A pair of well broken-in cowboy boots might be the first visual cue that Dr. William (Bill) Frazier is not now – and probably never has been – your typical Vero Beach physician.
The fact that he’s been the ‘head honcho’ at Vero Cosmetic Surgery and MediSpa since 1982 may say even more about him.
Frazier and his cowboy boots actually started out practicing medicine at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., in 1975.
“I was the medical director for the emergency department [at Yale], ran the burn unit and the trauma unit,” explains the soft-spoken Frazier, “and had my own practice in plastic surgery.”
He was also on the Yale medical faculty for seven years.
Now, after another 35 years of performing plastic surgery procedures here in Vero Beach, Frazier and his wife, Jane, are about to mosey on down the road – or, more correctly, mosey on up the road to launch a new phase of life and a new practice in Blairsville, Ga., (population 562), a place where many Vero Beach folks own property.
“I grew up on a farm,” Frazier explains, “but it was a dairy farm. But by 1970 I’d bought my first horse and rode, maybe not every day, but probably three or four days a week and I started wearing cowboy boots. I found them very comfortable and so I’ve just always worn them.”
The cowboy similarities pretty much end there, but Bill and Jane Frazier’s adventurous spirits are still firing on all cylinders.
Frazier describes his bride as “a 5-foot-2 blonde, blue eyes, tiny little person” who, he proudly boasts, has just driven a six-ton truck the full 10 hours from Vero to Blairsville on her own.
According to Frazier, “She has been to over 60 countries and is million-miler [frequent flyer] on two different airlines.”
Frazier may not quite be able to match his wife’s frequent flyer status but he has practiced medicine in Haiti, San Juan and Beirut, Lebanon as well as New Haven and Vero Beach and, he adds, “I’ve lived in 32 houses so far.”
The 33rd is on the horizon thanks, Frazier feels, in no small part due to fate.
The couple had been searching online for houses in the Blairsville area for quite a while and had made in-person visits to several of them. Then his wife came across a listing showing a house they both liked that had something special – what sealed the deal was a photo of a maroon bedroom with a bright blue and white Yale pennant on the wall.
They raced to Georgia where they discovered the seller’s son was a student at – you guessed it – the Yale School of Medicine.
Frazier was ecstatic.
“I went to Yale Medical School and my dad went to Yale and my brother went to Yale and my mother went to Yale,” he told the sellers, and within three days the deal done.
The couple plan to garden, raise a few head of cattle and never again worry about rising oceans. (Most of Florida, Frazier points out, is a mere 8 feet above sea level; in the Georgia mountains, an influx of Antarctic ice water won’t be a worry.)
That doesn’t mean they won’t miss living here on the Treasure Coast.
“Vero is an absolutely stellar community to live in,” Frazier says fondly, “but change is also important.”
Even more important is that he clearly feels good about selling his practice to his partner, Dr. Katya Bailor. “I really loved having her as a partner,” says Frazier proudly. “She’s wonderful.”
So wonderful, it seems, he reaches way past 1982 for an analogy dating back to the 1500s and the Renaissance.
Cosmetic surgery, says Frazier, “for some people, it’s really just something that they love to do. It’s like Michelangelo. Why did he take a piece of rock and turn it into a statue of David? Because he loved it. That’s what he was really good at.”
Bailor, says Frazier, shares that same type of passion for her work, so he says he has no qualms about patients of his becoming patients of hers.
Frazier’s passion, he says, remains reconstructive surgery. “There’s a lot of cancer surgery and melanomas,” in addition to burns and trauma cases where he still finds helping patients very satisfying and now he’s taking that passion to Georgia.
From now through September, Dr. Frazier can be reached at Vero Cosmetic Surgery and MediSpa at 1255 37th Street, Suite D. The phone number is 772-562-2400.
Starting in October, Frazier will be at Sentinel Plastic Surgery, doubtless still wearing his cowboy boots, at 123 Weaver Rd., Suite B in Blairsville, Ga. That number is 706-439-6486.
