This 'Giant' Scared No Child

"As we got more and more kids, we kept going to him," she said. "There were times he picked out toys so they could play with them."

Smedberg liked him because she could relate to him as a parent, she said. "He used to call himself the daddy doctor, because he had four kids," she said. "He always used to say, 'This is what I would do for my kids.' "

As she got to know him better, she began to share parenting concerns as well as health issues, seeking advice or commiseration when her boys came home with speeding tickets, for example, or when one or another of her children did not want to go to church.

Another longtime customer, Patti Durkin of Sterling, said she appreciated the "personal service" he provided to her family. One of her children has chronic health problems. At six months old, he got an infection and was running a high fever. McGorry met them at a Loudoun hospital in the middle of the night and had the boy air-lifted to Children's National Medical Center for treatment.

Another former patient and longtime Loudoun resident, Donnie Legg, whose wife is a nurse in McGorry's office, said he started seeing the doctor in the 1970s when he was 12 or 13 and had a diagnosis of diabetes.

"It was quite a struggle growing up with that," Legg said. McGorry "helped me understand that it wasn't a death sentence. . . . It's just an illness that you have to deal with," he said.

On a recent visit to McGorry's Leesburg office, the waiting room was decorated like the seashore, with tropical fish painted on the walls. McGorry was wearing a Winnie the Pooh tie. The files for the nearly 7,000 patients were stored from floor to ceiling on rotating shelves.

After he retires, McGorry and his wife of 41 years, Joan, are planning to spend more time with their grandchildren and their winters in a new house in South Carolina. But McGorry said he does not want to stray too far from medicine. He hopes to volunteer at the Loudoun County Health Department clinic.