By David Perlmutt
dperlmutt@charlotteobserver.com

She's a family doctor, a vice president at Presbyterian Hospital and the first African-American woman to chair the local medical society.

Thursdays, you'll usually find Ophelia Garmon-Brown at a free clinic she co-founded 10 years ago, "feeding my soul" by caring for poor, uninsured patients, like the people she knew growing up in a Detroit housing project.

Most summers, she dispenses her medicine in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Guyana, Jamaica and South Africa, where she has financially supported two boys and is paying for college for one.

Sunday, she'll be ordained as a Baptist minister.

And this week, because of her tireless care for poor people, Garmon-Brown was named Charlotte's 2010 Woman of the Year by a committee of past winners of the 55-year-old award.

She joins a list of 63 women whose selfless service have helped make Charlotte a more caring city. On March 30, they'll honor her at the yearly "A Woman's Place" program at ImaginOn uptown.

She cried, "so humbled" by the gesture.

"This is an extraordinary, accomplished woman," said Betty Chafin Rash, who won the award in 1979. "Just reading her nomination exhausted me."

A dream fulfilled

As a child, Garmon-Brown, now 56, knew she wanted to be a doctor.

Her father, a General Motors worker, died of encephalitis when she was 2, forcing her mother, Marinda, to move their two girls from a Detroit suburb into public housing.

"I had this dream: I wanted to save all the daddies in the world, so other kids didn't grow up without one," she said this week. "People would hear me talking about becoming a doctor, and say to my mother: 'Why you let that girl go on with those dreams?'

"My mother was a woman of great faith. She never allowed me to be discouraged."

Marinda Garmon, raised on an N.C. peanut and hog farm, decided to tough it out in Detroit, hoping her daughters would be exposed to cultural opportunities that she never found in Windsor in eastern North Carolina.

Yet when Marinda Garmon's family back home needed her help, she uprooted Ophelia, then 13, and her older sister and moved them to Bertie County.

There, with the civil rights movement in full swing, Ophelia experienced the discrimination that her mother had fled.

In ninth grade at freshly integrated Bertie High School, she was the lone black student in a chemistry class. Though she made A's, her teacher told her she'd never amount to much.

She never let go of her dream. Elected president of Bertie's student government, she went off to N.C. Central University in Durham to study biology - armed with her mother's encouragement.

In 1977, she was admitted to UNC Chapel Hill's medical school, one of 16 minority students in a class of 160.

What she couldn't pay in scholarships and grants, an aunt, teacher Sarah Coggins, paid - a gesture that inspired Garmon-Brown to give back years later.

In 1980, her dream real with an MD behind her name, she was ready to save all the daddies and everyone else.

Sharing her first love

At Presbyterian, she began caring for the body of her patients, first running the hospital's five urgent care centers.

She chaired the hospital's ethics committee, dealing with life and death issues. She's now vice president of business and community partnerships. And with a friend, Nancy Hudson, she started the Charlotte Community Health Clinic, where as her administrative roles at Presbyterian increased she continued to practice her first love of looking after sick people.

"Dr. G.B. has such a passion for the well-being of this community," Hudson said. "She didn't come up with a silver spoon in her mouth. She came up in Detroit, and helped start this clinic similar to the one she used as a child."

Garmon-Brown also went into public schools and provided free physicals and was medical director at the Salvation Army's shelter for women and children until she recently gave it up to another doctor.

"Everybody has the right to receive health care and I just feel like that's one of the things I can do," she said. "Nothing is more desperate than a person who is sick - or who has a sick loved one - and can't get help."

That belief takes her overseas to practice her medicine.

Along the way, she helped raise two children, daughter LaShown Kelly and son Spenser, both grown adults. She's a grandmother to 3-year-old Ezekiel Samuel Kelly.

But the faith that her mother planted in her, kept gnawing. Like "the calling" she heard for medicine, she heard it call for the pulpit to serve the spirit.

So in 2003, Garmon-Brown began studying and training to be a Baptist minister.

Sunday, she'll be ordained at Myers Park Baptist Church.

Friends ask if she's giving up medicine to preach. She's always quietly prayed for patients, but won't pray with them unless she's invited.

"I don't feel my calling is to pastor a church," Garmon-Brown said. "There will be times when I preach, but it will be a message from both callings, to help people improve their minds and bodies, as well as their spiritual beings.

"My faith has been a major part of my life. But being a family doctor is who I am - it makes me whole."

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