DOCTOR WATCHED NORTHRIDGE GROW UP.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

It is a remarkable, full life Dr. Lillian Seitsive is living - a life that makes you smile, shake your head in amazement, and say to yourself, ``Way to go, doc - keep it up.''

At 93 and still practicing medicine, this pioneering Northridge doctor will fly to San Francisco this weekend to receive one of the most prestigious honors awarded by the California Medical Association.

The Frederik Plessner Memorial award is given annually to a physician who ``best exemplifies the practice and ethics of a rural practitioner.''

Seitsive is the first woman doctor to win it, and the first doctor from Los Angeles County to garner the honor, since most of the county has long ceased to fit the definition of rural anything anymore.

But back in 1953, when Lillian and her late husband, Dr. Morris Rood, were shooing away chickens to turn the first spade of dirt along Reseda Boulevard for Northridge's first medical building, her practice had more in common with ``Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman'' than it did with the high-tech, sprawling medical centers of the urban Valley today.

And many of her longtime patients, like high school teacher Irene Park of Thousand Oaks, continue to like it that way just fine.

``Some of my relatives have tried to convince me to get a new doctor, but I refuse,'' says Parks, who has been going to Seitsive for more than 25 years.

``I appreciate the time I have with her. No one thinks of Dr. Seitsive as old. She gives you ageless advice.''

Advice we might never have heard or heeded if it hadn't been for a bad back and an understanding husband.

When you grow up in Brooklyn in the early 1900s - the eighth of 10 children born to Russian immigrants - you develop some pretty thick skin.

So, the young hospital resident trying to embarrass Lily Seitsive was wasting his breath.

``Don't you know women belong in the kitchen?'' he snidely asked her as she waited with 300 other applicants - all men - seeking prized internships at Coney Island Hospital.

Nationwide at that time - the late 1920s - there were only about 200 women physicians, about 6 percent of the physicians in this country. Today, women number 23 percent of all physicians.

Most of the men laughed at the resident's snide remark. One who didn't was another young resident, Morris Rood.

``He told me not to worry about the other resident's comment, and I appreciated his help,'' Lillian recalls, reflecting on the first time she laid eyes on the young man who would one day become her husband.

Lillian and 19 men got those internships at the public hospital, which had to set up a special dorm room in the nurses' quarters for its only woman intern.

It was tough, those early years after becoming a doctor in 1931, Lillian says. Too many people were like that resident who thought a woman's place was in the kitchen. Potential patients shunned her because they didn't want a woman doctor.

But attitudes, like time, have a way of changing. And this country was deep in the throes of change when her husband, Morris, went off to World War II to serve as a transport surgeon.

Lillian took over his practice, taking their young son, Robert, with her on house calls because there were no day care centers.

The boy liked what he saw. Today, Robert is a physician, specializing in diabetes. Another child, Madeline Rood Taft, is a social worker and member of the board of trustees for the Los Angeles Zoo.

Meanwhile, their mom just keeps on practicing medicine in the same old Northridge building she and Morris built 47 years ago - before they helped found the area's first hospital, a 49-bed facility that later became Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

``We moved to California in 1953 because I had a bad back and the warmer climate was good for it,'' Lillian said Wednesday, getting ready for her trip to San Francisco this weekend.

``Morris understood and closed his office in Brooklyn. We started all over again in Northridge. It was all dirt roads, walnut fields, poultry farms and horse ranches back then.

``I'd look out my office window and watch people riding horses down Reseda Boulevard,'' she says, laughing. ``Sometimes the winds would blow so hard, walnuts would come flying from the field next door and pelt my windows.''

Just some of the things an old rural doc had to put up with in the Valley almost a half century ago.

``Dr. Seitsive embodies the spirit of the rural physician,'' says Doctor Marie Kuffner, president-elect of the California Medical Association.

``She opened a medical practice in a very rural area that had no doctor's office, and was instrumental in building medical services as the community grew to the metropolitan area it is today,'' she said.

And, 47 years later - at age 93 - she's still going strong.

Yeah, it's a remarkable, full life Dr. Lillian Seitsive is living.

Way to go, doc - keep it up.

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Photo: Dr. Lillian Seitsive stands in her office, in front of her college graduation portrait.

Los Angeles County Medical Association