WATERTOWN, NY; April 1, 2022 –
Dr. Dorothea “Susan” Badenhausen of Brasher Falls, New York, was a country doctor. She was likely one of the last of her kind to make house calls to patients, even in the dead of a North Country winter.
Dr. Badenhausen was born in 1935 in New York City. She started out her medical career as a researcher. But, after a while, she realized she wanted more. She decided to go back to school, and in 1971, at age 36, Susan Badenhausen received her Doctor of Medicine from Boston College. She set her sights on the North Country, moving to Brasher Falls in 1975.
“She didn’t want to open a private practice in the city. She wanted to use her education to go where she would really be needed. St. Lawrence County, New York is such a place,” said long-time friend Pat McKeown. “I think the Tri-town Region, Brasher and Stockholm and Lawrence advertised for a physician, a community physician. She saw it, checked out the place, saw that it was pretty low on the income scale, saw that the majority of her patients would be Medicaid or Medicare patients, they didn’t have a lot of private insurance. And she said, as she said to me later, ‘That’s the place I wanted to be.’”
Dr. Badenhausen gave over 30 years of service to her North Country patients. She passed away in 2018 at the age of 83. The Dr. D. Susan Badenhausen Legacy Fund was established through her bequest at the Northern New York Community Foundation. Her bequest included grant awards to several area non-profits, including WPBS-TV.
Mark Prasuhn, President & General Manager of WPBS noted that “Dr. Badenhausen was a passionate fan of the opera and the arts, and so WPBS was a natural choice to be included in her bequest. Our team has worked to leverage the resources provided in this generous grant to raise awareness of the arts in St. Lawrence County through several interrelated initiatives, which we believe effectively honor Dr. Badenhausen’s legacy and love of the arts and the North Country.”
Four specific initiatives were supported by the grant:
1. Great Performances: Now Hear This virtual screenings
In the height of the pandemic in January 2021, North Country audiences were able to enjoy two virtual screenings of episodes of this classical music documentary hosted by Orchestra of Northern New York Music Director and Conductor Kenneth Andrews with program host Scott Yoo.
2. Artists of St. Lawrence County
WPBS created a series of ten short-form video programs highlighting North Country artists, singers, and musicians in St. Lawrence County, along with a biographical segment on Dr. Badenhausen. The programs will air as segments on the station’s flagship current affairs series, WPBS Weekly: Inside the Stories, Tuesday nights at 7:30, beginning on April 5th; and will be available on the WPBS video player (https://www.wpbstv.org/category/video/wpbs-digital-studios) and mobile app. The broadcast schedule is as follows:
- April 5 – Biography segment highlighting Dr. Dorothea Susan Badenhausen
- April 12 – John Morrow, Artist, Ogdensburg
- April 19 – Carrie Hill of Akwesasne, Sweet Grass and Black Ash Basket Weaver
- May 3 – Doug Rubio, Professor of Classical Guitar, Crane School of Music
- May 10 – Brian Dunbar, Assistant Professor of Flute, Crane School of Music
- May 17 – Margaret Chalker, World-Reknowned Opera Singer and Assistant Professor at The Crane School of Music
- May 24 – Scott Ouderkirk, Glass Goat, Creator and Artist in stained glass and wooden boat restoration
- May 31 – Bear Fox of Akwesasne, Singer and Songwriter
- June 14 – Len Mackey, Director of Ancient Earth Skills Education Center in Canton, and African Drummer
- June 21 – Frederic Remington Museum, Ogdensburg
An additional segment with Gouverneur artist and national television host Wilson Bickford, who passed away in December 2021, aired in the spring of 2021.
3. Back Roads Museums: the Frederic Remington Art Museum
This half hour documentary television program profiling the Frederic Remington Museum in Ogdensburg will receive its world premiere on WPBS on Tuesday, June 7th at 7:30 pm. A native of Canton, renowned artist Frederic Remington depicted scenes and figures of the American Old West, and the museum’s impressive collection makes it one of the leading cultural institutions in Northern New York. Back Roads Museums is a new documentary series, in development as a collaboration of Canadian independent production companies Blomeley Communications and TPC Productions.
4. Community Event (location TBC in St. Lawrence County, August 2022)
To promote and debut Artists of St. Lawrence County, WPBS will work with partners to organize a community event including a screening of the ten short programs and artistic performances.
About WPBS
WPBS is a PBS station serving approximately 650,000 households throughout Northern New York and Eastern Ontario via cable, satellite, Internet and over-the-air distribution. WPBS is a non-profit organization whose mission is to educate, inform and engage our two-nation region with exceptional and trusted content across multiple platforms. Its vision is to be the premier provider of extraordinary public media that instills wonder and curiosity across generations and borders.
More information about WPBS, including a full channel listing, is available at wpbstv.org, or by following WPBS on Twitter and Facebook.
