BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Telegraph Staff Writer
STARKE—The franchisee of the local Sonny’s Barbecue told the Starke Rotary Club how he came to build water projects in Central America.
John Kirkpatrick told the civic group that after graduating from the University of Florida, he sold life insurance in the Gainesville area. One of his clients was Sonny Tillman, who started a Waldo Road Barbecue restaurant in 1968.
Nine years later, Kirkpatrick and others persuaded Tillman to franchise the business, and Kirkpatrick became the first franchisee with a Sonny’s Barbecue in Ocala.
“So, my son now runs the company,” he told the Rotary Club, “and we bought the Starke store along with a group of other stores. We’ve got 29 Sonny’s, four Giovanni’s, and four or five coffee shops.”
“They’re making a lot of money,” he said of the enterprises. “And that’s good because that gives me an opportunity to give money away, and that’s where I get my greatest joy, which gets me into what I can do with the little bit of time I’ve got left to make a difference.”
From forming lines to dentistry
Kirkpatrick said his first trip to Central America was with a Canada-based missionary group. There he started out organizing lines into a medical clinic and finished the tour assisting a dentist extract teeth.
“Well, the last day I was there, a patient had this really loose tooth, and the dentist says: ‘Can you take that out,’” recalled Kirkpatrick. “I said, ‘Sure.’ So, she gave me the extraction device, and I took it out.”
Kirkpatrick said that as the owner of several franchises being run by a management team, he had time on his hands and considered returning to school to prepare for a second career in the medical field. However, he decided against it.
Kirkpatrick said that after talking to several physician friends and through self-training, he acquired the skills to extract teeth,
“Most people think of pulling teeth,” he said while showing the Rotarians a device, “but you don’t pull teeth. You actually use this instrument right here, which is called a luxator or a straight elevator, and you loosen the tooth up, and then you rotate it out.”
Kirkpatrick said he continued working on patients in Central America until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down travel.
“I did it for years,” he said of his work extracting teeth. “Dentistry and regular surgery are almost like carpentry. I mean, it’s a technical skill. The guys that really have it tough are the internists who are trying to figure out what’s wrong with you. But you can learn dentistry. I mean, we teach our military guys how to do extractions in the field.”
Kirkpatrick said he was even offered a medical license in Guatemala but turned down the offer.
Fresh water for hundreds of families
He said that his introduction to water projects was through his past membership in the Gainesville Rotary Club.
“We did water projects in Guatemala,” he said of the club,” but they were different than what I’m doing.”
“What I’m doing is I’ve got a person down there named Walter,” Kirkpatrick continued. “He finds a community that has a water need, and then we run pipes up to a spring, bring it down, and pump it up to a big tower that holds water, and then it goes through a reverse osmosis filtration system, and the people get water.”
Kirkpatrick said he is now installing his fifth system, which will provide water to around 300 families.
The businessman also talked about a medical clinic he financed with a $5,000 gift to a missionary.
Kirkpatrick made his presentation in a white lab coat with “John Kirkpatrick M.M.” embroidered on the left side.
Several of the Rotarians wanted to know what M.M. stood for.
“You know how doctors have their MDs and all that kind of stuff,” Kirkpatrick replied. “This is really tacky. It stands for multimillionaire.”
