George Race was responsible for building the splendid laboratories at Baylor University Medical Center. He has published extensively. His book, Laboratory Medicine (written at Baylor), is a 4-volume loose-leaf publication that was updated regularly through 13 revisions. He has published 165 articles in peer-reviewed journals and nearly as many abstracts. He was instrumental in starting the A. Webb Roberts Center for Continuing Education and was its first dean. He was also chairman of the Baylor Research Foundation from 1986 to 1989, and during that period founded BUMC Proceedings and received the Distinguished Achievement Award from Baylor University. Along the way, George Race studied anthropology at Southern Methodist University and, for 1 year, law at the evening law school of the same university.

George and his lovely wife, Anne, also a physician, have traveled extensively. His interest in animals has led him to acquire many species on his ranch in Lampasas. He and Anne are the parents of 4 living children, all of whom are physicians. Through the years, Dr. Race has received many awards and honors, including the presidencies of the North Texas Society of Pathologists, The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School Alumni, the Dallas Academy of Pathology, the Texas Society of Pathologists, the American Cancer Society of Dallas County, the Texas Division of the American Cancer Society, the Dallas Southern Clinical Society, and the Society of Medical College Directors of Continuing Medical Education. He has been chairman of the Explorers Club, Texas Chapter, and vice president for chapters and a board member of the Explorers Club, New York. His many hobbies, wide travels, keen insights, and incredible memory make him a fascinating man from whom we can all learn.

William Clifford Roberts, MD (hereafter, WCR): Dr. Race, I appreciate your willingness to speak to me and therefore to the readers of BUMC Proceedings. Could we start by discussing your upbringing, your parents, and your siblings?

George Justice Race, MD, PhD, MSPH (hereafter, GJR): I was born and grew up in Everman, Texas, a little country town in Tarrant County between Fort Worth and Burleson (Figure 2). I lived near my late grandparents' farm on the south side of the I-35 Expressway in Fort Worth, where the Miller Brewing Company is now located. That was back when dirt was farmed by teams of mules. Raising cotton was common. My mother was a schoolteacher; my father, a carpenter, house builder, and sometime farmer. In that environment I wasn't strictly on the farm, but I was certainly adjacent to the farms, and a lot of farm kids came to the grade school and the high school that I attended. Everman School was the grade school, the middle school, and the high school. I graduated from high school in 1942. The class consisted of 13 students. I played a little basketball in the school, but I was too little, too short, and too underdeveloped. When I entered the army in World War II, I weighed 127 lb and was 5 feet, 9 inches tall. I continued to grow to be 6 feet, 1 inch and now weigh >200 lb.

I have enjoyed animals all my life. Growing up, I had a horse and I was in the 4H Club. I raised some animals, including a pig and a goat, for showing at the Tarrant County Stock Show, and I always had 2 or 3 dogs. I enjoyed seeing the animals grow up.

I never had any luxuries in this depression era. My father was gone most of the time and eventually left altogether, leaving my mother to rear my sister and me. I had 4 grandmothers but no grandfathers. The grandmothers doted on me as the little boy who would run any errand for them. As a youngster I was indoctrinated into taking care of the needs of my family--particularly the multiple female family members. There were a lot of them: Aunt Pearl, Aunt Gamma, Aunt Conn, Aunt Ada, Aunt Annie Lee, my mother Lila, my grandmother Bunch, my grandmother Race, my great-grandmother Farmer, and my great-grandmother Race. They had all grown up in farm families in the area south of Fort Worth. Most settled in that area before and just after the Civil War. The Farmer family on my father's side had come into the area when Fort Worth was a fort and had a store selling goods to the soldiers. The Farmer brothers were sellers, purveyors of goods, and had some land south of town which they farmed.

After the Civil War the Race family came into the Texas area from Kentucky and Tennessee. Before and after that the Bunch family came in from western North Carolina and settled at Lampasas. In Everman there were probably 400 people, maybe 100 different families. At that time there was a drug store, a doctor, and a filling station (selling gasoline at 13 cents a gallon and Cokes for 5 cents). It was a very tight community. Everybody more or less took care of and gossiped about everybody else. It was hard to have very much private business.

As a skinny little kid, I was the runt of the class. I got into a few fights over that, but I learned that I did better with my talking than I did with my fighting.

I enjoyed learning. From an early age I liked to read. As a result, my third grade teacher told the principal and my mother she'd been giving me fourth grade lessons and felt that I should skip to the fourth grade, which I did. I graduated from an 11-year high school in 10 years at the age of 16. It turned out that that probably saved my life, because I completed 2 years of college before I was 18, which gave me an acceptance to medical school at the time I went into the army.

Some of my teachers influenced me greatly. I remember Mr. N. D. Butts, who demonstrated to the class the pressure of the atmosphere (14.7 lb/in2). He took an old turpentine can, held it over a boiling kettle of steam until the interior of the can was nothing but steam, and then quickly took it out and screwed the lid on. He said, “Now watch the can as I cool the steam. The can will be crushed by the outside air pressure.” We all watched as he put the can under cold water. As the temperature came down in the can the steam condensed, creating a vacuum, and the can crinkled completely due to outside air pressure. It was an absolutely stunning but simple experiment. He did things like that. He also showed us what a foot-pound really was. He had us fire a 22-gauge rifle into a 1-lb block of wood and we measured how far it moved. We then calculated the amount of energy that went into the wood. That sort of thing fascinated me. He also was a good shop teacher who taught us how to turn table legs on a lathe, make miter joints and interdigitated file drawers, and prepare cabinetmaking drawings. He was an unsung hero to me.

WCR: How old were you then? What grade was that?

GJR: That was probably in the eighth grade. I would have been 12 or 13 years old. The other teachers in that school were honest and dedicated, particularly an English teacher who was very precise and gave lessons that were easy to do. I did most of my lessons during study period. I'd write them up and put them in my desk so I didn't have to take any books home. That caused me some pain, because the other kids would tease me about not taking books home. I preferred to do other things at home. I built things. Initially, as a real small boy, I liked to build Tinker Toy sets, and I built a bicycle out of parts of scrap. A little later, after my father was gone, I learned to work on my mother's 1936 Chevrolet. I learned about the ignition, the spark gap, the condenser, the coil, the wiring of the spark plugs, and what it took to make it run. She thought I was a genius for doing that. There wasn't too much complexity to that engine.

Following graduation from high school, I went to Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth. I only went there because they gave me a full scholarship and the school was close to home. I completed the first year of college there and encountered one of those fabulous teachers, a young woman who taught biology. She explained such things as digestion, reproduction, a little bit of embryology, and seeing and hearing. It was absolutely fascinating. Right then, she turned me to premed without my realizing it, because all I was interested in was biology and chemistry. I had a good old-fashioned chemistry teacher who liked to demonstrate things like how solid sodium exploded when it came into contact with water. One student blew up part of the lab, but that didn't deter the teacher much. It did deter the dean of the school a great deal. Chemistry was stimulating, but biology was more interesting to me. The math, including calculus, left me standing high and dry. I was only 16 years old in my first year of college. I was taking everything I could because I wanted to complete as much premed as possible before I was called to the army. I managed to finish 45 semester hours in that 1 year.

After joining the enlisted reserves at age 17, with my mother's permission, I joined the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program. The army said that I could go to Oklahoma A&M at Stillwater or Louisiana State University (LSU) at Baton Rouge. I picked Louisiana and traveled 2 days by train through East Texas at a snail's pace and on a ferry train across the Mississippi River on a barge. (Groups of about 5 or 6 rail cars were driven onto a barge, ferried to the other side, and pulled onto another train.) At LSU, I found myself in the middle of an engineering group studying calculus. I told them that I was premed and was told, “You're in the army now, son. The army says you're going to be an engineer.” The sergeant major for LSU was an old sergeant from World War I with about 20 stripes on his sleeve who had been recalled into World War II from retirement. He advised that I talk to the colonel about it. The colonel was an old World War I colonel with all kinds of stars and ribbons from World War I battles (the Muse, Argonne, France, etc.) that I recognized. I told him, “You know I'm premed and I only have the rest of this year to get the remainder of the premed curriculum. I've got to take organic chemistry and physics. All you've given me are math courses and I can't use them.” He said the same thing. “You're in the army now, son. That's the way it is. This is war.” As I walked out, the old sergeant pulled me aside and said, “Look, you don't need to listen to that old guy. You are in here as a volunteer, you're not 18 years old, and you're not on active military status. If you want to leave, just leave. Just write a letter of resignation and leave.” That's what I did. I told the sergeant I had only $2 in my pocket and he said, “Here's $3 more. Go hitchhike back to Fort Worth.” I finally arrived back in Dallas with 50? left, which was enough to ride the interurban to Fort Worth. My mother came and got me at the bus station.

Then I looked at which colleges were available. Baylor University in Waco was on a quarter system, October to December and January to March, and all other colleges started in September. It was then October, so I went to Baylor and tried to register for the premed course. I got into a big hassle because they told me that I couldn't take advanced physics before I had prerequisites in primary physics. I said, “I've got to take advanced physics and primary physics at the same time because that's the only way I can get it done before I'm 18 years old. I've got to take that and one other premed course.” I was persistent enough that this old codger finally said, “Look, why don't you just take whatever you want to, and I will assign you not as a regular student but as an occasional student [or whatever title they had]. You will have to sign this paper that you will never want a degree from Baylor University, but that you can take whatever courses you want to at Baylor University.” I said, “Fine, I'll sign.” I took advanced physics at the same time I took primary physics, organic chemistry, biology, and French. That allowed me to get most of the essential premed done before March 1944, when I knew I would go into the army when I turned 18.

Sure enough, on my 18th birthday I had orders to report to Camp Wolters and the 106th Division (Figure 3). I was standing in the drizzling rain at 4:30 am when the sergeant called my name over the loudspeaker. I learned that I had been ordered to go to the Army Specialized Training Unit in Dallas because my name was on a list of acceptees to medical school, and that sprung me from the 106th Cactus Patch Division in the infantry. Most of those young men were killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

The army was very good to me. They paid me $50 a month plus my tuition. At that time, I was young, shy, and inexperienced. I tried not to be noticed because I just didn't feel comfortable reciting.

At some point in my second year of medical school, I went to a dance at the old Dallas Country Club that various Southern Methodist University sororities had arranged. I noticed a girl who was wearing a pirate's costume with a very short skirt. There were not enough chairs, and a lot of people were sitting on the floor. She wouldn't sit down because her skirt was too short. I met her there and learned her name was Anne Rinker. About 2 days later, I saw her walking down the hall of the old medical school shacks behind old Parkland Hospital. She was a first-year medical student. I latched onto her something fierce. My grades went from A's to C's. I spent all my time not studying, but constantly thinking about her. We decided to get married. She was in her second year and I was in my third. I was going to leave, and she decided to drop out of medical school at the end of her second year to accompany me to Duke, then to Boston for a year, and then in the air force for 2+ years, then back to Duke, then back to Boston, and then to Florida (Figure 4).

In the interim we had 3 sons, and I came back to Dallas on the Southwestern Medical School faculty as an assistant professor of pathology in August 1955. I had been gone 8 years since graduation in 1947. Dr. Jim Gill, the dean at Southwestern, remembered Anne very well. He asked her, “Why don't you come back to medical school?” She replied, “I don't remember anything.” He said, “Oh yes, you know more than you think you do.” They readmitted Anne to the junior class in 1956. She started on clinical pediatrics. That turned out to be very good because she could handle children well. She was asked on rounds once how she would treat a child with congenital syphilis. She answered, “606--arsphenamine salvarsan,” which she remembered from her pharmacology nearly 10 years earlier. That made everybody laugh. She is very smart and was able to catch up quickly. She graduated in 1958. I wanted her to go into pathology and do cytology, a subject that was started in 1943 or 1944 by Dr. Papanicolaou and got into the clinical laboratory in the 1950s. Anne would have none of that. She liked psychiatry and liked to deal with people. I have often said that she is a “people person” and I'm a “thing person.” I like machinery, equipment. I like understanding how things work. Her approach to everything was--how do you feel, how does it affect you, what is the relationship? In that sense I guess we are a good match, complementing one another.

I loved medical school, but I was so shy. I was very inexperienced and very unsure of myself. Over the years I've changed to where people sometimes think I'm bombastic. On occasion, they are right.

WCR: How old were you when your father left home?

GJR: I was 6 or 7.

WCR: Do you remember him at all?

GJR: I remember him very well. He was a big, tall, good-looking, nice, quiet, strong, and smart man. His arms and legs were very sturdy. One of my earliest memories of him was seeing him in the back yard standing over a Model A Ford engine and lifting the engine out of the engine cradle. The car, which was his pride and joy, had been in a wreck, and he pulled the engine out to straighten the frame. As he physically lifted that engine, I thought of him as Superman or Hercules. He had great intelligence in terms of construction and building. He could build anything out of wood or steel. He had only a half year of college (at Texas Christian University). He was self-taught in building and engineering and took some courses in a Chicago engineering school that rated him as an engineer. As a result, he ended up in World War II in the Seabees, building air fields, docks, and housing in the South Pacific.

During the depression years he did anything he could to earn money, including working with the sheriff and tax revenuers to raid alcohol stills near Mansfield. My father was kindhearted. He found a couple there too old to get out, and he started buying their groceries and taking care of them because they were starving. He had a good humanitarian streak.

WCR: What did he go on to do?

GJR: He worked in construction in West Texas. During the depression, he helped build the Midland, Texas, courthouse and post office, plus a lot of public works projects. He joined the engineering corps as a reserve navy construction engineer, the beginning of the Seabees. As soon as Pearl Harbor was attacked, they were sent to the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal. He was there and in the Florida Islands in 1942 during the fighting there. The Marines took a little island, then the Seabees came in to build some docks. The Marines moved to another island, leaving the Seabees to finish the docks, and the Japanese came back. The Seabees went into the jungle. My father was reported missing for about 18 months. During those 18 months the Japanese lived on the island, and in order to survive the Seabees worked out a deal to prevent the Japanese from hunting them--exigencies of war. The Seabees raided the Japanese commissary at night and killed people to get food. If a Japanese soldier wandered out alone, he would get killed. Eventually, the Japanese started leaving food on the trail to keep the Seabees from raiding for food at night and killing. That plan worked, and the 2 groups developed a symbiotic, unspoken relationship whereby everybody lived without killing one another. Finally, the Marines returned and retook the island. My father came home and was sent to Camp Perry Williamsburg at Norfolk, Virginia, and taught jungle survival to navy personnel. In 1945, he was sent back to Okinawa at the time of that invasion and finished the war as an aide to the military governor.

After the war he farmed for a little while at Alvord, north of Fort Worth, and then went back into construction work in Fort Worth, principally working for the Leonard brothers (the department store people) building things for their ranches. He married a very nice widowed lady who had several children. Their father, a Mr. McCullough, had worked for him in construction. That marriage turned out to be very good for my father. One of his wife's sons is Dr. Mike McCullough, a Dallas internist. I had invested in a little farm in the North Garland/Richardson area of Dallas, where they eventually moved, and she later died there. After I sold that property, I bought a ranch at Lampasas, and my father moved to the ranch. He was doing fine down there but unfortunately died unnecessarily. He was found unconscious by a ranch hand, and the cause of death proved to be a pulmonary embolus.

WCR: When was your father born?

GJR: He was born in June 1898 and died in February 1987.

WCR: You kept up with him all his life.

GJR: Yes. The period in which I had virtually no contact with him was between age 7 or 8 and age 16, when I graduated from high school. At high school graduation, I saw him standing at the back of the auditorium. He told the McCullough kids that he was sorry that he hadn't spent more time with me.

WCR: Did your mother ever marry again?

GJR: No.

WCR: When was your mother born?

GJR: She was born on March 9, 1902, and died on January 1, 1994. She lived 92 years.

WCR: What was your mother like?

GJR: She was very industrious, smart, and totally dedicated to teaching. Her father was a Texas scrabble farmer who didn't make it in Haskell County, Texas, and moved to a 50-acre plot south of Fort Worth, where he grew vegetables and sold them at the Fort Worth market. He was a very nice man. His wife, my grandmother, was a Baggett. The Baggetts had come to Galveston, Texas, from Holland and England and moved to the Temple area. My grandmother Baggett married a Mr. Bunch, one of the Bunches who came from North Carolina. My mother was born in the country near Belton, Texas. Her grandfather had settled in Lampasas County in 1892, having come from Arkansas. He was an “old-style” man who had 7 kids with his first wife; when she died in childbirth, he married a younger woman and had 4 more children. His second wife also died in childbirth when he was 52 years old. He elected to come to Texas alone to seek a new wife. He found a new wife in Belton, Lampasas County, and homesteaded there until he died at 96 as a result of a hunting accident. The family wondered whether he fell on his gun accidentally or purposely. His son, who was my grandfather, was the vegetable truck driver and produce farmer.

My mother's family were very poor. Both my mother's and grandmother's great ambition was for us to get an education: “You don't want to farm all your life; get an education,” they told us. And that took. My mother's older brother became a Baptist preacher trained at the seminary in Fort Worth. My mother went to school at Texas Christian University and got her teacher's certificate, which you could get after 1 year at that time. Her younger brother had no interest in education. He was a happy-go-lucky guy and liked to drink beer on the Mansfield highway. The fourth child, a daughter, went to college and married a very nice fellow. My mother took care of my sister and me and enjoyed all of the things about school. She went to every school kid's party. All of the students liked her. When she died, there was an outpouring from her students who paid her a great tribute.

WCR: What did she teach in school?

GJR: Originally she taught first/second grade and then fifth grade and eighth grade. After a number of years, she left the Everman area and taught in the White Settlement schools in west Fort Worth. They were full of kids, offspring of people working in the Fort Worth Consolidated Vultee bomber plant making B-24s. There was an influx of people into west Fort Worth when they built that bomber plant. She eventually taught special education there. She ended up being school principal, getting a certificate and a master's degree. I ran across one of her contracts with the Everman School District dated about 1935 or 1936. Her total annual salary was $900, paid at $100 a month. If the school ran out of money before May, they'd just stop school and stop paying everyone. She liked education, education, and education. That was her whole thrust, along with children, children, children. Everybody admired her. I sort of felt that she spent more time with the school children than she did with me. On the other hand, I had 2 grandmothers who really liked me, and I related to them very well and enjoyed them.

I'll never forget my grandmother Race. When I was about 5 or 6, before I started school, she was making lye soap out of ashes in a big black pot with a fire around. It was one of those “cold norther” days, and the wind was blowing. I kept going on the downwind side of the fire because it was warmer. She warned me, “Now don't get over there. You're going to get burned.” And sure enough, a big piece of burning paper came off and stuck to the fronts of both of my legs. I was screaming and jumping up and down. I can still remember the pain. She came over and put the fire out. She took me in, rocked me for a while, washed my burned legs, put some ointment on them, and wrapped them. When I finally quit crying and felt pretty good, she said, “Now, I told you not to get around behind that, and you disobeyed me.” She took me outside and gave me a paddling. She had a country lady's judgment. She did a good job.

WCR: George, what kind of house did you live in when your father was home and after he had left?

GJR: Before he and my mother had gotten married, he had built a little 2-room house on a 2-acre piece of land that he'd bought. It was about a mile from the Everman School. We lived in that house and eventually built another room on it. The little house was clapboard and the inside was wallpapered. The wallpaper was thin and wouldn't seal; when the cold northers hit, the wind came through the outer clapboard. It was warm enough because we had good natural gas and open flame gas heaters. It wasn't that dangerous, because the house wasn't tight enough to build up much carbon monoxide. The house leaked like crazy, so any fumes just got washed out. We cooked with a gas stove--no fireplace. There was no indoor plumbing.

My room was a little closed-in side porch. Although it might be cold, I was warm under a big comforter. Our water was from a neighbor's well and it came up in the back in a cast iron pipe. The water faucet was on the back porch, and we took water into the kitchen. In the cold winter the pipe would freeze and burst, and then we had no water. The pipe was totally exposed. When it burst we would get an old inner tube and wrap it really good and put baling wire around it and tighten it up rather than replace the pipe. When it leaked again we replaced the inner tubes. That was a great engineering solution. Inner tubes were expansible.

WCR: You had no shower in the house?

GJR: We took baths in a #3 wash tub. We would boil water on the kitchen stove, pour it in that tub, mix in some cold water until it got to a good temperature, and then jump in it and take a bath. It was all right. There was only one #3 tub for my mother, my sister, and me.

WCR: It sounds like you had a lot of contact with women while growing up. Your father had left when you were relatively young, leaving your sister and your mother and your 4 grandmothers. You must have been a hero to all these women.

GJR: I was the little boy who would run any errands and fix things. They drove me nuts, always wanting me to fix this or to do that. But I learned to fix things. I guess there's a bad side to that. I had Uncle Pug and Uncle Henry, my father's brothers. Uncle Pug's name was Earl, but they called him Pug Race for pugnacious. He worked construction primarily, but he didn't like to work too well and he always had 3 or 4 girlfriends. He never married until after his mother (my grandmother) died. Pug liked honky-tonks. Uncle Henry was a big, good-looking kid in school. He married a schoolteacher about 5 years older. That was the best thing that ever happened to him, because she more or less directed him into buying an auto parts business in Fort Worth. The public school in Crowley is named after his wife, the Bess Race Elementary School. I didn't see much of him.

My mother had 2 brothers. One of them was Uncle Justice, a Baptist preacher who was very rigid and pious. His belief was “The Lord will take care of me.” Of course, as the years went by, the Lord “took care of him” through my mother, who gave him money. Then she'd ask me for money and I'd say, “What happened to all your money?” “Well, Justice had to get his car fixed” or “Justice had to. . . .” He and his wife ended up living with my mother in Dallas, and she took care of them until they died. My other uncle on my mother's side, Uncle Wyatt, never had much use for schooling or anything else. He was a pretty good auto mechanic but preferred the honky-tonk on the Mansfield highway south of Fort Worth. As a result, I didn't respect many of the men in the family. There was one, Uncle George, for whom I was named. He was my great-grandmother Farmer's son on my father's side. He had all these sisters who never got married because my great-grandmother (my father's grandmother), Julia Cynthelia Adeline McFarland, thought no suitor was ever good enough for her girls. My grandmother only got married because she apparently went off with my grandfather, Willie Race (James William Martin Race) and stayed out too late, and the family decided that they should get married.

This great-grandmother McFarland was tough as nails and really Scottish. As a little girl, she had been in Tennessee when Sherman's Union troops came through. These troops burned down the house and the barns and stole all the cattle and horses. The women and children hid out in the cornfield until it was over. That was all they had--the corn in the field. Her family packed up and came to Texas. After my dad was rescued in 1944 and came back to the states from the South Pacific in his chief petty officer uniform, which is a double-breasted navy blue suit and beautiful white cap, he went to see my great-grandmother McFarland. She said, “Well, Claude, I'm so glad to see you. You look so handsome. I like everything about you except the color of your suit. It ought to be gray.” Real Civil War! She didn't like his blue suit because it was Union Army color.

WCR: George, tell me a little more about growing up in the small house. You walked to school?

GJR: Yes. We had an old 1936 Chevrolet that my mother drove to school. I'd get up after she was gone and fix my breakfast, which usually consisted of Karo Syrup and peanut butter stirred up into a thick mix, put on a piece of bread and toasted. It was really good. At lunch, I'd go over to my grandmother's house by the school and make a sandwich or something. My mother was always busy in the school. She had to supervise all the teachers' meetings. At night she would come home and make a big stew out of potatoes, carrots, chunks of meat, and whatever was available. It was good and healthy. We always had a garden. She had a green thumb and liked to garden, as did her mother. I had to help make the garden. She grew tomatoes, carrots, turnips, and onions. We usually had vegetables from the garden most of the year. I was always fixing flats on our old cars because we never bought a new tire. When one tire would blow out and couldn't be fixed, we would buy a used tire for a couple of bucks and start over again.

WCR: When you came home from school, what did you do? Did you come straight home from school?

GJR: I usually came right home from school. I had a horse and I rode it frequently. When I was a little boy (in the late 1930s or the early 1940s), a rich man from Fort Worth bought a plot of land close to the Everman Cemetery. He fenced it with a high fence, planted pecan trees, and kept it scrupulously clean of weeds. It was a beautiful place. Once I was riding my horse through that area to see a friend from school about a mile or two away. I didn't have a saddle, so I had to ride bareback. I always resented that because it's easy to fall off. I was loping that horse bareback across a pasture or field and he stepped in a hole. The horse and I went down. My head really hurt but I got back on the horse and went back home. I lay down in bed but I didn't feel good. I began to see double. I saw double for a week or two, and I never talked to any doctor about it. As a result of that head injury, my right pupil is bigger than my left. I always worried about being in an accident and some surgeon opening up my head because I had dissimilar-sized pupils. I'm sure I had a little intracranial hemorrhage. In all my pilot physicals since 1949, I've had a tendency for some hyperopia and exophoria. If I get under the red light during the pilot's exam, one of my eyes will be doing this and the other one will be doing that. I'm sure the injury to the nucleus of Edinger Westphal and damage to the optical muscle is related to that fall from the horse.

WCR: As a little boy, did you read a lot?

GJR: Yes. I read mostly cowboy books, Zane Grey novels. I'd go to the school library and get books. I was totally enamored with the stories of the West and the hijackers, cowboys, and Indians. I remember a fantastic story of Wetzsel, who was, I guess, a trapper, a mountaineer. He lived among the Indians and never got killed. Those were pretty heady novels of those times.

WCR: Your mother actually wrote a book, I gather with your help. Tell me about that.

GJR: Right. She was interested in the genealogy of the Race, Bunch, Farmer, and Baggett families. She began to collect material from Southern Methodist University's library, from the genealogy societies, and from the Mormon Church, and quickly put it together. It contained a tremendous amount of information.

WCR: When was the book published?

GJR: It was published about 1976.

WCR: Your mother had moved to Dallas by that time?

GJR: My mother moved to Dallas about 1965. I bought a little house on University for $25,000 and moved her into it. She promptly moved my Uncle Justice and his wife there and took care of them forever. I later moved her into a bigger house on Mockingbird, and she stayed there until she went to the nursing home. She always wanted to live in a 2-story house, and she lived eventually in a 2-story house in Highland Park and liked that. That was status for her.

WCR: Your mother went to college for 1 year only?

GJR: Originally. But she went every summer that I can remember. She would go up to Denton, which was then North Texas State Teacher's College. Now, it is called The University of North Texas. My sister and I rented a room in somebody's home. It was always hot. I loved it because the North Texas campus had a bunch of goldfish and a big central area where kids could play. Dr. Lester Matthews' father was president of that institution, and although we didn't know each other as children, we probably played together. My mother finally got her bachelor's degree and then her master's degree. She spent a summer in New York at Columbia University finishing her master's degree. For 40 years she continually educated herself a little bit at a time every summer.

WCR: I gather when you were growing up that you didn't have money enough to travel anywhere.

GJR: The first time I ever left Texas was on that train going to LSU in World War II. The farthest I had traveled was with the Boy Scout troop in Everman. I was active in scouting and enjoyed it. I had a great scoutmaster who is still alive. I see him occasionally. I went to Boy Scout camp on the Brazos River west of Mineral Wells for 2 or 3 summers, and that was great. That's where I got to like the Hill Country. I went to West Texas one time when I was a boy. My father was in town and took me with him to Lubbock in an old Model A Ford. I remember the narrow concrete highway just wide enough that 2 Model A's could pass.

WCR: When you went to college at age 16, did you live at home?

GJR: My mother had changed schools in 1942 from Prairie Grove School south of Everman to Fort Worth White Settlement. When she sold the house with 2 acres and we moved into the city, it was a different existence. There were no animals around. We moved into an area southwest of Fort Worth, which was closer to the White Settlement school. Also, it was within walking distance to Texas Wesleyan, formerly Woman's College, which my sister and I both attended.

WCR: You had a full scholarship. That must have been quite a new experience, not only leaving your country home, but also coming into the town. Were most of your classmates from that area?

GJR: Most students were from Eastland or Abilene or someplace close by, and they lived in the dorm. I worked at an upholstering company on East Lancaster Street that made ranchhouse furniture. The owner, Augustus Brandt, a German, employed mostly Germans, and many spoke German. I was hired there as a trimmer or a helper or a springer. The trimmer does the outside of the chairs and the backs. A springer nails in the springs. I made 40 cents an hour in the summer. That was $16 a week, for which they took out 3 cents for Social Security.

WCR: You worked during that freshman college year?

GJR: Yes. I worked and made a little money while going to school. That experience turned out to be a great thing, because when I was at Baylor later in 1944, I told a Waco upholsterer that I could upholster, spring, and trim. He said, “All my workers went into the army. You can come in here, kid, any day or night, if you want to. Work and keep your hours, and we'll pay you.” I picked up some spending money. It has been very useful ever since.

WCR: You worked the year at Baylor also.

GJR: I worked always as a waiter in the girls' dorm (very embarrassing) until I got into medical school, and then there wasn't time to do anything except study. It was study every day--morning, noon, and night. All students would get drunk at the fraternity house on Saturday night, get up Sunday, and start studying again.

WCR: Where did you live in medical school?

GJR: The medical school had 4 fraternities, and each one of them had a house. The Phi Chi alumni bought an old house at 2512 Maple, right across from the Crescent Hotel. I liked the Phi Chi people. I had known 2 of them at Baylor, where they had rushed me. I lived in that old house on Maple Avenue with 4 guys to the room. There was an old servant's quarters out back with another 6 or 8 guys, probably 20 to 25 people total. We hired a maid who cooked the meals but didn't bother with the rooms. A house manager bought the food, managed the money, and charged everybody a portion of the expenses. There was no particular rent, but we had assessments for food every time we bought it. Food went bad, and everybody got mad at the house manager, so he quit. Eventually, I became the house manager. I was the least experienced, but it was a good deal because I didn't have to pay the food assessment. I enjoyed buying the food. Once I came across a tremendous spill on the corner of Maple Avenue and Cedar Springs. As we were walking to the pharmacy to get some coffee, a bread truck rounded the corner, the rear door flew open, and out came a continuous stream of pound cakes on the concrete and sidewalk. The driver kept going. We gathered that stuff up and took it back to the fraternity house and ate those pound cakes and Mrs. Baird's bread for weeks--until everybody was tired of it.

WCR: When you were growing up, did your mother and dad push you to go to church?

GJR: My dad didn't because he had long since fallen out with the church and wasn't really “churchified.” My mother went every Sunday morning, Wednesday night, and Sunday night. I was more or less forced to go to the Baptist Young People's Union Sunday nights and to Sunday school on Sunday mornings. Sometimes I played hooky. My uncle's “hell-fire-and-brimstone” theology didn't sit well with me. My church experience was more negative than positive.

WCR: Let's go back to medical school. When were you in medical school at Southwestern?

GJR: I started in March 1944 and graduated in June 1947.

WCR: Southwestern started in 1943, right?

GJR: Southwestern started on July 1, 1943, in the Alex Spence Junior High School with the residual faculty of Baylor College of Medicine who refused to move to Houston. Most chairmen of the old Baylor departments stayed in Dallas. All of the clinicians stayed because they were in private practice. The salaries were just minuscule--the chairmen received maybe $400 a month, a full professor maybe $300 a month. Nobody else was paid. All of the clinicians were practitioners, and they all did clinics at Parkland, Baylor, St. Paul, and Methodist. The Department of Biochemistry had a budget of $11,000 a year. Pitiful. Pathology had $20,000; obstetrics and gynecology, $5,000; surgery, $875. Southwestern was primarily affiliated with Parkland Hospital.

WCR: How many were in your class?

GJR: It may have been 60 originally. I think 51 or 52 graduated.

WCR: Did you apply anywhere else to medical school?

GJR: Yes. I applied to Baylor Houston and to The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. UTMB wrote back and said, “We will not accept applications from anyone under 18 years of age.” I was 17. I got an acceptance from Baylor Houston and from Southwestern. I chose Southwestern because it started in March 1944 and I was turning 18 in March 1944. Baylor's new class didn't start until September 1944, and I would have been long gone with that 106th Division in Europe. They trained only 3 months in the USA and then went to Europe.

WCR: How did medical school strike you?

GJR: It was very hard. In high school I did not take any books home. In college I had to take books home and study if I was going to make good grades. In medical school I had to study around the clock, and I barely kept my head above water. The avalanche of material coming every day was so much that I couldn't afford not to study every day. I was in classes until 4:30 pm. When the labs were finished, I went back to the fraternity house, listened to the news, had supper, and then studied. About 10:00 pm I'd walk down the street to the Stoneleigh Pharmacy on Maple Avenue and get some coffee. I went back and studied a little more and then went to bed. I got up at 6:30 or 7:00 am, had breakfast, and rushed over to the shacks behind the old Parkland Hospital for the “morning call” required by the military. At 8:00 am I was back in class. Most classes were an hour lecture and then 2 or 3 hours of laboratory. The medical school curriculum was in blocks--anatomy and biochemistry in one quarter, then the same thing with physiology and bacteriology.

Anatomy was an afternoon course that usually had a lecture and then lab. In the anatomy lab the corpses were in phenol and formaldehyde. When I took a body out of the vat, I got the phenol all over me. My fingers absorbed the phenol, and I smelled like phenol all the time. Labs were not air-conditioned. When I would dissect the leg or another area, I couldn't tell a nerve from a vein, from an artery, or from the origin of the muscle. Eventually, I was reduced to taking string and tying it along the saphenous vein. It was not a good way to learn anatomy. Years later when in Galveston waiting for one of my sons, I watched a tape in the Truman Blocker Library there and learned more anatomy of the leg in 30 minutes than I learned in a month of monkeying around not knowing what I was doing. Anatomy lab was a terrible waste of effort. A doctor over at Southwestern has the whole pathology course on the computer now, all interactive. You can sit there, take the quiz yourself, look at slides on the screen, and make a diagnosis.

WCR: What did you enjoy in medical school?

GJR: I enjoyed physiology most--respiration, circulation of the blood, seeing, and hearing. Pathology was interesting enough, but I never understood the histology well enough to really get with it. I liked bacteriology and infectious disease. I absolutely hated obstetrics/gynecology. I had an old professor who later went to Illinois. He was a poor teacher--vindictive and mean.

WCR: What about when you started rotating through medicine and surgery?

GJR: I liked to see surgery performed and to understand what was going on. In medicine, I was less inclined. I liked cardiology, but a lot of the other stuff I didn't get deep into. I didn't particularly like patient handling. I was timid. I didn't like obstetrics. However, we had a call service for delivering babies in homes, and I delivered babies in homes around Dallas. The mechanical aspect of orthopaedics appealed to me. I suppose physiology, microbiology, parasitology, surgery, and orthopaedics were the things that most appealed to me. Strangely enough, pathology wasn't one of them. Pathology was hard, and it wasn't fun because I didn't understand the microscopic sections well enough.

WCR: Who influenced you a great deal in medical school?

GJR: There is no question about that: Tinsley Harrison and Carl Moyer. Dr. Harrison was a fantastic teacher. He was a short, active man, and he could mimic all the heart sounds. He'd say, “lub dub geeee, lub dub geeee, lub dub geeee. What is that?” That was aortic insufficiency. He'd say, “brpp, brpp, brpp. What's that?” That was mitral stenosis. He knew all these sounds, and he was so animated and enthusiastic. Dr. Harrison required excellence of everybody. The reason the Southwestern Medical School is great is that Tinsley Harrison and, after him, Carl Moyer, the surgeon from Michigan, absolutely demanded excellence. You had to learn, you had to be able to recite, and you had to be able to think on your feet. I'm sure the reason that I got my appointment at Duke was because of the recommendations of Carl Moyer and Jim Gill.

In clinic, Carl Moyer showed a patient with a great big arm and said, “Listen over here.” I listened with the stethoscope, obviously a bruit. I could feel it. Then he started quizzing me. “What is it?” It had to be an arteriovenous fistula. The heart was fairly rapid, the arm was swollen, and the veins were distended. Then he'd ask, “How do you get those?” That nearly stumped me. I said, “I don't know. I suppose that you have to have some connection made, maybe congenital.” He said, “This patient's arm wasn't this way last year, so it's not congenital.” It finally hit me that the man had a scar. It was a stab wound. Dr. Moyer was that kind of teacher. He would make you stay there until you figured out what was going on. Then he would discuss other kinds of aneurysms--dissecting aneurysms, fusiform aneurysms--and before you got through, you had learned aneurysms in a very short period of time. That man was the single smartest teacher I've ever seen.

WCR: Did any of your classmates in medical school become fairly prominent?

GJR: Yes. Joe White, a close friend of mine, went into anesthesia in Iowa and became the dean of medicine at Oklahoma, the dean of medicine at Galveston, and then the vice president of the University of Missouri and later president of the Chicago Medical School. He came back to Dallas to be the dean of continuing education at St. Paul. Tom Shires was a classmate who graduated a year late because he did a year of physiology with Tinsley Harrison. He then went to Boston and was trained by Carl Moyer. He became the chairman of surgery at Southwestern and later chairman at the University of Washington in Seattle, then chairman of surgery at Cornell in New York, and then the dean of Cornell. He is now director of the trauma center in Las Vegas. In the class behind me was Jules Hirsch, who is now the president of Rockefeller University. His classmate, Tom Nesbit, a fraternity brother, became president of the American Medical Association. He trained at Michigan in urology, went to Nashville, and became president of the Tennessee Medical Association. Tom was always very much a politician. Another classmate who has done very well is Sylvan Stool, who has been the chairman of otolaryngology at Jefferson in Philadelphia. He is a major national authority in ear, nose, and throat problems. He is a tremendous man.

WCR: I gather that while you were in medical school you were gaining a good deal of confidence. You were not quite as timid as you had been earlier in your life. Did you make friends with the teachers there?

GJR: I made some lifelong friends. I would say I earned the respect of others. One teacher who has always astonished me is Gladys Fashena, a major figure in pediatrics in Dallas for 40 years and also a great pathologist. She was from New York and had married Floyd Norman, a local Dallas doctor. She was a great teacher and a fountain of information in pediatrics and acid-base balance in the same way that Carl Moyer was so bright as a physiologist. Moyer had trained under Lester Dragstedt and Carl Dragstedt, physiologists and surgeons at Michigan and Chicago, before going into surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Moyer was a great physiology teacher, as was Gladys Fashena. The school was incredibly blessed in having these fantastic teachers who demanded excellence. Such a culture of excellence still exists: it is passed from one person to another in a department. That's what has made the school great.

WCR: What was Parkland Hospital like at that time?

GJR: It was on Maple Avenue. The building is still there. It had open wards, a central pharmacy, and a central laboratory. It was a nice enough building with terrazzo floors and brick, but it was not air-conditioned. On the far north part was a wing for polio patients. I remember seeing probably 20 iron lungs in there pumping away. I nursed those polio patients because I needed to make money. I figured I was exposed to polio growing up in the country and never got into trouble.

Parkland was a good intellectual environment. Tinsley Harrison said in so many words, many times, “I can teach you medicine in the alley. You don't have to have a good building. You have to have a good teacher and receptive, bright students who want to learn.” And, of course, he was right. When I went to Duke as an intern, I was very apprehensive about whether or not I had had a good medical education. In pathology, one intern was from Johns Hopkins, one was from Duke, and one was from Washington University. I found out rapidly that I knew as much as any of them and that I had also done more. I'd delivered babies, sewed up wounds, and helped with an appendectomy. I decided that Southwestern as a school was good. Bryan Williams and I wrote to Duke and to Harvard about applying to the junior class to repeat the last 2 years of medical school because we thought that Southwestern might not survive, and that would be very embarrassing. But it did survive.

WCR: Southwestern was a private school when you were there as a student?

GJR: Yes. It was private and sponsored by Southwestern Medical Foundation from July 1, 1943, to September 1, 1949, when it became a division of The University of Texas. It went through several name changes--Southwestern Medical School of The University of Texas, then The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, then The University of Texas Health Science Center, and then back to The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. It never had a nursing school. The need for nursing education and support was supplied by Texas Woman's University in Denton.

WCR: How did you decide to go to Duke? What was your thought process in doing internships in both pathology and surgery?

GJR: I was apprehensive that Southwestern wasn't going to make it and that I was going to graduate from a defunct medical school. After listening to Dr. Moyer, who had been at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Dr. Harrison, who had been at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and others, I wanted to go to a well-known school to intern. I didn't know quite what I wanted to do, so I applied to Duke in pathology because Dr. Gill, who had come from Duke in pathology, talked about how great Duke was and how pretty North Carolina was. I applied to Duke in pathology, to Michigan in internal medicine, to Denver General for a rotating internship, and to the Massachusetts General Hospital in surgery. I didn't get an interview at Massachusetts General, but I did get accepted to Denver and to Duke. I applied to the University of Chicago Clinics in surgery but didn't get an interview.

As I was finishing the pathology internship at Duke, I still was interested in surgery and applied for surgical internships at Massachusetts General, at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, at the University of Chicago Clinics, at Johns Hopkins, and at Boston City Hospital. I got the University of Chicago and the Boston City positions, and I took the Boston City job, which was a mistake. The internship in surgery was a year of scut for the second surgical service--drawing all the blood, doing all the lab work. I lost interest in surgery as a result of that. I was kind of attracted to anesthesiology because of Peter Voorheis, who was head of anesthesia and was very intellectual and directed the nurses' anesthesia school. I rotated with him for a month, and soon he had me giving anesthesia. I didn't like it. He said, “You're better than the nurses” and used me for the complicated surgical cases during the month. I also spent a month in thoracic surgery with Dr. Carl Streider and Dr. Dwight Harken, a month in neurosurgery with Dr. Donald Monro and Dr. Derrick Denny-Brown (a neurologist), and a month in infectious disease. There was an open ward at the Boston City called “South House.” The patients had diphtheria, tuberculosis, amebiasis. I remember a patient coughing up amoebas from a liver abscess that had come through the diaphragm into the lungs. I had never seen heart failure from diphtheria or smallpox before. That “South House” was brutally educational. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be a surgeon or a pathologist. I decided that pathology was much more intellectual and a lot more fun and required a lot less hand scrubbing. I decided to go on into the army instead of continuing with the surgery residency.

WCR: When was that?

GJR: July 1949.

WCR: You had to get that army service.

GJR: Yes. I went into the army and was all set to go to Europe and spend a wonderful 2 years at Weisbaden. Then suddenly they changed my orders to Alamogordo, New Mexico. I called the man in Washington and asked, “Why are you changing it? All of our household goods have already gone to Germany.” He said, “It's an economy measure. We went through the list and found that everybody going to Germany was married,” and they pulled them off and sent only unmarried men so they could live in the bachelor officers' quarters. I went to Alamogordo Air Base and loved it there. It is now the F-117 Stealth Fighter base. Alamogordo was 1 mile from the army's White Sands Proving Grounds. Werner von Braun and other Germans were there making rockets, and the air force was making rockets at Alamogordo. It was a very relaxed base--half the people there were civilian engineers. It was a wonderful experience. One of the colonels asked me, “Why don't you go to San Antonio for 3 months and become a medical examiner flight surgeon?” I did, and I loved that. We went back to Alamogordo and spent the rest of the year there with wonderful trips flying. They were shooting off every kind of missile. I went out to the atomic bomb site. Permission had to be obtained to go there.

I was due to get out after having served 2 years, but in July 1950 the Korean War started. My time was extended to July 1951. Somebody in Washington called the adjutant on the base and said, “Now listen carefully and write these servicemen numbers down. We think you have 5 jet pilots capable in F-86s, 3 jet mechanics, and 1 flight surgeon. We will give you their names, ranks, and serial numbers. You cut the orders for them to travel to Travis Air Force Base by noon tomorrow from Alamogordo. Find your own transportation, whatever is available on the base.” I was sitting in the clinic listening to squalling kids, which I didn't like. I answered the phone and was told, “Stop whatever you're doing, clean out your desk, and turn anything you're doing over to somebody else. Go by the legal office and sign powers of attorney to your wife, go home and pack, and be on the flight line at 4 in the morning. We're going to go to Travis Air Force Base by noon and then to Korea” (Figure 5).

We got to Travis. We never stopped. We walked off the plane, and they were shooting us with encephalitis and typhoid vaccines. We walked out of one plane and got on another one, flew all day and all night to Anchorage, then to Adak, to Shemya, to Yokohama, and down to southern Japan to Fukuoka. I stayed there about a week and then went over to the Tague K-2 Airstrip at the Pusan Korea perimeter. I got there in August. It was really hot. Every night it was boom, boom, boom. We were leaving and then not leaving. We put gasoline drums in every camp or building, and all the records were packed up and put on a C-47. This went on for about 3 weeks and suddenly MacArthur made his move north. The North Koreans left when MacArthur landed. That was an interesting period. All the pilots were World War II pilots. They were unusual guys. Somebody would get killed, and they'd have a big send-off party and never mention the death again. We were losing people right and left.

WCR: How long were you there?

GJR: Altogether I was there about 6 months of the first year of the war and 6 months in Japan.

WCR: What did you actually do over there?

GJR: I ran the medical hospital clinic on the air base, and I was a flight surgeon for the 49th Fighter Bomb Group and for the 6147th Tactical Control group. Basically, I held sick call and took care of those guys. Just outside of our base were Lieutenant Colonel Tender, MC, and Colonel Michaelis of the Wolfhound Regiment, who had a little hospital unit manned by former surgical residents from Kansas City General, San Francisco General, and Parkland Hospitals. Some of them ended up in Korea in civilian clothes. The colonel organized them to form a mobile army surgical hospital (MASH). He told Generals Walker and Partridge: “If you'll just give me about 6 or 8 trucks and some good motorpool mechanics, we will create a mobile operating room that can be moved wherever there is a fight.” That was Colonel Michaelis' and Colonel Tender's idea, and General Walker said, “Great!”

WCR: Back to your internship. How did Duke hit you? That's really the first time you were away.

GJR: It hit me very positively. Seeing those pictures on the wall in Duke Medical School of Sir Charles Sherrington, Sir William Osler, John Hunter of Guy's Hospital and famous English physicians was something I really was interested in. Duke had a great library. Every time I got a good case at autopsy I worked it up. I got a case of Klippel-Feil syndrome with achondroplasia, dwarfism, and achondroplastic thoracic cage and found that the neck was broken. I studied the neurological and embryological literature and reported the case. I think that case ended up with an autopsy report of 200 pages. I still have it, and it's an excellent reference work for the old German literature on Klippel-Feil. Most of the Duke faculty had been trained at Hopkins, and they had a learn, learn, learn attitude. It was wonderful for me. The Boston City Hospital experience, in contrast, was a terrible letdown after being at Duke.

WCR: You enjoyed the intellectualism of pathology that year.

GJR: The intellectualism of pathology was fantastic. I couldn't get over how much I enjoyed it. Although I didn't like Boston City Hospital, it was good training for the Korean War. I had learned how to repair a wound to the Adam's apple, for example, and that experience was repeated in Korea, where I did some cranial burr holes and closed thoracic sucking wounds.

WCR: You had been in Asia for quite a while and now you were back in the USA and you decided to go into pathology. What happened?

GJR: While sitting in the airport in Tokyo with a set of orders to come home and 60 days' leave, I decided to get the first plane out and go home rather than go around the world, which I had an opportunity to do. When arriving at McChord Airbase, Washington, my superiors said, “We don't know what to do with you. Nobody gets out of this war. We'll query Washington.” Washington came back and said, “Get rid of this guy. He's not even in the army. His commission expired some time back. All of those people in Korea whose commissions had expired and who had over 2 years' service as a doctor, get rid of them.” They issued me “go home” papers.

I came back to Dallas and saw my 8-month-old son for the first time. The 3 of us stayed in Dallas about a week, then got in a borrowed car and started driving back to Durham, North Carolina, to Duke, so that I could begin a pathology residency. I worked hard learning pathology with help from the 2 or 3 pathologists still there from my internship. I have always been blessed by the fantastic teachers to whom I have been exposed. First were Dr. Tinsley Harrison and Dr. Carl Moyer, my great heroes, and then Dr. Forbus at Duke and all of the Duke faculty, and later Dr. Arthur Hertig in Boston.

The first year back was like heaven. Anne and I had some good friends in the area, and every weekend we went to Washington, DC, or to Williamsburg, Virginia, or to Myrtle Beach, or to Pinehurst, North Carolina. It is beautiful country, and we learned about the economy of tobacco. The Liggett Myers plant, which produced Chesterfield cigarettes, was in the middle of Durham, and the whole town smelled like tobacco. The Washington Duke Hotel was downtown and was evidence of the Duke tobacco money.

A big new Veterans Administration hospital was being built, which was needed and became one of the better VA hospitals. Dr. Forbus, as chief of pathology at Duke, wanted to recommend me for a Markle scholarship, but pathology friends in Boston--Dr. Jack Mickley and Dr. Robert Teabeaut from Duke--encouraged me to go to Boston. “Dr. Hertig would like to have you at Harvard. He'll make you an instructor and then an assistant pathologist at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.” The Peter Bent Brigham was the place to go. That's where the best intellects in Boston were: Dr. George Thorne, professor of medicine; Dr. Francis Moore, professor of surgery; Dr. Dwight Harken, who had come over from the Boston City Hospital in thoracic surgery; and Dr. Gus Dammin, chief of pathology, who had come from St. Louis. It was a great intellectual milieu. Every day at noon I could hear a fantastic visiting physician speak in the hospital and was often mesmerized by them. Dr. Homer Smith, the renal physiologist from New York, said, “The most intelligent organ in the body is the kidney, not the brain or the eye or the heart. It has more intelligent decisions to make.” It was a thrill to see somebody whose publications I had read.

One incident has always stood out for me as an illustration of Dr. George Thorne's teaching of ethics in medicine. He was the chairman of medicine at Harvard and physician in chief. Dwight Harken, a bombastic guy, presented 2 patients in whom he had done closed mitral valve commissurotomy. He showed movies of the operations. In one, the blood went sky high onto the light in the operating room. Everybody was taking off their glasses because they couldn't see. The patient was sitting there in the conference, bug-eyed, seeing the film of his own surgery. Dr. Thorne got up and thanked both patients for coming to the conference and told them that the doctors learned so much from their cooperation. As soon as the patients were out of the room, he ripped into Harken something fierce in front of the whole staff and said, “This is the most despicable type of management of patients I've ever seen. You should never scare a patient to death by showing him all of this, and you should never do it in public. You might let a patient see this in private in your office.” Harken was so upset that he left the room with his face flushed and was gone for a week or two. I thought he would never come back. Dr. Thorne gave a lesson in ethics to that entire staff and all those houseofficers. That was a lesson never to be forgotten. The Brigham was a wonderful, intellectually stimulating time for me.

I did research on the adrenal gland in Boston. I was trying to determine from which adrenal cells aldosterone, cortisone, and androgens were coming. I could walk across the street to the medical school and talk to the world leaders, particularly experts in electron microscopy of the various cells of the adrenal gland. I wrote some papers showing aldosterone coming from the outer cortex, the zona glomerulosa, and cortisone coming from the midzone.

Before leaving Duke, I'd had a high bilirubin (1.5 mg/dL) with some kind of a skin rash and was diagnosed with hepatitis. It may have been infectious mononucleosis. Later in Boston, after a gastrointestinal consult, they put me to bed. It was wonderful because I could study all day for my pathology boards. I took the indexes of major textbooks, Anderson's Pathology for example, and would ask myself what I knew about the various topics encountered. If I didn't know about a topic, the page numbers were there and I would flip back and refresh myself. It was a wonderful study effort. I didn't want to get well fast because I was learning a lot.

I took the boards at Northwestern University Pathology Laboratory in Chicago. A funny thing happened in the clinical pathology part of it. They had set up a bunch of pieces of filter paper with stool, yellow crystals, and whatever on them, and I was supposed to identify each. They had a microscope beside the specimens. It was in the middle of summer, there was no air-conditioning, and the windows were open. A big puff of wind came in and blew the various specimens off the table and onto the floor. They were not numbered, and nobody knew which one came from which microscope. The examiners gave each examinee a passing grade in this section.

Winter in Boston is terrible. Although Drs. George Thorne, Arthur Hertig, Gus Dammin, and Francis Moore wanted me to stay at the Brigham, I just couldn't take the cold weather, and I had a wife and now 3 little boys and no money. I was making $200 a month as an instructor at Harvard and $300 a month as an assistant pathologist at the Brigham. Five hundred a month was not much to live on in Boston. I was trying mightily to decide what to do. We lived in Natick, 2 blocks off of the Worcester-Boston Turnpike. I had to get down to the turnpike each morning. They plowed the turnpike, and I could drive it without chains, but to get from my house down 2 blocks in a foot or so of unplowed snow, I had to put on chains. I had to jack up the back of the car, get chains out, and put them on the back wheels. I'd drive to the turnpike, get out, take them off, put them back in the trunk, get on the turnpike, and go to work. That was every morning and sometimes in the dark to get there early enough to do frozen sections for surgical pathology. One morning while I was under the back of this old Mercury putting on the chains, an enormous blob of black snow from under the fender fell, hit me right in the face, and spread all over me. I said to myself, “That's it. I'm not staying here.” That may seem trivial, but that one incident made it easy for me to leave.

I told everybody I was leaving and going to Florida to try to get out of debt, which I did in 1 year at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg. We were used to living on $500 a month, and I made $3000 a month in St. Petersburg. We had so much money we couldn't spend it. I bought a station wagon and an old Lincoln. I bought a house at 3508 Princeton in Dallas' Highland Park for $22,400.

I finished the year in Florida and moved to Dallas as assistant professor at the medical school with Dr. Ernest Muirhead, who was one of Dr. Caldwell's students at the old Baylor. He had been in hematology and blood banking with Dr. Joe Hill and was doing renal research. He was tying off dogs' ureters and doing the chemistry on what happens in uremia. He showed that, if the kidneys are removed, hypertension does not occur. That fit with Dr. Page's renin hypothesis of hypertension. Dr. Muirhead was a great intellect, a great researcher, an incredible man, totally enthusiastic, and hyperkinetic. (He drank a lot of coffee.) He had a million ideas streaming out of his head and much research work going on. I was fascinated with him.

I had loved Florida--the beaches, the weather, and the people were great--but I didn't care for the transient people. There were people coming and going, and all had some horror story about New Jersey or New York state. You couldn't talk to them without hearing bad stories. There was one funny guy who ran the filling station near where I lived. Some nights he'd close and some nights he wouldn't. Frequently at night I'd gas up, and once I asked him, “How do you decide when to close?” He said, “I don't know. I don't have a watch. I lost my watch when I came down here and never bought another one. I just close up when I get tired of standing around here. And if I want to go have a beer or something, that's when I close the station.” Coming from the highly precise, technical background in Boston and Duke to such a laissez-faire operation was interesting. The attitude was different than in Durham and Boston.

WCR: How did it come about that you went to St. Petersburg?

GJR: I had some friends there from Duke--one in West Palm Beach and 2 or 3 in St. Petersburg. They recruited me. I went to both places. I liked West Palm Beach, but I didn't like the deal. I liked St. Petersburg principally because I could run my own lab, and I wanted to do that. It was in a Catholic hospital. The technician was a nun who slept in the lab. She was always there. That's the most wonderful arrangement I have ever had in 40 years of pathology--to have somebody whom you could trust in the lab all hours of the day and night. Any time something came up she'd call me and say, “Can I do this or should I do that?” It saved me an enormous amount of effort. She also drew blood and ran the blood bank. The convenience was just unbelievable. I grew to love her. She was very kind to my children, and she was understanding of the fact that I was a Baptist and didn't understand the Catholic church. They were wonderful people, all of them, except the old mother superior who was dominating. I guess that's how she got to be the mother superior.

WCR: You came to Florida from the very intellectual environment of Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, and suddenly you were at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg, a nonacademic hospital. How did it hit you?

GJR: It stunned me because I was doing things I really hadn't done at Duke or at Brigham. When I had to do an autopsy, I had to open the head. In Durham or Boston, a diener would do that. I had to draw blood, cross-match it, and look at it. I'd take blood from one patient and put it in another one. Extreme care was critical.

I hadn't done many bone marrow aspirations, but I had read about the Turkel needle and its little sawtooth cutting edge. Instead of just jamming a needle into the sternum I could slowly rotate it and it would cut itself right into the marrow. I was always worried about the risk of going through the sternum into the aorta. Doing an iliac crest aspiration is difficult because the bone there is so heavy. Doing a tibial aspiration is the same way. I didn't like doing it but I had to because I was the only one there who could do it. I had to interpret the results after I did the aspirations.

I started smoking cigars at the Brigham because Dr. Gus Dammin did. I was copycatting my superior, and I thought it looked manly to smoke cigars. In the hospitals in those days, you could walk down the hall smoking a cigar. I did a bone marrow once in an old lady. I said, “This is not going to hurt. I'm going to do this very gently. It will only hurt when I draw the needle out.” I had smoked a cigar as I had walked down the hall before going into her room. I put it out in the hall sandbox, and then put the remaining portion in the side pocket of a brand new sports coat I had on. I went into the room and hung the sports coat on the chair in the room. I got on my gloves and got everything laid out on the tray to do the bone marrow aspiration. I got the needle in the lady's sternum, and I looked over at my coat and saw a curl of smoke coming up. I did the marrow aspiration and pulled out fast and she said, “I thought you were going to do it gently.” I said, “Sorry. Hold this over the spot there.” I grabbed the coat, went back in the hall, and put the thing out before I wrecked the whole coat.

As a pathologist, I was asked to be medical examiner whether I liked it or not. Pinellas County did not have a medical examiner in those days, and I had to cover. That was heartrending at times. Many autopsies were of old folks. One old lady trying to make a left-hand turn didn't make it and went up in the yard and into the living room of somebody's house through plate glass on the front. She died immediately. Another time I got called to go see an old man who was yellow as a gourd and weighed about 70 lb, with a pretty big frame indicating he had been a big man. I thought, “What is this?” He had to have a stone in the common duct. I took my hand and reached through his paper-thin abdominal wall and felt the gallbladder. It was a sack full of stones the size of your hand. I could squish and rub the stones around through the skin. It was a natural death from common duct obstruction from cholelithiasis--untreated. You just don't see that very often.

Another heartrending incident was when I went out to the beach to see a beautiful baby dead as a hammer. His mother and 2 or 3 other mothers were just playing there and didn't notice he had wandered into the surf. The 2-year-old child was dead. I tried to console the mother, but there wasn't any consoling. I never felt worse. Another case touched me emotionally. An old man whose wife had died was living alone in St. Petersburg, and he had taken a car out to the beach for the Christmas sunrise. He was dead, with a hose from the tailpipe coming in through the back window and the music on the radio still going. It was very sad to see how he decided to end his life on Christmas morning.

One of those medicolegal cases I was forced into involved an 18-year-old girl found dead in bed. She had been healthy previously. She'd been out dancing the preceding night and reportedly had quite a bit to drink. An autopsy was necessary. I found a little blood streak at the aortic valve and some blood in the pericardial sac. She had died of cardiac tamponade from this pinhole leak. I traced the pinhole leak through the anterior chest wall and out to the skin. Then I could see that there was a tiny hole on the skin. I didn't know what had happened to her. When I talked to the policeman about it, he said, “I can tell you what happened. She got into a fight with another girl over some man and the other girl hit her. We've been out to talk to the other girl and recovered an ice pick with a point about 2 inches long on it. The other girl had concealed the ice pick in her hand, and nothing showed except the 2-inch point with which she was stabbing her in the chest.” It was a murder. The policeman solved it. I solved the cause of death, but I didn't know how the stab wound could have been inflicted. Apparently, a sharpened-down ice pick was a common weapon to carry for protection.

WCR: You essentially went to Florida because you needed the money and were tired of Boston's cold weather. What made you decide to leave St. Petersburg after only 1 year there and return to Dallas?

GJR: Before I left Boston I had made an agreement with Ernest Muirhead to be an assistant professor at Southwestern. I told him I would come a year later. That was agreeable to him. I arrived back in Dallas on August 1, 1955.

WCR: It sounds like the year in St. Petersburg was an eye-opening year for you.

GJR: It was a tremendous eye-opener for 10 different reasons. I saw people in practice there I'd known at Duke, and I saw the practice of cardiology, surgery, general internal medicine, and obstetrics/gynecology in a way I had never been exposed to. These were high-quality practitioners. It was an interesting intellectual group of young doctors and young lawyers who descended on St. Petersburg to get their fortune and fame. They liked living there. It was a wonderful town. I loved the people and still have a friend there who's an orthopaedist. We were close during that year. However, I had been trained in academic institutions, had research interests, and wasn't going to be satisfied just to do surgical pathology and autopsies for the county for the rest of my life.

My contract with Southwestern in Dallas was for $7200 a year. I went from $35,000 a year to $7200 a year, again. I was able to supplement that with another $5000 doing pathology for the Children's Hospital. I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of pathology at Southwestern. Unfortunately, the dean, A. J. Gill (also a pathologist), and Ernest Muirhead (chairman of pathology) had major disagreements. The Department of Surgery was run by Dr. Ben Wilson, a friend of Dr. Muirhead. Dr. Muirhead, being a researcher, was opposed by some of the faculty and by Dr. Gill, who thought too much money and time were being spent on research and favored more teachers and more teaching facilities. It was a difference of opinion about which direction medicine at Southwestern should go. Recently, I went on a site visit to a New York medical college with Dr. Muirhead just before he died. He said, “The day I decided to leave Southwestern and go to Detroit, I was told that I spent too much time in research and that all I needed to know was right in the library.” Of course, that's an absurd statement. There was a conflict of intellectual points of view from senior people--one group thinking that you needed to teach and read and the other thinking that you needed to spend most of your time with dogs and rats and push back the frontiers (that is, do research).

In 1956, I started doing work in Fort Worth with Terrell Laboratories. I learned a lot from Dr. T. C. Terrell, one of the first pathologists in Texas who established Terrell Laboratories. He had contracts with All Saints' Hospital and St. Joseph's Hospital and every hospital in town at one time. He also subsidized pathologists in Amarillo (Dr. Churchill) and in El Paso (Dr. Maynard Hart) to start up subsidiary laboratories. He had 2 small oil companies and there were wells drilled on his ranch. He owned and operated a medical supply business in the Medical Arts Building in Fort Worth. He also had a couple of radiologists working for him doing radiology for All Saints' and St. Joseph's hospitals. He was a businessman. I asked him one time, “How did you get all of these contracts with All Saints'? He said, “It was in the middle of the depression, and they were going broke and had a bunch of bonds out they couldn't pay. I bought their bonds, and I hold all the bonds on All Saints' Hospital. When I want to have a pathology contract I have it, and when I want the radiology contract I have it, and when I want the medical supply contract I have it.” He taught me a lot about business. Basically, you sign things up and you do them--follow them through.

Dr. Terrell's only son was killed in World War II. The son was going to take over his ranch, oil companies, and businesses. His son's loss was devastating. He was telling me that when he was a young man he went to the Terrell School near where the Swiss Avenue Bank now is. He wanted to go to the Naval Academy and was accepted. His father said, “You cannot do that. There's no money, no career, and no family in the navy. I forbid you to do that.” His father sent him to The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston to be a doctor. T. C. Terrell was a good doctor and a smart doctor, but he never really was all that interested in medicine. He was interested in the business of medicine, and he taught me about business.

Dr. Terrell constantly hired people and promised them future partnership. It never transpired. Dr. May Owen, the pathology associate who was later president of the Texas Medical Association, asked me, “Do you think Dr. Terrell ought to make me a partner?” I said, “Dr. Owen, he should have made you a partner in 1939 after you'd been there 10 years.” She was a wonderful lady who worked her whole career for Dr. Terrell in Fort Worth on a salary. They have the May Owen room in the Texas Medical Association building in Austin. She was a very good all-around pathologist and a good teacher.

WCR: It sounds like your association with Terrell Laboratories was a very good experience for you.

GJR: It was a learning experience. It was a wonderful time because I hadn't been in Fort Worth since I was 16 or 17 years old. I also renewed acquaintances with family.

The Fort Worth medical milieu was a general practice milieu. Everything in town was controlled by general practitioners--all the hospital staffs, the county medical society. Gradually, Harris Hospital and the specialty groups became the leaders. The experience was different from St. Petersburg, where most doctors had specialty training at Duke, Georgia, Emory, Medical College of South Carolina, or Tulane. Dallas was a specialty milieu like St. Petersburg. Everything was controlled by surgeons and internists, and there were 4 big institutions (Methodist, St. Paul, Baylor, and Parkland). Later, Presbyterian became the fifth of the big hospital groups.

WCR: Did you move to Fort Worth when you worked the year there?

GJR: No, I didn't, and that became very irritating. That was before the Dallas-Fort Worth turnpike was built. Driving was slow. I had to go out 183 or Valley View or old US 81, going through stoplights in Grand Prairie and Arlington. I bought a Piper Tripacer airplane and got my commercial instrument certificate and commuted. I kept a car at the little airport on the south side of Fort Worth and a car here at Highland Park Airport. I commuted back and forth by plane every day if the weather was good. I'd jump in the car, drive out to Highland Park Airport, have a nice 30-minute ride looking at the countryside. I did that for over a year. I put about 450 hours or so in that little Tripacer. That was something that was fun and wasn't dangerous in good weather. Occasionally, I got trapped in bad weather, and then it was dangerous and not fun.

I came back to Dallas as a full-time associate professor at Southwestern Medical School because Dr. Muirhead had left and gone to Detroit and Dr. Charles Ashworth was the current chairman. Dr. Ashworth, who was Dr. George T. Caldwell's first assistant and proudest offspring at Baylor, became chairman of pathology at Southwestern. Dr. Ashworth was a great teacher and a great surgical and autopsy pathologist. He had a hot temper and was at times difficult to work for. I'd see him in the hall and he'd scowl at me, and I'd ask myself, “What did I do?” I'd go talk to his secretary and say, “Why is Dr. Ashworth mad at me?” She'd say, “He's not mad at you. He couldn't get the door to part of his cabinet open and he was pretty upset about it.” I said, “Thanks. I'm glad to know that.” He was a difficult man to work with because he saw everything as black or white. He was from Kaufman, Texas. He'd married early, had several children, worked his way through Baylor