is a nursing home owned by the mayor. Since Dr. De left for Michigan in December 1977, Dr. Bui has been running the clinic alone. In May, with the approval of the town, he resigned from the Health Service Corps and the clinic is now a private facility. "He has his own business now. How large it grows depends on how hard he wants to work," says Mayor Place. "We are trying to make him as happy as we can."
Most days Dr. Bui, 44, a slight, shy man with a boyish cowlick, is up by 6 a.m. and on his way in his 1975 Ford Granada to Chicot Memorial Hospital in Lake Village, Ark., 35 miles away. By 10 a.m. he is back in his clinic.