CINCINNATI – The 100-year-old doctor still makes house calls.

He must, said Dr. Fred Goldman. That’s where the patients are.

“If they’re sick and can’t leave home,” he said, “I go to see them.”

They came to see him Dec. 12. Patients, friends and family – some using walkers, some in strollers – gathered in numbers passing the century mark at the office he calls, “the dump,” to throw a surprise birthday party for the internist who is the oldest licensed physician practicing in Ohio.

He surprised them. The guest of honor arrived 90 minutes early.

“I almost had a heart attack seeing all of the people in the hall and the waiting room,” Goldman said between greeting well-wishers with a question about their health.

How’s your ankle?

You still smoking?

“People ask me why do you go to a doctor who’s 100?” said Patti Levine, a fourth-generation patient of the doctor. “I tell them, because he’s seen it all and he knows everything.”

The Blue Ash woman stood by a stroller holding her 10-month-old daughter, Madyson. “She’s not his patient,” Levine said, “yet.”

“He asked me to come work for him in 2007,” said 85-year-old Dr. Leo Wayne. That’s the year Wayne retired and Goldman, at the age of 96, cut back from five, eight-hour days a week to three.

“I told him I would not work for him,” Wayne added. “I’m too young.”

Would he prescribe retirement for his older friend and colleague?

“I would not dream of advising him to retire,” Wayne replied. “Dr. Goldman is an excellent diagnostician. He knows his patients, including himself. He knows this patient is still up to the task.”

As the birthday doctor worked the waiting and the hallway, his guests peppered him with questions.

How does it feel to be 100?

He examined both of his hands. He squeezed one. Then, the other.

“Don’t feel anything different,” he said with a sly smile.

“Most people my age,” he added, “can’t feel anything. They’re dead.”

The crowd laughed. So, did the 100-year-old birthday boy.

Goldman was born Dec. 12, 1911, at his family’s home on Ninth Street in the West End.

“My mother – a housewife – was from Poland. My father – a shopkeeper – was from Russia,” he said, “and I was from both of them.”

“Hell, when I became a doctor in 1935,” Goldman said, “Freud was still seeing patients.”

Entertaining the party’s guest, Goldman offered to show them his office.

“Want to see the rest of the dump?” he asked before leading visitors on the tour. He sees 12 patients a day in his computer-free suite. His schedule is set by hand by his sole employee, office manager Patti Heath.

“I came to work here when he was 91,” she said.

She thought she would be a short-timer.

“Here I am nine years later. And he’s still going strong. The first year I worked for him, I collapsed on a beach for my vacation. He hiked the wilderness in Alaska and lived in a tent. They don’t make men like Fred Goldman anymore.”

The century-old doctor’s office overlooks Burnet Avenue, the former site of Jewish Hospital and the towers of University Hospital. When the latter was Cincinnati’s General Hospital, he was making his rounds one day when he met, wooed and eventually wed Esther Nelson, a red-haired farm-girl turned nurse from Amelia.

“She was tending to my patients,” he recalled of the woman he wed in 1938. “And, she had her own ideas about things, which I admired. The best thing was she became the mother of our three kids, the best gifts she ever gave me.”

Another party guest asked the centenarian tour guide for his secret to a long life.

“I have no secrets,” he confided. “Haven’t a clue why I’ve lived this long. Maybe it’s because my office is a mess and I keep saying I’m going to clean it up. That keeps me going. That and it’s in my genes”

He admitted to “having some bumps in life.” He survived major heart surgery and licked prostate cancer.

“I had good doctors,” he explained, “who took good care of me. “

Last winter he suffered several bumps. While making a house call, he went up a snow-covered set of steps that had no handrail. He slipped. Down he went – bruised but nothing broken. He has already told that patient “if you get sick this winter, I’m coming in by way of your garage.”

The biggest bump he suffered was when his wife of 60 years died in 1998.

“She suffered from a brain tumor,” he said. For the first time on this festive day, a trace of sadness appeared in his strong voice. He suffered, too. “I still miss her,” he said, looking toward a photo of “my Esther” standing on shelf by his desk.

“When she died, I had to go on,” he said, “I could not afford to feel sorry for myself. I had to be diverted by work.”