Dan Dickman still hasn’t lived down the last time he was featured in The Daily Inter Lake. 

A photo of the recently retired nurse for the Flathead City-County Health Department went “viral” before that meant anything other than the spread of disease.

“My boss set me up,” Dickman said. “We had this ‘pregnancy simulator’ and there was a guy who really needed a demo. So I put the belly on and he opens the door. There stood Anne Clark from the Inter Lake with her camera. She wrote a story about me and it was picked up everywhere.”

Dickman said the photo was used by the Associated Press and made it to newspapers like the Boston Globe and Salt Lake Tribune. 

“My poor mother, she got together with some church ladies and they had cut out the article and given it to her,” he said. “She called me and said ‘son, you’ve embarrassed me before, but this takes the cake. I never thought you’d go and get pregnant on me!’”

Dickman and his wife, Becky, laugh easily and often. Both are registered nurses. Dan retired from the City-County Health Department after 30 years. Becky remains the nurse in the Whitefish School District. 

Before school comes back in session, the Dickmans plan to visit two of their daughters in Atlanta and help one move to a new job in South Carolina before touring the Northeast coast.

One daughter will be working with a Lutheran seminary while the other takes a new job at Georgia State University.

A third daughter, a teacher, lives in the Flathead. 

“I’m surrounded by women,” Dickman said. “I’m being punished for my sins in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Now that he is retired, he plans on volunteering more than ever.

Dickman, 67, won the 2009 volunteer of the year award from United Way. A Northridge Lutheran Church member and long time Kiwanian, he has also volunteered for 15 years as a Big Brother for the Big Brother Big Sisters of America.

“I’ve been a volunteer forever,” he said. “Everyone has told me to take it slow now, and not commit every hour to volunteering — which I totally can do.”

Dickman went to school at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula for three years before finishing up in a one-year program in Bozeman.

His first job was at the Helena Veterans Administration hospital, where he met Becky. The two then came to Whitefish (where they still live today) and worked at North Valley Hospital. Dan left after six years and came to the City-County Health Department in 1984.

“Things used to be very different then,” he said. “We used to visit every new mother in the valley. Can you imagine that now? Our department was small, we had four public health nurses. Now they have eight or nine. It’s huge!”

While the nurses started as generalists, Dickman said as the years went by the nurses found their niches. He became the immunization guy. 

“We were up in Glacier and these two little boys walked by,” Becky said. “They looked at each other and then at him and said ‘that’s the guy.’ He had given them their shots.”

Dickman describes going just about anywhere in the Flathead and someone recognizing him as the guy who gave them shots. Some of his first patients are now bringing in children and even grandchildren for public health immunizations, Becky said.

He has established a rapport with a core group of seniors who will miss him, and vice versa.

“I’ll miss the people. I’ve got a dedicated following of seniors who come in for me,” Dickman said. “I’ve told them a million times I’m a registered nurse but they keep calling me Dr. Dan.”

But Dickman, a self-described jokester, doesn’t mind the mixed-up professional credentials. A social man, having fun is kind of what he does.

“I used to embarrass Becky at events like the fair,” he said. “Every transient there would gravitate toward me. She’d take the kids and say she was going one direction and I was going another. Even at Syke’s Diner, these old farmers would come up and tell me about their health. She’d say, ‘go eat over at that table.’”

So retirement won’t be a boring time for Dickman. When not volunteering, he plans on exercising more, hiking more and just spending more time doing what he likes.

“I’m definitely going to miss it,” he said of his job. “But I’m the kind of guy who will talk to anybody, and if there’s nobody to talk to I’ll talk to a post.”

And he might just tell the story of the time the press, and subsequently the country, caught him wearing a fake pregnancy belly.