Lebanon
Allen Hinkle, a former pediatric anesthesiologist at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital and an inventor who later became an executive in the insurance industry, said success lies in being relentless and boring.
“He didn’t actually mean boring,” his daughter Melisse said in a recent phone interview. “What he meant was being persistent (and) that everyday small actions are the things that add up to something big in life.”
Friends, family members and former co-workers remember Hinkle, who died at the age of 66 in February, as someone who set goals and then worked to achieve them. If one approach didn’t work, he tried another.
In addition to Melisse, who describes her father as her “guiding light” in both personal and professional matters, Hinkle also served as a mentor and guide to medical students, residents and colleagues at Mary Hitchcock and in the insurance industry.
Melisse and her mother, Hinkle’s wife of 42 years, Mary Lou, both said Hinkle’s ambition was driven in part by a desire to overcome a difficult childhood.
Hinkle was born in Pittsburg, Calif., the middle of five children born to Marjorie and Joseph Hinkle. The elder Hinkle was an Army sergeant who was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War.
While Hinkle was growing up, the family moved frequently to different military bases in the U.S. and Japan, and struggled financially. His father suffered from mental illness, which meant he was sometimes absent receiving treatment and at other times acting erratically. His mother didn’t drive, which made it difficult for her and the children to avoid Joseph’s erratic behavior.
Hinkle knew from a young age that he wanted to become a doctor and that he wanted to escape the situation at home, Mary Lou said.
“From the time I met him, I always admired him,” she said. “He did it all totally on his own.”
Hinkle graduated from Nashoba Regional High School in Bolton, Mass., in 1969, and then put himself through the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he met Mary Lou, and majored in zoology, the pre-med track.
During Mary Lou’s freshman year and Hinkle’s sophomore year, they sat next to each other at a film for a course and struck up a conversation. They then went to her room for a cup of tea.
They married in the summer of 1974, after she graduated from college.
He graduated in 1973 from UMass, magna cum laude, and then went directly to Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx borough of New York City where he earned his medical degree in 1976. He furthered his training with a pediatric internship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a pediatric residency at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston and an anesthesia residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, also in Boston.
From there, Hinkle was recruited by Dr. Harry Bird, then director of the department of anesthesiology at Mary Hitchcock, which was in Hanover at the time.
“A lot of people have come into the department who have worked hard at it,” Bird said. A smaller segment, “not only contributed, but made a difference.”
Hinkle, one of the latter, was talented and worked hard, Bird said.
As a physician fully trained in both pediatrics and anesthesiology, Hinkle focused on the special needs of pediatric patients, Bird said.
“It’s the old saying that pediatric patients aren’t just little people,” he said, noting that they are still developing in a different way from adults.
Hinkle’s clinical role involved anesthetizing patients with the least amount of trauma, aiming to avoid discomforts such as nausea and vomiting.
In 1990, Hinkle received a patent, his first of four, for a scented facemask intended to block the smell of the anesthetic gases and help alleviate children’s anxiety as they prepared for surgery.
Choosing between scents — such as bubble gum, strawberry or cherry — gives children a feeling of control over the situation, said Dr. Timothy Quill, a former Mary Hitchcock anesthesiologist who worked with Hinkle.
“When you first look at the invention,” Quill said, you could say “ ‘Why didn’t someone else think of this?’ You can say that sort of critically, but the thing is they didn’t (or if they did, they) didn’t put in the work to bring it into production.”
A bubble gum-scented facemask provided some comfort to Plainfield resident Nancy Liston’s seven-year-old daughter Alexis when she needed surgery to repair her arm after one of her brothers pushed her off a picnic table in 1991, Liston recalled.
In retrospect, Liston, who later came to know the Hinkles when their children attended Kimball Union Academy together, thinks it was Hinkle who was the anesthesiologist during Alexis’ surgery. She and her daughter were both comforted by Hinkle allowing her into the operating room and guiding her to be the one to put the facemask over Alexis’ face.
“She was still afraid,” Liston said. But, “at least it wasn’t some awful ether.”
In addition to the facemask, Hinkle held a patent for a color-coded system based on a child’s age and height to help providers find the correct equipment and medication dosage for treating sick children. He also invented a method for remotely monitoring a patient’s physiological metrics from home and sharing those with their provider.
His last invention, for which he received a patent in 2009, was for the Hinkle Nosing Glass, a bouquet-enhancing wine glass. A cone pointing upward from the center of the glass helps to aerate the wine as it falls into the glass, which increases the body’s ability to absorb beneficial chemicals found in wine, according to the product description on the website.
Three Tomatoes restaurant in Lebanon, which Hinkle and Mary Lou frequented, has some glasses on hand, said server Veronica DeFord. Hinkle gave the restaurant some glasses after he first invented it in an effort to get the word out about it, she said.
Now, Three Tomatoes, which sits in downtown Lebanon, sometimes uses the glasses to serve wine, aperitif, whiskey and bourbon, DeFord said.
The glass “makes the aroma stronger,” she said.
DeFord added that Hinkle is missed by Three Tomatoes staff.
“The staff here all loved and respected him,” she said.
Hinkle’s popularity was widespread.
Dr. Will Lee, now a New York City-based gynecologist specializing in infertility treatment, remembers Hinkle’s kindness during his years as a medical student in Hanover in the early 1990s.
As a Chinese-American from New York City, Lee said he found Hanover to be a lonely place, but Hinkle urged him to focus on his studies while he was there and then move on.
“I remember this loving, jovial man (who) did nothing but encourage me day in, day out,” Lee said.
Lee said he remembers that Hinkle “always had a smile on his face.”
Though Hinkle enjoyed clinical practice, Mary Lou remembers he “was always looking for the next challenge.”
A stint leading a finance committee for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock physicians group led him to the next part of his career, which he spent working as an executive for insurance companies in the northeast, first at Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Hampshire beginning in 1995. While there, he was able to continue to see patients one day per week at what was by that point, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
“He always had a strong feeling that physicians really should be the head of insurance companies as opposed to so many of them (that) are run by lawyers and MBAs,” Mary Lou said. “He thought physicians who took a hands-off approach from this topic were doing themselves and the industry a disservice.”
As chief medical officer of the Tufts Health Plan in Massachusetts, Hinkle ensured that the plan’s standards of care were scientifically based and he improved the systems for evaluating the plan’s effectiveness, said Dr. Robert Lonigro, then a medical director who reported directly to Hinkle.
Hinkle also led an effort to the tune of several million dollars to improve the overall health of the plan’s members by encouraging them to participate in wellness and self-care programs, Lonigro said.
“In fact, it really was an invaluable investment,” Lonigro said. “The members got healthier.”
As a boss, Hinkle helped Lonigro to focus when he was feeling overwhelmed by the number of the tasks at hand.
“There would be times where for example there were so many things going on at once it looked like the world was spinning,” Lonigro said. Hinkle would advise him to “take a deep breath. ‘What’s the first thing you have to do? What’s the next thing you have to do?’ ”
By the end of the conversation, Lonigro said he would feel better.
“He was a good listener,” Lonigro said.
Hinkle’s positive qualities as a boss led administrative assistant Ginnie Johnson, of Chichester, N.H., to follow him from Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Hampshire to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and then to Tufts, before she decided the commute was just too much for her.
Early on, Hinkle gave Johnson an assignment she didn’t understand. She went to ask someone else to explain it to her, when Hinkle appeared.
“After that I’d ask him all the time,” she said. “He was so patient.”
He also urged her to take a health care actuarial exam, which she took and passed.
“He pushed me out of my comfort zone,” she said.
Hinkle left Tufts in 2010, for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, and ended his career at MVP in New York state. Though he worked for out-of-state plans, he and Mary Lou maintained the Jenkins Road residence in Lebanon they bought in 1982, when Hinkle first took the job at Mary Hitchcock. In 1983, in honor of Melisse’s birth, Hinkle planted nearly 400 Colorado blue spruce trees on the property. The family and their friends later used the spruce trees as Christmas trees. A few still stand.
“This is where we wanted to stay,” Mary Lou said, of their home in Lebanon.
Hinkle’s death, which came about two years after a cancer diagnosis, came as a surprise.
“From the second he got diagnosed he was very private,” said Melisse’s husband, Pearse Lombard. “He wasn’t interested in anyone’s pity.”
Instead, Hinkle saw cancer as yet another obstacle to overcome.
Hinkle’s approach was “how can I fix this?” Lombard said.
“He had great hope that some of the treatments that he was trying were going to extend his life,” Mary Lou said.
Even while undergoing chemotherapy, Hinkle continued working, she said.
“He really did try and live with it rather than succumb to it,” she said. “I thought he was pretty brave.”
On the night before their wedding in August, six months after her father died, Melisse and Lombard honored Hinkle and another friend of theirs who had died with a party at a restaurant on the Boston waterfront. The party had been Hinkle’s idea, so the celebration was bittersweet, but the speeches, the location on the water, the weather, the food and the alcohol helped make the evening special, Mary Lou said, noting that guests took Hinkle Nosing Glasses home after the wedding.
In her speech during the event, Melisse refered to her father’s oft repeated words of advice.
“I know he’d say I arrived at this moment, the night before I marry the love of my life, by following his mantra,” she said, according to a written version of her speech. “So, Pearse, when I say I’m being ‘relentless and boring,’ just remember it’s a good thing. I’ll always carry my dad’s words with me, in my marriage and beyond.”
Valley News Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
