On Call with the Prairie Dog is a medical television show started by Doctor Richard P Holm, and it's been a focal point for South Dakota to ask their medical questions.

On Call was ahead of its time with the rise of medical television.

And it all started in 1981 with Doctor Holm and his family moving to Brookings, South Dakota.

He was vocal, charismatic, knowledgeable, and loves sharing medical information.

In the early 1990s, his life would change with one phone call.

There was a radio host at KBRK w how would you like to come in and do a medical just a half hour show?

And he did it once, and he thought that was fun.

And then when Burt Gep called ag they just started talking about, well, why don't we make this a regular plan?

Doctor Holm loved His time on kBRK Came and liked the idea of a doctor answering medical questions to listeners.

He soon had a dream, and that's when Rick met Joan Hogan, a nontraditional student turned instructor for the mass communication department at SDSU.

He came up to me on some social thing and he said, are you in communication?

You're doing the television, radio stuff.

I said, yeah, that's a the course is it covers there.

He said, I really want to be on television.

I said, well, good for you.

While they laughed in that moment.

Rick still had his dream and soon Joan shared that dream with him.

I came back to Rick and I said, Rick, we could have a weekly radio show in less than a month.

We can get it sponsored.

The TV show would take about a year.

He said, okay, let's start radio.

There would be TV.

In 1993, Homespun Medicine went live on the radio waves, and the duo covered many topics and answered many questions for many years.

Early on, Joan realized the type of person Rick Holm was.

Said Rick, you come in our early.

The show starts at 930.

We'll meet at 830.

I got 8:30, and I waited and waited and about 920 he runs in the door.

Okay.

We're good.

So what are we going to talk about today?

Don't worry about it.

Just introduce me.

So I learned early.

Rick just runs by.

He just runs.

However, Rick still wanted to be on TV.

Good news.

In 1995, he got his chance.

In the meantime, I kept researching how to get the TV done, and there was a TV production studio in town, Jay Vanduch, Leonard it and his wife, Ginger Thompson was involved in it as well.

Rick, Joan Jay and Ginger Sue worked on and created House Hall, the first iteration of On Call with the Prairie doc.

You really push, you know, the proof content thing.

And we tried, you know, we would go down to Sioux Falls and interview doctors and come up here to our studio, and we do the studio segments.

You know, you try to edit it together and only be in half an hour.

You only had 28 minutes and all kind of stuff.

Jay had produced five half hour videos, and then we presented them to South Dakota TV and they didn't care because they hadn't produced it.

But you really kind of laid the groundwork for how On Call eventually came together, I think, but it never got out of Rick said that he wanted to be on TV.

Years went by before a new opportunity would strike.

Rick would still bother Joan about creating a TV show, and on a whim, she went to SDSUs mass communication department head Lori Helena to see if there was a way to start the TV show.

And I said, Lori, he's bugging me.

He really wants to do this TV show, but I know public TV will not do it unless they're producing it, and I don't know how to get through.

I said, well, you know, public TV moved to Vermillion, so they're not they're headquarters out here.

But we in South Dakota Ag in and I said, he's not a farmer.

And he said, no, no, no, farmers need medicine to go and talk to the people in South Dakota.

And which was produced right here at South Dakota State University.

So I went Ag and decided, I would talk to the head there, and I talked to him.

I didn't expect a positive response.

He was thrilled.

He said, we have a woman working here who's just finishing her degree.

Lindsey Myers.

She is so talented, but we can't keep her.

We don't have a job for her.

And he said she could produce the show and then we did the job for her.

We hear the half an hour we spent this hour work when I was graduating, they came to me and they said, you know, we'd like to start a medical television program.

We have a local internist who would like to do it.

Would you be willing to sit on and produce and host it?

And so I was 21 years old and I thought, sure, why not?

And it was my first job right out of college.

I was shocked, I was pleased, Rick was thrilled.

And, you know, if it's being produced by a South Dakota University product, then they're going to earn it a decent time.

On July 20th, 2003, the first season of On Call with the Prairie Dog began filming.

The show needed a director and South Dakota Ag communications later.

SDSU Extension brought on the Lowell Haag to fi the job.

On call shows were 30 minutes long, and so to go public broadcasting basically was almost a similar format than it currently is.

We're, there were two news packages that were used in the show to kind of set up topics that then Doctor Holm, the producer and then the host would be on set and ask questions to, guest doctors who were specialists on that topic.

The very first seasons we would pre-record, someone calling it a question, simulating that we were live.

We're out from here in asks, does an aspirin help prevent stroke?

John Hogan made it clear that he would stay on the radio, but did not want to work in television.

She recommended Lindsey Myers as a co-host.

I was going to, first just produce the program.

But then I soon realized that Rick had such a gregarious personality that he needed somebody to kind of give him time, cues to ask questions about, like, what does that mean from a medical jargon standpoint?

And so then I soon began to host it, too.

The show started gaining popularity, but he felt On Call could be mor I was like, what if we took the show alive?

Because I really feel like people need to call in their questions.

And so we went to public broadcasting, had a conversation with them.

But one consistent piece of feedback was that viewers wanted an evening timeslot, and they wanted their questions answered live.

Well, be careful what you wish for was May 15th of 2006, that we we've done enough episodes of public television so that we could go become a primetime live program.

It was around this time then Rick started to sense his purpose, and he soon claimed his title of the Prairie doc back home went to a book authors convention in Boston, and when he was there, he was visiting people.

And I think he met with some consultants.

And after that he came home with the you are the prairie dog, uncle, switch from 30 minutes to an hour long show.

And it took off with viewers loving the content and Doctor Holmes antics on TV.

He absolutely was like out of controls sometimes because he didn't care about time cues and he didn't care.

When we were out of time and we were doing live TV.

So it's not like we had more time.

And so, we had to come up with a queuing system where I put my hand over to Rick and you could literally see I was almost crawling across the table sometimes because he was going on and on about something we began realizing is Rick is a very also is a very creative person.

We did, the laughter show.

The laughter show.

Yeah, we did that here in Brookings at the Lutheran Church.

You haven't seen that.

You really need to watch it.

All right.

So this is actually called the lawnmower laugh, and I'll demonstrate it first, and then I'll have you do it.

And again, you're going to move around the room when you do this.

You're.

This the other thing with Rick.

Somehow he got surrounded by people who were really talented people like Lindsay and Lowell And they just put the show together, and it was phenomenal.

And Rick, of course, he had all the talent in the world.

Around this time, Lindsay thought of an idea that would later birth the prairie doc assistants.

So I went to the College of Pharmacy in the College of Nursing and the pre-med program at South Dakota State University, and I said, what if we gave your students experience and, let them answer the phones for the show, and in exchange, they really learn what patients are going to be asking them when they're out in their clinical, experiences.

And they love that idea once they get going, is that not only did they help us, but that we helped them because we included the pre doc assistants, the college students, in the pre television time with the best doctors.

So every week they spend an hour with the doctors asking a million questions.

And with that on call with the prairie dog was hitting its stride and Doctor Rick home started branching out through different mediums as well.

He didn't want to just have the television show.

He wrote a weekly column.

And so he would go to Cook's Kitchen very early in the morning, and he would sit there and he would write his column, and he did it every single week.

He wanted it to be his original thoughts, his original words.

And then he started circulating those to the newspapers, and I started sending them out to newspapers that would pick it up across the state with the television show radio with John Hogan, on KPRC, newspaper columns sent down across the state, and everything he did outside of on call doctor Holm became a very busy man.

When the TV show beginning, he was still practicing physician and saw patients in the clinic.

He was very politically involved.

He was the president of South Dakota medical Association.

He was on all the different committees.

Before he became the president.

He was helping to write a weekly column and coming in to host the show.

Plus, he lined up all the guests for the show, and there was a season where he was the director and the medical doctor on the hospice team.

He also started the hopeful spirit around, and sometimes signs are the value of his personal life.

He loved sailing and had, had a cabin up on Lake Pontiac where they had a sailboat.

That was when he really you could see him kind of relax just a little bit.

There are times I would ask him, when do you sleep?

Never give me an answer.

Perhaps, some of his family members would have an idea if we had an amazing amount of energy.

And he sleep, you know, five, six hours is all he needed.

Later on into the late 2000 and the early 20 tens, uncle with the Prairie doc went through some major changes.

Lindsay Meyers left the show in 2007, leading to other hosts before Rick went solo after that.

The unit within is this huge extension that produced on coal was outsourced on coal ash is South Dakota State University could fund them, but they wanted more than Rick was willing to give.

They wanted to control the content of the show, and Rick didn't want somebody else controlling the content of a medical show that he was the editor of.

Uncle needed some sort of stability, and that's when Rick thought of starting a nonprofit.

And I said, Rick, that's going to be really tough because the government is really cracking down on nonprofits.

They think there's too many.

So even though you're playing for no profit foundation, it probably won't work.

Little did I know what this man is like.

One month later, we have Senator Tom Daschle show up at the radio station as a guest in our program.

And when that was over, within a month, Rick got approval in 2011, through the cooperation of Jay Vaduch and Rick and Joanie Holm, they created the Healing Words Foundation that allowed groups to donate and keep the show alive.

If it wasn't for the fact that Healing Words was created, the show could not have gone on On Call.

It kind of grew from just being the TV show to being blogs to being newspaper articles, radio shows.

I mean, so it's, kind of On Call Pr Doc media in, in those early years, it was very it became very obvious that Doctor Holm was a very caring man, that he loved his patients, who wanted the best for them.

He lost his sister at a very young age in a car accident.

And that really impacted Rick's life after that.

And he realized he didn't care what other people thought of him.

He was going to live his life.

He was going to spread medical education, and he was going to be open.

And himself.

He didn't show up for the show.

He was 45 minutes late, and at the time I didn't respond very well because I did not understand why he was 45 minutes late.

And it's because he had stayed with a patient that passed away.

He then came to record the show.

South Dakota and surrounding communities love Doctor Holm, and he planned on being the prairie doc forever.

Joan Hogan, on the other hand, was starting to feel the fatigue.

In 2016, Joan was deciding on retirement and found Laura Ellsworth as a replacement for the radio show.

So I had her do it almost for a year.

You know, if I were gone, she would do it.

And, you know, just, you know, it kind of became her place.

And I was already to tell Rick, okay, I got a replacement and you've had enough of me.

And he announced that he was he was diagnosed with this death sentence.

Basically.

This is terrible.

I can't talk about it.

Okay.

He didn't show symptoms.

You know, he he had run a half marathon once before diagnosis.

So he was always very physical and very strong, and he developed belly pain.

And it was only a matter of weeks before that.

We thought it was gall bladder.

And the exploratory surgery show that it was not called bladder.

And so he called me while I was going through the tests and, and he's like, I think something's going on.

And when he found out he had pancreatic cancer, it was really devastating because that's such a difficult cancer to treat.

I just can't leave him.

You know, it's 2017.

I can't leave him.

However, in record fashion, he continued the show and didn't let pancreatic cancer slow him down.

One of his favorite pictures in the world is, Snoopy doing the happy dance thing, and that's why he wanted to live his life that you always, at some point, did the happy dance as much as you could.

Throughout the next couple of years, Doctor Holmes still hosted the show and was very open about his cancer.

In 2018, he finished his second book called Final Season, which was a collection of his essays about not fearing death and not letting it win.

Sadly, however, cancer was taking his life little by little.

I always want to be the host, no matter how he felt.

But during that time, when he was going through chemotherapy and things, we would always have a back up on the parade of clothes on site to me in case he couldn't do the show.

He just would not let that disease win win.

And, you know, even up to just a few weeks before he passed away, he was still adamant that he was going to host the show.

There got to be times where doctor whom you you're not you're not going to him.

Pre-show meeting.

I'm going to do the show.

Your family members here is going to take you home.

And he fought against that.

At times it was hard for me to, embrace the show when Rick was getting sicker and sicker and there was a an in the, I suppose, of his time that, you know, spend the time with us.

And now, with the show nearing his final time hosting, he had made sure that the on call media would not die with him.

But he just kept saying is, I want this TV show to go on and that was that was of utmost importance.

He had planned and talked with the four physicians that we currently have as our host and mentored them.

And, you know, we laughed at it.

We had one very busy physician and it took four to replace him, and that's kind of the way it was.

Doctor Holmes final show he hosted was on February 20th, 2020.

Everybody knew it.

Nobody wanted it and like that or ten.

But, it was anything we could do to support him at that moment was the important thing.

Our primary production team has been planning for the future for some time now, and no matter how my present health concerns resolve, we know that laying the groundwork for the years to come is important, and we're doing that.

Doctor Richard Holm passed away from cancer on March 22nd, 2020.

I still think of him so often and I miss him every day.

He was such a tremendous gift to me and to my career.

I would never be where I am today without a doctor holm pouring into me, believing in me, caring about me.

And I know I'm one of thousands of people who feel that way.

Because he made such a tremendous impact in his life.

During his final days, the Covid 19 pandemic had struck and nearly shut down his show.

However, South Dakota State University, South a value of on call with the prairie dog and kept the show alive to communicate vital Covid 19 information.

So we we wore masks, we wore face shields, we had barricades built in.

So we took all the measures to continue the recovery.

That research based factual health information that the world needed.

Good evening, and welcome to On Call with the Prairie doc.

This episode begins our 19th season and sadly our first without the original Prairie doc, Doctor Rick holm In September of 2020, On Call with the Prairie Doc resumed with many changes.

Joan Hogan retired from radio and four doctors volunteered to do the job of one special man.

During this change, Executive Director Ashley Ragsdale has taken the Prairie Doc programing to new heights.

We see around 700,000 people a month are being somehow, reading, listening, watching the prairie doc programing, whether it is from the television show that's on SDPB four times a week plus YouTube and Facebook, our prairie doc podcast, we have two of those that we have listeners listen to quite regularly, as well as the radio show that's now statewide.

And then our perspective column, which is in more than 500 newspapers and around 12 states.

Besides sharing medical information, Doctor Holmes other goal was for doctors to stay in South Dakota, and it's still alive through the prairie.

Doc assistance was to educate the public, but it was also to maintain physicians in the state.

You know, we don't have a large state.

We don't have a large number of students that go to med school and stay with us.

And so by involving the students, they could see what small town doctoring was like.

Many agree that without Doctor Holmes charisma and passion on call with the Prairie, doc would not have succeeded.

The thing that made it work was Rick, and he would pick up the phone and call a doctor here and there and, say, you know, we'd like you to be on the show this week.

We're going to talk about, you know, The replacements or whatever.

And almost every doctor came to work with a friend, and they knew they could trust him.

These physicians would come off of clinical things, and they would drive all the way across the state just to get to see doctor holm.

So he was such an amazing leader and medicine, and he really had the connections, and I sure would have never been what it is today without Rick giving us as a strong foundation.

He had a way of just pulling in people that he needed, and you were pulled in.

Once you were in, you were in, you were never out.

So I think it was more, appreciation that he had reached out to me.

That was the main emotion.

I appreciated working with him.

And still to this day On the Prairie is honoring Doctor Holmes legacy and his mission of informing the public about important medical information he's seen for each week was stay healthy out there.

And so we are continuing to follow that mission by providing science based information to the public for free each week.

And until next time, stay healthy.

Other people stay healthy out there.

People.

Stay healthy out there people, and stay healthy out there people.

Stay healthy out there people.

Until next time, stay healthy out there people.

Until next time.

Stay healthy out there.

People from all of us here at on call with the prairie doc.

Until next time, stay healthy out there, people.

And.