Bob Schultz ’69, chief of the medical staff at the Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center, will be retiring in April. He has been a doctor at Kaiser for 30 years, and he has delivered about 2,500 babies and supervised 300 doctors and 1,100 other workers at the Santa Rosa complex. Schultz’s 30-year career as an obstetrician-gynecologist and administrator parallels Kaiser’s growth from a clinic at Creekside Plaza in 1980 to a medical megacomplex that handles 141,000 patients at facilities in Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park and Petaluma, accounting for about 44 percent of the county’s privately insured residents. Greg Rosa, a Sebastopol family practice physician, said that Schultz is as responsible as anyone for Kaiser’s success in Sonoma County.

 

Schultz worked in his father’s butcher shop as a teenager, as a park ranger while attending Santa Clara University, and as an electrical engineer for Raytheon in Massachusetts before finding his calling. He enrolled in UC Berkeley’s public health graduate program in 1970, and then switched to medical school at UC Davis and finished there in 1976. His stint in private practice in Lebanon, Ore., lasted just six months as sawmill shutdowns crushed the local economy, forcing Schultz to close his obstetrics office. A medical school classmate invited him to join Kaiser in Santa Rosa, and Schultz found his place, or, as he said, “You come for a job that turns into a career.”

 

Schultz is a bachelor half the year, as Priscilla, his wife of 42 years, lives on the 30-acre upstate New York farm from May to October. That’s all going to change, as Schultz is leaving Kaiser eight months before hitting mandatory retirement age of 65. He’ll be with Priscilla and Butte, his black Labrador “walking buddy,” in the countryside near the Berkshire Mountains when the fall colors—Schultz’s favorite sight on Earth—explode in October. Schultz is looking forward to a summer at his farmhouse in upstate New York, walking his dog, peering into the heavens with a telescope and settling down with Sudoku puzzles.