And by his estimate, he delivered 5,500 babies over his career — more than enough to fill the Beaufort High School basketball gymnasium two times over, with another 100 strollers waiting in the ticket line. “Living and working here has been such a marvelous experience,” Fontana said. “I have a lot of patients, particularly from when the community was small, who were still very close friends. Beaufort has allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do with my career in medicine.”

Though that career is now in its twilight — Fontana retired from full-time practice in 2016 — he remains active. In addition to serving on the board of the Wardle Family YMCA, Fontana still works five or six days a month at Beaufort Memorial assisting with surgeries. He also continues to operate during mission trips to the Caribbean with one of his sons, J.J. Fontana, an anesthesiologist who lives in Washington. That work harkens to his earliest days in Beaufort, a burgeoning town that met a very specific set of requirements when Fontana was picking a place to settle.

“I wanted to be in a small town, on the water, near a bigger city,” Fontana said. “If you look down the East Coast in the South, there’s really only about four places you can do that from northern Florida to southern Virginia.” Fontana grew up in a small farm community on Grand Island, in the middle of the Niagara River. In terms of land mass, the island is bigger than Manhattan, however, only about 4,000 people lived there when Fontana was growing up in a home that overlooked the water and offered a view into Canada.

His father was a college professor,his mother a school teacher. No one in the family and no one the family knew practiced medicine. Yet somehow, Fontana and his brother both became doctors, and his sister a nurse. “I think being a doctor appealed to me because my parents were very giving people, always taking care of others,” Fontana said. “In our little town, if someone had issues, they came to my house. My mother, in particular, was someone people would turn to.”

Fontana did his undergraduate work at St. Bonaventure, then attended medical school at Georgetown University. He decided to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology “because the OB docs were all happy,” he said. “I wanted to be a family doc, but I also wanted to do surgery. … This was a wonderful discipline for me because it allowed me to do both.” As it turned out, he’d do a whole lot more.

After attending the University of Florida for his ob/gyn training, he worked for a while teaching medicine at Penn State. However, he took a 50-percent pay cut to come to Beaufort, where Collins, a former classmate at Florida, recruited him and Credle to help start a practice that would be affiliated with Beaufort Memorial. “You just knew the place was going to be a great place to live and raise kids,” Fontana said. “It was just like my home. It was small. It was intimate. You could cross Ribaut Road and look up and down and not see a car when you crossed the road.”

He hadn’t been in town long when he bumped into Dr. Herbert Keyserling, who served as Beaufort’s country doctor for more than a half century. “It’s a good thing there are three of you in your practice,” Keyserling told Fontana. “Why is that?” Fontana asked. “Well, one of you can be in the office, one of you can be in the hospital and the third one had better be in the river catching some fish because you aren’t going to make enough money to live on.”

Fontana said Keyserling wasn’t far off on that prediction, at least where the early days of the practice are concerned. He and his partners ran themselves ragged, raising money to improve natal care at Beaufort Memorial Hospital at a time when South Carolina had the nation’s second-worst infant mortality rate.

Fontana often served double-duty as his ob/gyn patients’ family practitioner. With office visits mixed with deliveries and surgeries, Fontana learned to sleep in one-hour increments, and in any position. When waking hours weren’t spent caring for patients, he was helping raise money for needed equipment and tending to administrative duties that helped improve care for both his practice and Beaufort Memorial.

“As I said, one reason I came here was because of the geography and the natural surroundings,” Fontana said. “The other reason I came here was I wanted to be able to say I had benefitted the community, and I think we did.”