Donald Bruce Rhodes, 87, of Santa Barbara, passed away on May 7, 2026. Born on Jan. 10, 1939 to German and Scandinavian immigrants Gerald Rhodes and Mildred Sutfin in Williston, North Dakota, his life was steeped in medicine, baseball, his deep faith, and his family.

The Rhodes family moved to Ellensburg, Washington, in 1940 and lived in a home on what is now the campus of Central Washington University.

Despite Don’s consistent use of the phrase, “I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck,” when he was in elementary school, the Rhodes family moved to a farm on the outskirts of town on which fruits and vegetables of all varieties were grown, including turnips.

With a giant willow tree featuring a tire swing, a fast-flowing creek, and an abundance of flat open space, two of the three Rhodes boys, Don and Loren, grew to be tall, lean left-handed pitching machines.

When Don was 10 years old, in addition to having severe asthma, he was diagnosed with appendicitis. He was sent alone to Seattle, Washington, for the surgery.

The surgeon was bemused by all of Don’s questions about appendectomies, and in addition to taking great care of him, asked little Donnie if he would like to be awake during the surgery to watch the procedure on a mirror above the operating table.

Not only did this occur, but Don came home with the clear and firm 10-year-old mandate that he would someday become a surgeon.

There was rarely a time during his elementary, high school or collegiate years that he was not working a full or part-time job including working in his father’s hardware store, helping to build the Wanapum Dam along the Columbia River and driving a delivery truck for United Freight.

A favorite story of his kids involves him working a summer job for the local electric company and being high atop a telephone pole on one of the hottest days of summer in Eastern Washington, choosing to not come down for a good length of time because a coiled rattlesnake was perched at the bottom of the pole.

By the time he graduated from high school in 1955, Don had pitched one of the first high school no-hitters ever recorded and was offered a contract to pitch for the San Francisco Giants.

His father, reportedly, dispensed with the contract in favor of Don accepting a full scholarship to the University of Washington to pitch for the Huskies. This decision turned out to be prescient in that the entire Rhodes/Woodruff clan are staunch Dodger fans, the archenemies of the Giants.

Don also played basketball for the Huskies for his first two years. In his freshman year, he was mistakenly placed in a junior-level zoology course. He received high marks in the class and was asked by the professor to continue in the senior level coursework the next year.

His baseball coach informed him he would lose his baseball scholarship if he did this as there was no way for him to take this coursework without missing team travel games. The zoology professor offered Don a teaching assistantship position with financial benefits that equaled his baseball scholarship.

Don continued to play for the Huskies and the team from those years was entered into the Huskies Hall of Fame in 1995. He graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in zoology in 1959 and was admitted to the UW School of Medicine.

Yet, most importantly during these years was that he met his, at the time, roommate’s girlfriend Alita Wilcox, and patiently waited until they broke up so he could date her. Thus, began what was a 65-year relationship with the love of his life and mother of his children.

They were married in 1963 at All Saints-by-the-Sea in Santa Barbara, and lived in Seattle so he could finish medical school while Alita taught elementary school. He frequently showed up in her classroom in his lab coat to speak to the kids about science/medicine and to put on magic shows for them.

Don was not only famous for being able to entertain just about any roomful of people from every walk of life, but for his magic tricks that he spent hours working on in preparation for these “shows.” He continued to present them at Mountain View Elementary School in Goleta in his own children’s classrooms.

Through Alita, he fell in love with classical music and recounted, many times, his experience hearing Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” for the first time on a trip to Chicago as being a conversion-like, life-changing event.

His support of his wife’s career as a classical cellist, his own children’s and grandchildren’s musical careers was unwavering despite growing up with little to no musical training or exposure at all.

It was also during his time in medical school in Seattle that he was invited to join a group of men under the leadership of Earl Palmer, pre-eminent C.S. Lewis scholar, in studying the works of Lewis. This was a profound experience for Don such that 60 years later, his nearly-complete collection of first-edition works of C.S. Lewis was given to Westmont College.

In 1966, Don and Alita’s son Christopher was born in Seattle. In 1967, as the draft was going on, Don enlisted in the U.S. Air Force for a medical research program at the age of 27. This was not to be as shortly thereafter, he was called to serve, active duty, as a captain in the Army as surgeon in the Vietnam War.

Two days after his second son Jesse was born, he left for Chu Lai, Vietnam. He would end up serving until 1969 and was separated from his family during that year. He missed his wife and boys dearly, and Alita would send him reel-to-reel tape recordings that he listened to with such frequency that these works became a part of him.

Prime among them was Rudolph Serkin’s recording of Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” and a recording of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.”

He also built his own bomb shelter under his bed out of an air-conditioning container he found in the MASH unit, and described frequently rolling out of bed and into this encasement when rockets were raining down upon their unit.

He loved the people of Vietnam and one of the most moving stories from his time there was when he and another surgeon visited a small village outside of Chu Lai and witnessed babies left to die in the street who had been abandoned due to the mother’s inability to nurse them because of cleft-palates.

He and the other doctor, despite being general surgeons, trained themselves to perform cleft-palate surgical repairs and returned to the village to perform operations on these infants and return them to their families.

There were also stories of Don entering local restaurants and everyone staring at him because of his 6’4” tall blonde, blue-eyed frame, followed by giggling commencing when he started to eat. It took him a few visits to figure out that it was because he was left-handed and no one in Asia ate with the left hand.

All three of his children would end up being left-handed, as would two of his three grandchildren so this was a gene to be reckoned with on the Rhodes’ side. Don often referred to Alita as being “… the only one in the family in her right mind.”

He would later describe the sheer quantity of surgeries completed in Vietnam as the equivalent of 10 years of surgery undertaken in a routine year in his career during non-wartime in the U.S.

As with many veterans, Don did not openly speak of his time there unless questioned and drawn out about it, but when he did, his love for the people of Vietnam was clear and deep as was the pain of all he witnessed and experienced.

Shortly after his return, Alita took an Asian cooking class because Don missed Vietnamese cooking so much so. Nine months after his return, their daughter Mary Beth was born.

Don completed his urological surgery residency at Harbor General, UCLA. The family lived in Palos Verdes, California, until 1974, at which point they moved to Santa Barbara, Alita’s hometown.

Don took on a position as urological surgeon with the Santa Barbara Medical Foundation Clinic, the same clinic at which Alita’s father was a physician. He would go on to serve this establishment as an M.D. for the next 40 years as it became Sansum Health.

As a surgeon, Don was known for his invention and patent of a device that greatly increased the success rates of reverse-vasectomies; for the founding of the first surgical center in Santa Barbara (the Santa Barbara Surgical Center); for providing the financial means behind the scenes for many of the staff members of the urology department to attend nursing school; and for assisting surgeons of other specialties whenever possible.

He also was known for frequently operating on neighborhood animals that had tumors or other medical conditions that were of threat to them. These procedures would happen in the family garage with the help of anesthesiologist friends who would come to assist.

As a father, Don coached and assisted with just about every baseball, softball and basketball team on which Chris, Jesse, and Mary Beth played. He was so engaged in the musical activities of the household that he, himself, took up the clarinet.

At the time, the family had moved to an avocado farm in Goleta with abundant wildlife in the area. One evening, all three kids, from an upstairs bedroom, heard an ominous sound that they discerned as either coming from a known defunct toilet in the house or a howling animal and raced downstairs only to realize that what sounded like a coyote in distress, as they closed in upon the sound, was, in fact, their father’s attempts at channeling his inner Benny Goodman.

The avocado farm was tended to entirely by Don and the kids with every last avocado being picked by them every season. He taught the kids, among other things, to manage the drip irrigation system, and this involved using syringes to unplug the drippers; learning how to monitor and adjust water pressure/flow. Not at all unlike urological training.

As a father, Don stitched up Jesse’s dramatic head wound from careening into a pillar at the bottom of the staircase when he was 9; Mary Beth’s knee and various cooking injuries to her precious violin fingers no fewer than four times; and Chris’ nearly severed finger from a run in with a bagel.

He was not only a wonderful father and husband, but the medicine man for the entire Wilcox/Rhodes/Woodruff tribe.

Don’s sense of humor was such that he could disarm any situation of tension with the sparkle in his eyes that impishly and mischievously alerted those around him that one of his jokes was incoming and about to serve as deliverance in the form of laughter.

In a family of musicians, he himself was tone-deaf, yet, had the most impeccable timing and delivery as the teller of a joke. Anyone who has heard his “MacGregor” jokes can probably readily summon his Scottish accent.

As the field of medicine evolved during his lifetime, Don regretted not being able to spend more time with his patients. He saw and treated his patients as each having his/her own story to tell and often spoke to his own children about the importance of knowing when to listen versus when to speak.

He was fascinated with the science of medicine, and there was no safe napkin around him in a restaurant as he would take his Cross pen out and make a napkin-sized diagram of a kidney, ureter, or the vascular supply to the bladder to demonstrate a recent procedure or medical mystery he wanted to share with his kids.

On Sundays, for a period of five years, he would pick up his patient, 88-year-old Max Stegman, a Holocaust survivor, drive him around and visit with him after Max’s wife had died and he was living alone. He was truly honored to be a physician, a healer, and friend to his patients.

Don’s years in retirement were spent traveling with Alita; attending any and all concerts involving his children and grandchildren; doing every stinking day of the week New York Times’ crosswords faster than anyone else in the room; reading to blind residents of the Samarkand Senior Living home; lecturing and leading courses on C.S. Lewis; and serving as an elder at El Montecito Presbyterian Church.

As he seemed to be entering the next realm, Alita read “The Last Battle” from the “Chronicles of Narnia” to him.

To conjure Don without Alita or Alita without Don is to imagine a fish without water, Narnia without Aslan, or a baseball without a glove. They were truly one.
Don is survived by his wife of 63 years, Alita Wilcox Rhodes; brother Duane Rhodes; children Christopher Rhodes (Sheryl Pognant), Jesse Rhodes, and Mary Beth Rhodes Woodruff (Matthew); three grandchildren Aidan, Henry and Claire Woodruff.

A memorial service celebrating his life will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday, June 13 at El Montecito Presbyterian Church, 1455 E. Valley Road, Montecito. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in his name to the local music education nonprofit The Rhodes Fund/Santa Barbara Strings.