Jan. 21,2025 — From growing up in a small town in rural Alabama without running water or electricity to becoming a distinguished military veteran and OB-GYN physician, University of Florida alumnus Richard L. Allen, M.D. ’77, embodies the transformative power of perseverance and education. His journey, shaped by a love for learning and insightful mentors, community, family, and faith, led him from a two-room schoolhouse in Russell County, Alabama, to Tuskeegee University and, ultimately, the UF College of Medicine, where a chance visit to Gainesville changed his life forever.

“You look back, and you think, ‘How did things develop the way they did?’ I look back, and I think God did it,” Allen said. “Medicine has never been a job to me. It’s just giving back.”

Allen and his three siblings grew up in Hatchechubbee, a tiny town of less than 500 people in Alabama’s Chattahoochee Valley near the border with Georgia. His parents spent their days working in Columbus, Georgia, a half hour away, while the kids enjoyed playing sports outdoors and going hunting and fishing. One day, after playing with some older kids outside the school at recess, Allen followed them inside and joined the first, second, and third graders in class, taught by Nellena Holley. Despite being only 5 years old, he worked hard to catch up to the older students, and his love for learning was cemented.

“My first-grade teacher saw something in me and just kept inspiring me to move forward,” Allen said. “I developed a joy for learning, and it just went from there.”

Allen became the first in his family to attend high school, finding a competitive spirit with his classmates in both academics and sports. On top of playing baseball on the school team and intramural basketball, he also joined the Russell High School band program, where he played trumpet, and graduated top of his class as co-valedictorian.

About five years ago, Allen looked up his archived high school transcripts, where he was surprised to see that as early as eighth or ninth grade, he stated that he wanted to be a doctor.

“That really kind of shocked me,” he said. “I still don’t know where it came from, when I didn’t even know how to become one. I just knew to do the best I could in every class I took.

“When somebody asked me in middle school, ‘Are you going to college?’ I said, ‘What is that?’”

Allen wound up applying to and attending Tuskegee University, a historically black land-grant university in Alabama, where he joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and prepared for military service in addition to his studies. He loved all his classes, finding a special interest in health and the opportunity to help others.

Then one summer, the elderly woman he was boarding with asked him for a favor. She had a previous tenant a few years older than Allen who had moved to Gainesville, studying and teaching psychology at UF, and she wanted to pay him a visit. So he drove her to Florida.

“While we’re there,” she said to Allen, “Maybe he can take you to campus and show you around the medical school since you’re interested.”

At the time, Allen had already applied to medical school programs at the University of Alabama and Howard University in Washington, D.C. Not being from Florida, he hadn’t thought of UF as an option. But he got to Gainesville and immediately knew it was the right place to continue his studies.

“I felt really at home at Florida from the beginning,” Allen said. “The atmosphere was so much different. People just seemed more relaxed. I could feel the warmth, and the city was my kind of town.”

He submitted an application to the UF College of Medicine and returned to Gainesville a few weeks later to interview with the late Hugh M. “Smiley” Hill, M.D., then associate dean for student and alumni affairs at the college.

“He’s the kind of guy you just don’t forget,” Allen said. “He had a big impression on me, and I said, ‘Well, this seems like the better place to me.’ I ended up at Florida because of that trip.”

During his first year at UF, Allen met another Gator legend and impactful mentor, Willie Joel Sanders, a tenured associate professor of anatomy and cell biology and the first African-American faculty member in the College of Medicine. Sanders taught anatomy lab, which quickly became one of Allen’s best subjects.

“He made learning anatomy fun, and he had a big impact on all the students,” Allen said. “I kind of patterned my own teaching after him and Dr. Hill, who’s impact has been like a mountain to me.”

In-between all the studying and continuing ROTC, Allen also found a new love, Janet — his future wife and a fellow UF student. They met in Beatty Towers on an elevator, and from the start, Allen thought she was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. As he talked to her on the elevator, he found her to be a great conversationalist and very witty. He eagerly named all of his Tuskeegee classmates from her hometown in Bartow, Florida, building a connection over their shared friends. It turned out, he and Janet had also started attending and got baptized at the same church in Gainesville, the Church of Christ.

By the Spring semester, Allen had worked up the courage to invite her to a medical school picnic and a church banquet, and the two hit it off.

When the time came for clinical rotations, Allen eagerly dove into each specialty, loving it all and soaking up knowledge everywhere he went. He liked surgery, and internal medicine, and pediatrics. OB-GYN, he found, was the perfect blend of everything, and he found a unique joy helping bring new life into the world.

At commencement, Allen was given the honor of leading the prayer for the Class of ’77, and soon after, he began his military service as a captain in the U.S. Army, with Janet by his side.

Allen’s first orders were to continue his medical training through a general internship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. After another two years as a military flight surgeon, he knew he wanted to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology and was assigned to an Army residency program in Tacoma, Washington.

“Believe it or not, it was similar to Florida,” he said. “I loved it. It was a good fit for a country boy like me.”

Allen went on to serve a full 20 years of distinguished service with the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and caring for patients everywhere, from his home state of Alabama at Fort Rucker to Virginia, Colorado, and overseas.

In the fall of 1989, he was stationed at a U.S. military hospital in Germany as OB-GYN chief. His hospital was targeted to close with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but when the time came sooner than anticipated, he was tasked with coordinating patient evacuations and transfers to a local German hospital across the street for families to safely deliver their children.

“That was a big moment,” Allen said. “It was a smooth transition. We were trying to keep things calm and in order, and we did a pretty good job. But coordinating this smooth transition to the German medical center was way beyond what I could have ever imagined as a young lad growing up in Hatchechubee.”

After retiring from the military in 1993, Allen and Janet settled in Columbus, Georgia, to give their two children, John and Deborah, a stable home life and education. He joined a family practice residency program caring for patients and teaching residents at the Columbus Regional Healthcare System, now called Piedmont Columbus Regional. He also joined the Mercer University School of Medicine as an adjunct professor.

“It was my way of fulfilling the dream of being a country doctor, taking care of people similar to those I grew up around, and coming back and serving the community,” Allen said.

Though semi-retired now, he still teaches the next generation of OB-GYN physicians one day a week and has been recognized several times as Teacher of the Year with the residency program. In his free time, Allen and his fellow Russell High School alumni transformed their old campus into a new senior center for the community, where folks can gather to dance, play games, and socialize in the former cafeteria.

“That gives me joy,” he said. “It’s a treat to go see them having fun.”

He also stays connected with his fellow Gators, attending alumni reunions with his family and friends, and avidly following the Florida Gators basketball and football teams. One year, he brought Holley — also a Gators fan — down, to share a game and thank her for launching his incredible journey all those years ago in the Hatchechubbee school room.