5 DOCTORS OF INTEREST
BY JANIE GOULD
PHOTOS BY
PORFIRIO SOLORZANO
Orthopedic surgeon
132
Dr. Ron Grober specializes
in sports
medicine and is an
acclaimed jazz musician,
but it was neither music nor
medicine that drew him to
St. Lucie County 36 years
ago. He’s a sailor, too, and
as soon as he saw the Fort
Pierce Inlet, he knew where
he wanted to live.
“It’s a great inlet,” said
Grober, 71, who had taught
himself to sail from a book
because he didn’t grow up
near water.
A native of Teaneck, N.J., Grober became interested in
medicine in high school when he worked in a veterinary
medicine clinic. After graduating from the University of
Pennsylvania and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he
interned at an inner-city hospital, Philadelphia General,
where he endured 72-hour rotations and saw plenty from the
raw side of life. “It was not uncommon to have drunks come
in covered with maggots,” he said.
The shifts were so long that one time while assisting a neurosurgeon
during brain surgery, “I kept falling asleep standing
up. I had had no sleep for 72 hours, and almost no food.
I almost fell into a brain.”
Another surgery was equally memorable. “I had to fix the
trigger finger on a guy who had just killed a cop. That was
tough.”
Grober served four years in the Air Force and then, while
doing a medical residency in Jacksonville, he began a specialty
in orthopedics and sports medicine. He’s a former ice
hockey player who enjoys sports, so it must have been a natural
fit. He likes working with muscle and skeletal functions
and he generally likes orthopedic patients.
“Pretty much you’re dealing with people who want to
work to get better,” he said.
He concentrates on knee and shoulder injuries, and does
several hundred surgeries each year. He’s been serving as the
team physician for the New York Mets since 1988, when the
team moved its spring training to Port St. Lucie.
Grober has some simple advice for keeping the body from
getting stiff and creaky. “Maintain muscle tone and flexibility,
and believe it or not, hydration is important too. I try to
do those things myself, but need to do more with flexibility,
whether you call it stretching, or yoga or Pilates.”
Grober enjoys snow skiing in Colorado and calls himself a
“bad golfer and a bad tennis player,” but his primary avocation
is music. He took some piano lessons as a child but was
more interested in sports, especially ice hockey. Then, in 10th
grade, he joined a Dixieland Jazz group that needed someone
to play piano. The group asked Grober to play just one
song: “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
“Pretty soon I’m busy every weekend playing piano and
making what I thought was big money -- $10 for four
hours,” he said. “Then I started listening to jazz and guess
what. I started liking it.”
Grober organized a jazz ensemble in Philadelphia called
Ron Grober and his Quaker City Rhythm Kings. They played
throughout the Northeast and in Europe. Soon after moving
to St. Lucie County in 1971, he joined the Pelican Yacht Club
in Fort Pierce. The Pelican’s manager happened to be looking
for a Dixieland Jazz group to provide some entertainment.
One thing led to another and soon Grober was making music
at the Pelican. The club manager dubbed the group Doc
Grober and his New Orleans Mudcats.
Doc Grober and his New Orleans Mudcats are scheduled
The
PIANIST