Emmet V. Headlee, M.D.

Headlee's practice grew with a boom town. Odessa had about 750 people in 1925, and the discovery on the W. E. Connell ranch in December 1926 brought only a modest well. The Penn field opened in 1929 and the Cowden field in 1930, and Odessa became an oil center, reaching about 5,000 people by 1929 and more than 10,000 during World War II. In later decades the city became a regional medical center, with Medical Center Hospital serving as a teaching hospital for Texas Tech's residency programs, and a separate hospital for women and children.

What the plaque says

Emmet V. Headlee, M.D. Emmet V. Headlee was a fourth-generation physician; his great-grandfather, Elisha Headlee, was a civil war surgeon. His grandfather and father practiced medicine in Teague (Freestone Co.), and Emmet was born there in 1900. At age thirteen, he saved a friend from drowning, an act which earned a stipend from the Carnegie Hero Fund which helped pay for his college courses. He earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Texas in 1922 and his Doctor of Medicine degree from Baylor University College of Medicine in 1926. While interning at St. Paul's Sanitarium in Dallas, Dr. Headlee met and married Marie Sprusil (b. 1900), a native of Cleveland, Ohio, and a registered nurse and certified nurse-anesthetist. The young couple arrived in Odessa in nov. 1926, and Dr. Headlee became the only doctor in a town which then numbered about 450 people. His first office was in the back of a drugstore, and the front rooms of the Headlees' first home were examination and operating rooms. Dr. Headlee became Ector County health officer and also served patients from throughout the region. He opened a seven-bed hospital in 1934, which expanded before 1949, when Medical Center Hospital opened with Dr. Headlee on staff. Near this site, the Headlees bought land for the animals which Dr. Headlee accepted as payment in lieu of cash during the Great Depression. In 1949, the couple built a house here. In 1957, in recognition of her long years of dedicated service in church and charitable work, Marie Deadlee was named "first lady of Odessa." The civic-minded Dr. Headlee was active in community, school and medical organizations until his death in 1965. Emmet and Marie Headlee provided great leadership to odessa, which has become a major medical center in West Texas. (2011)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• White-Pool House — 4.6 mi
  Odessa's oldest standing building, an 1887 brick house of a family the Texas and Pacific drew west, later cut into apartments for the oil boom and now a free house museum.
• Midland Army Air Field Museum — 6.8 mi
  A hangar museum at Midland's airport, run by Commemorative Air Force volunteers, telling how a 1927 grass field became the bombardier college that graduated 6,627 officers in World War II.
• Odessa Meteor Crater — 14 mi
  A shallow bowl in the ranchland southwest of Odessa where a shower of iron meteorites struck in the late Ice Age, with a trail down into it and a small museum on the rim.
• Permian Basin Petroleum Museum — 15 mi
  Midland's museum of the oil basin it sits on, from a restored diorama of the Permian reef to a 40-acre yard of drilling rigs and Jim Hall's Chaparral race cars.

More markers nearby

• Old Buffalo Wallow — 1.2 mi
• Homer Robert Henderson — 1.4 mi
• Ector County — 1.5 mi
• Comanche War Trail — 1.5 mi