I don't think I made the
transition from childhood to adolescence very gracefully. I remember it as
a not too happy time in my life.
Change is one of the
stressors of life, and this period is full of change for any child. I had
the usual issues to deal with....puberty, facial hair, girls, etc. I also
had the change brought about by a new school. In the fall of 1949 when I
was twelve, I moved to a new school. When I was a child, there were
transitions in schools that really did not make much sense. I guess that
is why they have subsequently changed. I went from kindergarten to the
second grade. That made me a year younger than everyone in my elementary
school class. About the only times that really mattered was when I became
old enough to become a scout I had to wait a year. I was also young
looking for my age anyway, and the class bully used to call me "baby face."
Elementary school then was grades one through seven. I seemed to thrive in this
environment and was an active, outgoing child. I was president of the
student body when I was a sixth grader.
Children went to Junior
High for grades eight and nine, then to High School for ten through twelve.
Junior High was rather traumatic for me. I was put with a different bunch
of kids who blended from several local elementary schools. I became rather
shy and did not make friends easily. I tended to stick with the kids I had
known in elementary school for the most part. I also had an illness in the
summer of 1949 that made a change in my life.
As was expected of me, I
spent the summers working. The summer of 1949 when I was twelve, I worked
at my dad's farm. It was hard work, and especially for a kid who was not
very big and had no skills. I was put to work in the fields on dad’s farm.
At that time, there was little mechanized equipment in farming that is now so
common. Hay was bailed by cutting, raking and hauling the grass to the
center of a field where a stationary hay bailer was set up. The newly
bailed hay was then loaded into a truck and taken to the barn where it was off
loaded and stacked.
We had a big barn that
held 10,000 bales of hay. They were stacked at least ten or twelve bales high.
Lifting a 50 pound bale of hay around was not easy for a kid. I built
muscles that summer. Another task was building shocks of oats. A
cutting machine (binder) would cut oats and tie them into clumps that were about
the size of a bushel basket. It dumped them on the ground behind the
machine. These bundles were collected and stacked into shocks of about
15-20 bundles. They were then hauled on a wagon or truck to be processed
by the next machine (thrasher) that shook the grain from the straw. Now
this process is done by a "combine" in air-conditioned comfort.
Some time that summer
when I was shocking in the oat field, I got sick. I remember lying down in
the shade of a fence row beside the field. Someone called my mother who
came after me, and I spent the next several days in bed with fever and felt
terrible. My dad did not know what was wrong with me. Pneumonia was
suspected but my illness was atypical. After about a week I was better,
but never felt well enough the rest of that summer to resume the work at the
farm. I began having back pain. I went to several doctors and the
diagnosis of "juvenile epiphysitis of the spine" was made. My work was
restricted, and more importantly, I was not allowed to play sports. We
often wondered if the febrile illness was a mild form of polio.
Polio was a big deal when
I was a child, and I ever learned to swim, as my mother was convinced you
caught polio at public swimming pools. No one we knew had a swimming pool
at home. My dad belonged to the downtown Dallas Athletic Club where I took
swimming lessons. The instructor got so upset with me that he picked me up
and threw me in the pool trying to prove to me I could swim. That ended my
swimming lessons. I did not learn to swim until I went to college and
took swimming lessons as part of physical education which was mandatory
for freshmen.
Sports were a big deal
for me, especially baseball. I was not big enough to play football, and I
don't think I would have played if I had been big enough. Getting tackled
or tackling someone else was not my idea of fun.
I wanted to be a pitcher.
I was a lefty, and could throw the ball pretty well. I was devastated when
I was not allowed to go out for the baseball team because of my back problem.
As an alternative, the coach made me the student manager. I kept up with
the balls and bats that were furnished by the school. We also had our own
bases that had to be put out before each game. Every kid had his own
glove. I also kept the record of hits, runs and errors for each player.
It let me go to practices and to each game. It was OK but not as good as
being a player.
I made some good friends.
One friend, Tommy Pool, is still a friend. We do not know, nor does his family, where he lives currently. Tommy was a good pitcher with a very good curve ball. He was
big and tall for his age and saved me from the class bully when we
were in the 6th grade. The bully was knocking me around on the playground,
and Tommy took up for me and beat the c... out of him!
The next summer I was
better and resumed my work at the farm, but still was not allowed to play
competitive sports at school. Somehow, I find that a little peculiar now.
My parents were more tuned into work than play.
I remember a little later
when I wanted to learn to play golf. I found an old set of golf clubs in
the attic that had belonged to my dad. They had wooden shafts. I
used them to learn. I was left handed, but these clubs were right handed
clubs, so I learned to play right handed. I got little support from my
dad. He said golf was a "game for the idle rich, and we were neither idle
nor rich." I played anyway and it became a sport I was able to continue for
a long time. More about golf later.
This period in my life
continued to be influenced by my mother's ill health. I remember vividly
when I started having to iron my own clothes, including ROTC shirts. Other
guys had their shirts sent to the laundry and they came back with neat creases
in the back. I was lucky to get the major wrinkles out of mine. I
did my best later in life to never tell my wife I knew how to iron. This
was long before the marvelous wrinkle proof fabrics that we have today were
available. Most everything was 100% cotton or 100% wool.
I was not interested in
girls during this stage. They were there, but that was about it. I
was more interested in woodshop, baseball, hunting and fishing. There
would be plenty of time for girls later.
I continued to attend
church, but with maybe less fervor on my part. Being Baptist, when the
other kids were taking dancing lessons, I was not allowed. I was a singer
but there was no kid’s choir at church. My voice was changing at this
time, and my singing was not the best anyway.
One of dad's sisters,
Lucy Lee Crutcher Henderson, was a piano teacher. She gave me lessons.
I was more interested in playing baseball. Mother had the choir director
at church listen to me sing. He did not think I had a solo voice. My
brother sang and played the piano. My mother also played and often
accompanied my dad while he sang. I enjoy music to this day, but more as a
listener than a participant.
This was also a time when
I had to be carried everywhere I went. This was a real chore for my mother
and dad. Dad was hardly ever at home at the right time. The task
usually fell to my mother, and she really did not feel like it much of the time.
There were no other kids in my neighborhood going to the school I attended (W.E.
Greiner Jr. High) and we could not car pool. The school was a long way
from the street car line, and would have been a transfer by bus. I
remember my dad would sometimes take me in the morning, and my mother would pick
me up in the afternoon. My older brother was only home in the summers, as
he was in college. He was five years older than me and we had little in
common anyway.
Owen George continued to
be a big influence in my life. I remember he bought a farm near Paris,
Texas and we spent some time there. He was a big help to my mother helping
me get a driver's license. When I became 14, you could get a "hardship"
drivers license. My mother applied for the license and had to appear
before a board to present the hardship. Her hardship was she had to haul
me out to Hutchins every day to work in the summer. The board did not feel
that was a real "hardship" and turned down our request.
Owen went with me to talk
to the county Judge in Paris, and he granted me the ability to get a driver's
license. I remember taking the drivers test the same day. I had not
studied the rules, but I passed without much trouble. I had been driving
tractors and trucks since I was big enough to hold the wheel at the farm.
This reminds me of one of
my less pleasant driving experiences. When I was learning to drive,
my dad would occasionally let me drive home from the farm. On this
particular day, I drove home without any problem. We parked the car in the
garage and went into the house. My dad heard a loud sound and went out and
saw the car in our front yard. We lived on a hill, and I had forgotten to
put the emergency brake on. The car rolled out of the garage and down the
hill into the front yard, sideswiping a tree on its way down. It was a
fairly new Chrysler two door coupe. At that time, Chrysler had its famous
"fluid drive." It had no gears in the transmission, and there was
absolutely nothing to stop the car from rolling other than the emergency brake.
Needless to say, this
event did not make my dad happy and my driving was severely curtailed for some
time. The windshield was damaged and leaked when it rained. My dad
made me take the car when he traded it and explain to the dealer what had
happened. I don't think he got a very good trade in on that car.
Soon after I got my
license, my dad bought me a red Crosley pick-up. The bed of the truck would
hold two bales of hay if you stacked them up the narrow way. It relieved
my mother of the job of transporting me back and forth to the farm to work, and
it was great fun for me.
The guys at the farm made
great fun of my new truck. One would say...."here comes Billy to pick up
the eggs in his truck." I really loved that truck. I improved my
skills as a mechanic. I took the engine out several times, whether it
really needed it or not. I removed and cleaned the spark plugs, replaced
points in the distributor, changed oil and all the other things that were
"routine maintenance" of vehicles at the time. The truck had a 26 horse
power four cylinder engine made by Continental. I was told it was the
engine commonly used on refrigerated trucks to run the refrigeration system.
It had a floor mounted stick shift with three forward speeds. It weighed 1403
pounds and could be bought new for $916. I don't know what my dad paid for
it, as it was a used "demonstrator." He bought it from Clarence Talley who
had a car lot on Ross Avenue. He later became the first Volkswagen dealer
in Dallas.
I suspect my dad had been
influenced by my mother's brother Ben Wells who owned a Crosley and found it to
be cheap reliable transportation.
The kids had fun with my
truck too. At this time, the Cliff Temple Baptist Church auditorium was
cooled by blowing air over blocks of ice. There was a big chute going down
into the basement where ice trucks would dump ice into a big reservoir.
One Wednesday evening, some of my friends lifted and carried the truck down the
chute and left it at the bottom. Fortunately no one got hurt, and I was
able to simply drive the truck up out of the chute. One time after I was
in Sunset High, I found the truck on top of the long flight of stairs at the
front door. It was a little more difficult to get down from that position.
My dad always took the
month of August off from work. For several years, he had spent it with the
family on vacations. We took long touring vacations for several summers.
One summer we went as far as Montreal, visiting Washington, D.C. and New York
City on the way. Another summer we went north as far as Lake Louise in Canada,
visiting Yellowstone and the Tetons on the way. I remember only seeing the
Tetons out the window, as we did not have time to spend there on our way to
Yellowstone Park where we stayed several days.
One summer we went west
to Los Angeles and Catalina Island. All of these trips were
considered part of our education. All were taken by car, and of course, no
air conditioning anywhere. I remember my mother taking along a bottle of
Lysol to use on the bath tubs in some of the motels where we stayed.
We spent several Augusts
in Lake City, Colorado, where several families vacationed
together. Owen George and his wife Lucille, a man named "Penny" Lee who
had a daughter named Peggy that I had a crush on. He was named Penny
because he managed the J.C. Penny store in Oak Cliff. There were several
other families who were also friends. Lake City was primitive then.
There were no paved streets. We cooked on wood stoves. It was a real
luxury to have a house with indoor plumbing. The fishing was fair.
The fun was great. My brother did a lot of hiking, as he cared nothing
about fishing. After a few years, we quit going to Colorado as my dad did
not like dealing with the altitude. That is when we started going to
Minnesota.
The summer I got the
Crosley, we were going to Detroit Lakes, Minnesota to spend the month fishing.
We had a family friend who was in the tent and awning business. My mother
had a cover made for the pick-up bed and my brother and I drove the Crosley to
Detroit Lakes. I remember we burned $9.28 worth of gas on the way up.
That was when gas was probably 10 cents a gallon, but it was pretty thrifty with
gas. Coming home, we lost oil pressure and had to have the rod bearings
replaced. I don't remember what that cost. As I remember, the top
speed on the car was about 50 mph.
The only grandfather I had known was my maternal
grandfather, Willie Wells, who died when I was nine. He lived in Temple
and as I visited there fairly often to be with him and my aunt Sissie. I
called him Dada. He had a farm near Belton, and he went out to the farm
for some reason almost every day. We would stop at the grocery store on
the way out and buy meat for lunch.
We usually bought steak
that was turned into wonderful chicken fried steak by Flossie, the lady who
lived on his farm. It was accompanied by mashed potatoes, gravy and
usually hot biscuits. I learned to shoot a 22 rifle there, and spent a lot
of time shooting at water snakes that populated the stock tank on the place.
I remember wonderful grape juice home made and kept in a storm cellar adjacent
to the house. I also remember she
had a daughter about my age named Nita.
We spent several summers
at Muench's Beach Resort on Long Lake just outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota.
Here we vacationed with friends and someone who had influence on my life as a
surrogate grandfather, a man named Jess Harkey. My dad was a part time Medical Director for
United Fidelity Life Insurance Company. Jess was an agent. He was
from Arkansas and never met a stranger. He and his wife Ora had no
children, and it was easy to develop a relationship with him.
Jess was a very good
fisherman, and taught me most of what I know about fishing for walleye pike.
I learned bass fishing from his niece Pat who lived in Garber, Oklahoma.
Jess had a lot of friends
and relatives who came to visit him while he was in Minnesota. He spent
all summer there. The Harkey's had one of the few cabins that had its own
bathroom, as it had served as a temporary living space for the owner of the
resort while he was building a new house. The Muench family had a large
farming operation, growing sweet corn. The also had the resort that was
ten or twelve cabins with a central bath/shower arrangement.
My mother and brother
hated it. She said she had a wonderful utility room and kitchen with a
dishwasher at home only to go to Minnesota where everything had to be done by
hand. She put up with it because dad and I loved it. My brother only
went for one or two summers. The only thing he ever did was read and sit
out in the sun. Neither of us knew how to swim. Dad liked to fish,
and liked to be with the people we knew who were also vacationing at the resort.
The grownups played canasta by the hour. Everyone slept and ate
wonderfully. The sweet corn was fresh every day. There were also
fresh blueberries enhanced by fresh cream. Of course, we had an
abundance of fish. Walleye is about the best fish you can eat, especially when it is
fresh from the lake.
The summer of 1953 we
spent touring Europe. My mother, brother and I flew to England in early
June and picked up an English Ford brand new from the factory. We toured
England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. We then went to the continent and
visited France and Italy. My dad joined us in Austria, where he spent a
week studying with a famous surgeon in Gratz named Ernst Navratil. We then
visited Austria, Switzerland and Germany before my dad returned home. The
rest of us continued our tour and visited Holland, Belgium, and Denmark.
We drove 10,000 miles that summer. We flew home from Copenhagen, and
somehow, the Ford got shipped to us.
It was a wonderful
experience. I appreciate it more now than I did at the time. I
thought I would never see the end of the fancy churches as we visited in Italy.
I was hungry for real food.
Very few people spoke
English in Europe then, and we had some interesting times trying to order food.
Everyone else was drinking beer and wine, but of course, being good Baptists, we
could not. In Italy, we ordered bottled water to drink by using an
expression (fizzzz....) seen on billboards. It turned out to be naturally
carbonated water and it was terrible to drink. People now think Perrier is
wonderful.
We usually stayed in bed
& breakfast establishments. We had no advance reservations. It is a
wonder we did as well as we did! My mother was very brave and venturesome
to do that much travel with two young boys. My brother, age 21, had just
completed his freshman year in medical school and thought he was grown. As
I remember, he did all the driving.
Hunting and fishing
continued to be important to me. I hunted anything that moved on my dad's
farm. My friend Tommy Pool and I sometimes camped out in my aunt's house
(vacant at the time because of her incapacity) and hunted on the weekend.
We mostly hunted rabbits.
We raised hogs on the
farm, and they loved rabbits. I think a hog will eat most anything.
I made war on the many pigeons that tended to light on top of the various barns,
particularly the big hay barn. There were quite a few holes in the metal
roof when I shot a little low.
I had a horse that I
could shoot off of. I killed quite a few crows by riding up to a feed
trough where they tended to congregate. Crows are very smart and usually
are hard to get close to. In season, I shot doves and an occasional
scissor-tail. I remember seeing some quail, but was never successful in
killing one with my rifle. We shot a lot of hand thrown skeet.
My first shotgun was a pump 410.
I soon graduated to a Browning 20 gauge automatic.
I continued to go deer
hunting. My dad had a friend, Mr. Martin, at church who owned a big ranch
near Menard, Texas. My dad bought me a real deer rifle, a model 99 Savage
in a 250/3000 caliber. I killed my first deer with that rifle on that
ranch. I don't think I was successful in killing another deer until
several years later when my dad and I went hunting in east Texas on a property
that is now called Holly Lake. We never had a regular deer lease after the
place in Utopia. I have a picture of a 1949 Mercury with two bucks tied to
the front fenders. I think that was the only deer my dad ever killed.
Owen George bought
another property, this time closer to Dallas. It was located in what is
now Allen. At that time, it was way out in the country just to the west of
Lake Lavon. There were a lot of rabbits on the property, and I took
advantage of that fairly often. Owen enjoyed working on that place.
I remember he cut and burned a lot of brush. He got in the smoke, and it
must have had a lot of poison ivy in the brush, and he had a serious case of
poison ivy rash!
There was also a tank on
the place. I don't think I ever caught a fish, but I gigged quite a few
bullfrogs. My mother used to like to cook frog legs. If you fix them
like chicken, they taste like chicken. If you fry them like fish, they
taste like fish. I preferred the chicken variety.
Horses remained a big
factor as well. My dad bought me a pony when we lived on Junior Drive.
The pony's name was Baby Doll. My grandfather gave me a small saddle that
fit her and me. She was very gentle and patient with me. I rode her
everywhere. As the neighborhood started to have houses built, we moved
Baby Doll to the farm where I rode her often. She got to be a senior
citizen as I got older and she lived out her days in peaceful grazing.
My dad had a big rhone
gelding that I rode some times. He was almost too much for me to handle.
He would run so fast and accelerate so quickly it was scary. There was
also the horse that I shot off of. He had been given to me by one of my
Uncle Aubrey's friends. As I got older, I rode him more than Baby Doll, as
she was a fairly small pony.
We also had a Shetland
pony that had once been one of S.M.U.'s mascots. He was very mean and no
one was able to handle him. He was used as a stud and dad bred several
mares to him. I don't remember how he came to get him. The farm
tended to be a horse rescue for animals looking for a home. My dad's love
of horses made that easy.
In high school, still
restricted from contact sports because of my back, I went out for the golf team.
I broke all the shafts of the old clubs I had found in the attic. I was
working at Roland Ellis' Men's Store and saved enough money to buy a second hand
set of clubs. They were Walter Hagen's, and I still have those clubs.
As I mentioned before, my dad was not supportive of my golfing. I never
was a good enough golfer to make the A team and play in city tournaments, but I
enjoyed getting out of school one period early (P.E. was golf) and playing at
Steven's Park golf course every day.
After our golfing, one of
the team members lived across the street where we played pool in his basement.
His name was Walter Temple and his father Jimmie was one of Dallas' mayors
several years ago. He was one of the executives of Oak Farms Dairy that
later became the parent organization of 7-Eleven.
Walter had a James
motorcycle. We spent a lot of time riding that motorcycle. I had
another friend, Teddy True, who also had a James. I wanted one very much,
but my dad would not discuss the idea with me. Owen George was adamantly
opposed to the idea as well, as his best friend in college was killed in a
motorcycle accident. The motorcycle will come up again much later on.
Somewhere along the line,
I learned to like girls. I did not have many girl friends, but enjoyed the
few that I did have. One was the sister of my best friend in high school.
Her name was Carol Ann Quade.
Dickey was a runner, and
tried to get me interested in track. I tried, but began to have pain in my
ankle that later would become a major problem. Dickey had a model T Ford.
We spent a lot of time working on that car. Dickey had a paper route, and
I would help him out from time to time, particularly when he went out of town
with his family. His grandparents lived in St. Louis, and he would visit
there occasionally.
Dickey became a professor
and teaches physics at Texas Tech University. I tried to renew our
friendship when our sons were at Tech, but the chemistry was no longer there.
Carol Ann later married an orthopedic surgeon. I have long since lost
track of her.
My first real love, Mary Ann Allen, later
became my wife. We met when I was a senior in high school. My dad
had delivered her and knew her parents as patients. More about this later.
The summer after I
graduated from Sunset (1954) my uncle Earnest Moon died. He was aunt
Sissie's husband. He was a physician on the staff of Scott and White in
Temple for many years. He died unexpectedly. My aunt Sissie was left
with two cars and she did not drive. She gave the newer one to her brother
Ben Wells and gave the older one to me.
It was a 1941 Packard
four door sedan. It was quite a boat. Uncle Earnest had owned it
since it was new and drove it on special occasions. It had a big engine
and burned a lot of gas. It also used some oil. The main problem was
the universal joints. If you went more than about 50 mph, the car would
shake terribly. I wanted to get it fixed, but my dad preferred to have is
serve as a governor. The Crosley was history. You could almost put
the Crosley in the back seat of the Packard!
The car to be given to my
uncle Ben was a 1949 Chrysler New Yorker. At that time, Ben was the dean
of a medical school (Creighton) in Omaha, Nebraska. It was my chore to
drive the car to Omaha on our way to Detroit Lakes that summer. That was a
long and lonely trip, and I remember how hot it was. It was even hot when
we got to Omaha. No one had air conditioning then, and everyone suffered
in the summer.
It was time for college.
My dad offered to send me to any college I wished, but he made it clear that the
only place he and my mother would support (and pay for) was Baylor. They
were both Baylor graduates, as were several other members of my mother's family.
My older brother had gone to Baylor and was in Baylor's Medical School in
Houston. Needless to say, I was headed for Baylor in Waco.
There was a boy I knew at
church named Clinton Twadell. He was going to Baylor. We arranged to
be roommates and got a room in a brand new dorm at Baylor, the first one that
was fully air conditioned. It was so new, it had no name and was called
the "new men's dorm."
Being a freshman in
college was tough for me. It was the first time I had ever been really
away from home. My girlfriend was still in Dallas in high school.
The course work was not particularly demanding, but consumed my time. I
settled in to life at college. Clinton was doing his own thing, and we
rarely did anything together except share a room.
My habits were to try to
have all my classes in the mornings so that my afternoons were free. If I
needed to study, I would do it mostly in the afternoons. At night, the
dorm was very noisy and not a good place to study. A lot of people went to
the library to study to get away from the noise. Our dorm also housed the
"jocks" who usually did not have studying in mind. The afternoons were
quiet and I could get a lot done. Some afternoons, I played golf. I
sometimes went to the track and ran, but soon my ankle would become painful and
the running was not for me. I could play golf, get outside and it was an
enjoyable way to spend the afternoon. I don't remember who I played with,
but there was always someone available on relatively short notice.
I had a meal ticket at
the cafeteria in the student center. It was my downfall, as I wound up
eating regular meals and more than I needed. I started putting on
weight then and it has continued to be a problem for the remainder of my life.
I am a board certified eater with a lot of experience. I particularly
liked the Dutch apple pie in the Baylor Student Union cafeteria.
As I was pre-med, my
schedule was full and compact. Baylor was on the quarter system, and
classes went by quickly. I took a full load every quarter. I had
worked all through high school, but my dad made it clear that he did not want or
expect me to work at college during the school year. I worked every
summer, but not while I was going to school. The goal was to make good
enough grades to get into Baylor Medical School.
I developed good study
habits and made good use of them. I learned to type in high school.
I was the only boy in my high school typing class. Owen George had given
me a Royal typewriter when they upgraded to IBM electric typewriters at his
office. I would take my notes from the day's lecture and convert them into
a typed document. It was a good learning tool. I have used typing
skills to great benefit all my life.
The only classes I had
any trouble with as a freshman was math and has remained a challenge for me. I had not enjoyed math in high
school. I did not have the mind for math concepts. I struggled with
trig and algebra and fortunately, did not have to take calculus.
Science was my thing and
I enjoyed it and excelled. I made the dean's list a few times.
Things were going well with school.
I was less than happy
with my social life. I made a few friends and did things with them.
I dated a few girls, but my heart was still with the girl back home.
I made frequent trips to
Dallas on weekends to be with her. I talked with my folks about
transferring to TCU. I really don't remember why TCU came into mind, other
than my girlfriend's cousins who I knew were there. I got a nice letter
from a doctor friend of dads offering me encouragement with my situation and to
stick it out where I was. I imagine how my dad probably was talking to
this doctor friend in the doctor's lounge while waiting for a baby to be born.
It was nice for him to take the time. His name was Dr. Floyd Franklin.
I still have his letter.
One friend I made who
lived down the hall later became a medical associate when we shared an office
space at Medical City. Trevor Mabery was a good friend. He was from
Weatherford, Texas where his dad was a pharmacist and owned a drug store.
Trevor had gone to a junior college in Stephenville, Texas the first year and
lived at home. He was a year ahead of me in college, but we were at Baylor
for the first time together. He lived with Ted Edwards in a corner room in
the dorm. We had common interests in hunting and fishing, which we did
many times over the next 15 years.
Trevor was one of four
Dallas men killed in a private plane accident in Montana. They were all on
the board of Focus on the Family, and had gone to Montana for a retreat and
board meeting. They were meeting at a ranch that belonged to Hugo
Schoelkopf. Hugo and Trevor were good friends and Hugo had a plane.
Trevor had flown to Montana on a commercial airline, and had a return ticket.
Hugo talked him into coming back to Dallas with him and two men who were Baptist
preachers. They were found in the side of a mountain. I presume they
were sight seeing and the plane crashed going full speed. It was a tragic
event for me and for the entire Christian community.
I spent the summer after
my freshman year working at my dad's clinic as an assistant to the X-ray
technician. I had known her for several years, as she had worked for my
dad almost since he went into practice. I was the chief barium mixer and
cleaner upper. I helped process the X-rays. That was way before any
of the automated equipment of today. Each film was put on a hanger, moved
through two tanks in the developing process and then hung up to dry. My
dad's clinic had about fifteen doctors, and the X-ray facility was a busy
place.
My sophomore year was
better. My school work was more science oriented, but harder. I
remember spending most of the "extra" time studying. I moved to a new dorm
with a new set of roommates. My friend Clinton got married during the
summer.
My newly assigned
roommates were new friends. One was Wayne Gillies from Houston. He
brought along Billy Davis, one of his friends. We picked up an unknown in
the match. His name was David Payne. He was the son of missionaries
and was kind of strange.
Four guys in one room was a bit much,
but we made it OK. The missionary kid did not last out the year.
He was replaced with Winifred Holland, an OK guy.
I continued to study in the afternoons when the roommates were usually
gone and it was quiet. I made new friends in the new dorm, the oldest on
the Baylor campus, Brooks Hall. It was not air-conditioned.
One of the new interests
was HAM radio. One of my friends was a whiz in electronics, and he drew me
a schematic for a radio transmitter that would send Morse code. The
radiology technician's husband at my dad's clinic was a HAM radio operator, and
stirred my interest the previous summer. I was home for the weekend and
showed him the schematic. We went out to his workshop and he came up with
a power supply and the vacuum tube necessary for the system. I bought the
rest of the components at Crabtree Electronics and built the system. I
bought a Hallicrafters HAM radio receiver.
I had the only HAM radio
antenna stretching across the quadrangle in Brooks Hall. I suspect no one
knew or cared what it was. It was a long copper covered wire that
stretched across to another friend's room in the wing opposite to our room.
His name was Ernie McKowan. He was later killed in an automobile accident.
We were both pre-med students. I learned Morse code quickly and got my
amateur radio operators license. My call sign was NKLKE. The N was
for novice. It was fun when you could communicate with someone halfway
across the country. I never got to the point where I got the full license
necessary for voice communication. I did not have the time for this kind
of thing. The educational system for me became harder as I progressed.
I have often thought about taking up ham radio as a hobby again, but the
Internet in recent times has been my passion.
Friends come to mind
while writing this that I haven't thought about in years. I remember a guy
I shared many classes with whose name was Earl Davis. His dad was an
osteopathic physician in Brownfield, Texas. Earl had a Mercury, one of
those that looked like a bathtub with wheels. He went home every weekend
to Brownfield. I have lost track of Earl. I don't know if he
completed his goal to become a doctor.
When I lived in Brooks
Hall, I quit eating at the campus cafeteria and ate where I could. I got a
meal ticket at the greasy spoon across the street from the dorm and ate many
meals there. Breakfast has always been a favorite meal, and I always had
breakfast there.
My roommate Wayne Gillies
wanted me to become a member of one of the local social clubs. When I was
at Baylor, there were no national fraternities. There were several social
clubs that did pretty much the same thing. I became a pledge for Tyron-C.
It was not as much fun as I thought it was going to be. It was mostly an
excuse for the guys to get together to get drunk. I had never drunk
anything with alcohol at that time in my life, and did not start then. I
picked up my roommate Wayne from one of the parties that were memorable.
Billy Davis' had his
aunt's brand new Buick for some reason for the weekend. He lived in Mexia,
and his aunt was quite wealthy and a benefactor of Baylor. I dated her
daughter for a while. She could have been a fullback for the Detroit
Lions. Anyway, when we went to get Gillies, he was leaping from table to
table like a drunken monkey (which he was). On the way back to the dorm,
he vomited and failed to get his head out the window completely. We had
fun trying to clean up Billy's aunt’s car. I guess we did an OK job, as
nothing more was said about that event. Billy would later become a
urologist and Wayne would become a lawyer.
I finally learned how to
dance as a member of that club. I remember dancing with the girlfriend of
a friend I had known since grade school who was also at Baylor. She seemed
to melt and moved like liquid. It was fun. Dancing has never been a
passion to this day. My mother used to say "we don't smoke, drink or dance
and don't run with the folks who do."
I worked the summer
between my sophomore and junior years again at the farm. By this time, we
had an "automatic" hay bailer. It would pick up the grass that had been
cut and raked into windrows. It baled the hay and spit them out the back.
My job was to pick up the bales and haul them to the barn. I worked with a
black kid named Cupie. We hauled and stacked 10,000 bales of hay that
summer. We also had a new combine, but I was not considered experienced
enough to operate it. It was a dirty, messy job. It kicked up a lot
of dust as it cut the stuff being harvested. I remember a field of button
clover where it was so dusty you could hardly see the combine for the cloud of
dust. My job was to drive the truck that hauled the seed from the combine
to the storage bin. Dad bought some old wooden railroad boxcars and used
them for grain storage. There were also grain storage bins in one of the
barns. I think the button clover was a crop of a neighbor, and we were
just doing the harvesting.
I remember plowing a 60
acre field that summer where we grew maize for the dairy cattle. I was
driving a John Deere tractor that burned a mixture of coal oil (kerosene) and
water. It had two cylinders. It also had a broken head gasket, and
the radiator needed to be filled often. I wasted a lot of time driving to
the well and filling that radiator that summer. I finally got the field
plowed, but it seemed it took forever.
The cows loved that
maize. We cut it with a shredder which blew it into silos made in the
ground in big trenches. It was covered with tarps and fermented. It
must have had some alcohol in it. As I remember, it was called ensilage.
My junior and last year
at Baylor was very busy. I was happier with my social life, as my Dallas
girlfriend Mary Ann was now at Baylor. She took most of my spare time.
My academic load was very
heavy, with quantitative analysis and organic chemistry being the two big
courses. I remember staying at school over most of the Christmas holidays
in the lab doing the analysis of my "unknowns." I had a lot of company, as
that was supposedly the toughest chemistry course at Baylor.
In the spring of my
junior year, sometime about a month before the end of school, I got news that my
mother was sick. She was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach. My
dad took her to Mayo Clinic for treatment. I left school so that I could
be with my mother and let my dad return to Dallas while she was recovering from
surgery. My professors were very kind and understanding, but I had to
complete some work. I was taking comparative anatomy that spring, and I
had to bring a cat home to study for the final exam. No one was very happy
about having a dead cat in the bottom of the refrigerator.
My mother did well for a
while after surgery. Things then happened as a blur. I had been
accepted into Baylor College of Medicine. We were pretty sure mother would
not survive her illness. I did not want to leave my dad alone to handle
her illness. My brother by then had graduated from medical school and was
in the Navy on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the orient.
I made a late application
to Southwestern Medical School. It was a start up in Dallas and at that
time was a struggling independent school. Most of the professors were
former Baylor College of Medicine faculty who did not want to move with the
school when it relocated to Houston in 1943. Getting into a medical school
at that time was not easy. They had far more applicants than they had
positions. It did not hurt my case that my dad knew many of the
professors, as some had taught him when he was at Baylor when it was in Dallas.
I was interviewed and accepted.
My mother knew I was in
love, and she wanted to see me marry. As I look back on this, had it not
been for her illness, I don't think I would have even thought about getting
married. I did marry that June and mother was able to attend. It
proved to be a poor decision on my part, as the marriage would not last.
I had a good job that
summer, working in the Mobil Oil Company research lab that was located in
Duncanville at that time. I worked for a man named George McIvor in the
natural gas lab as a lab technician assistant. It paid well and allowed me
to gain some primary exposure to the research process. My dad helped me to
get the job through a friendship we had with the president of the company.
His son Teddy and I had been friends as children. His family was patients
of dad's, as well as being friends. His name was Leslie H. True.
With my new wife and a
dead cat in the refrigerator I started the summer. I took my final exam on
the anatomy of the cat and made an A in the course. The other course I had
pending was German. I took an incomplete in that course, as I did not need
it anyway. I had enough hours to get me into medical school.
Our predictions about
mother were correct. She progressively got worse. The surgeon had
not been able to remove all of the cancer from her stomach. She died in
Baylor Hospital on September 17, 1957. I was in class that day when one of
the professors mentioned at the beginning of the class that one of their
classmate's mothers had died the day before. I think everyone was shocked
when I identified myself and thanked them for their concern.
I was afraid to miss
anything that year. The first day of class, one of our professors, Dr.
Duncan who taught us microanatomy, stated that "we did not ask you to come here,
but we may ask you to leave" made a big impression on me. About 10% of our
class would not become second year students, and we were the cream of the
college crop!
I was glad I made the decision to
stay in Dallas. My dad bought us a house near S.M.U. on Dyer Street.
I remember the payments were $49 a month, and the house cost $9,000. Mary Ann went to S.M.U. to complete her education, and she was able to walk to
school. Dad ate dinner with us almost every night for that first year.
He was a lost soul. I think being with us helped him get through the
grieving process. Dad was 57 and in the prime of his professional life.
My time in the first two years of
medical school was spent with hard work and studying.
I was usually tired when I got home in the late afternoon.
I would go to bed early and get up at 3:00 AM and study until 7:00 AM.
Early morning hours were productive for me.
I studied in what had been a screened in porch adjacent to our bedroom.
I used an old roll top desk that I had bought when I was at Baylor.
Last edited 6/28/08