George Justice Race, MD, PhD, MSPH:
a conversation with the editor
G
eorge Race (Figure 1) was born in Everman, Texas, on
March 2, 1926. He grew up in a 2-room house with running water but without plumbing and usually without
a father. He graduated from high school in 1942. After a year at
Texas Wesleyan College and a second year at Baylor University,
he had acquired enough premedical credits to enter medical
school at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School,
where he graduated in June 1947 at age 21. He was allowed to
complete medical school in 36 consecutive months because the
USA wanted to avoid a physician shortage during the war. He
interned in pathology at Duke University and in surgery at the
Boston City Hospital. On July 1, 1949, he entered the US Air
Force at Alamogordo, New Mexico, becoming a flight surgeon
and spending time in Korea. After nearly 3 years in the armed
services, he returned to Duke University, completing his pathology residency in 1953. He then moved to Harvard Medical
School and Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where he
was a faculty member for a year. In 1954, he went to St. Petersburg, Florida, as chief of the pathology department at St.
Anthony’s Hospital; he stayed for a year before returning to
Dallas and Southwestern Medical School, where he was appointed to the pathology faculty in 1955. In 1959, he became
chief of pathology at Baylor University Medical Center, a position he held until 1986.
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,
264
Figure 1. George and Anne Race walking near their home prior to his 1989 retirement.
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
From Baylor Cardiovascular Institute (Roberts) and Department of Pathology
(Race, retired), Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas.
Corresponding author: William C. Roberts, MD, Baylor Cardiovascular Institute,
Baylor University Medical Center, 3500 Gaston Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75246 (email: [email protected]).
BUMC PROCEEDINGS 2001;14:264–285
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 5'9"
tall. I continued to grow to be 6'1" 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¢ a gallon and
Cokes for 5¢). 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
JULY 2001
Figure 2. With his older sister in 1928.
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.
GEORGE JUSTICE RACE, MD, PHD, MSPH: A CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR
265
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
266
Figure 3. Age 18 in the US Army.
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
BAYLOR UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER PROCEEDINGS
VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
Figure 4. Age 21 with Anne R. Race.
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
JULY 2001
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
GEORGE JUSTICE RACE, MD, PHD, MSPH: A CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR
267
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 cer268
tificate, 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
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VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
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.
JULY 2001
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
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269
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.
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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¢ an hour in the summer. That was $16 a week, for which they
took out 3¢ 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. Some-
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VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
times 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. EventuJULY 2001
ally, 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
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271
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
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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
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VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
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
JULY 2001
Figure 5. Flying on an AT6 in Korea, January 1951.
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 C47. 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
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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
274
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 airconditioning, 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.
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VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
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 WorcesterBoston 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?
JULY 2001
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
GEORGE JUSTICE RACE, MD, PHD, MSPH: A CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR
275
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" long on it.
The other girl had concealed the ice pick in her hand, and nothing showed except the 2" 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 eyeopening 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 in276
tellectual 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 Medi-
BAYLOR UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER PROCEEDINGS
VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
cal 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,
Figure 6. Age 33 on becoming chief
asked me, “Do you think Dr.
of pathology at Baylor Hospital.
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
JULY 2001
Figure 7. Boone Powell, Sr., in the 1970s.
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 College of Medicine, and went into pathology.
He was a wonderful teacher in every respect.
At that time (1959), Dr. J. M. Hill had been the director of
laboratories at Baylor Hospital on Gaston since 1933. There was
a lot of turmoil. Dr. Hill spent all his time in the Wadley Research
Institute, and the laboratories were in poor shape. The surgeons
called the labs “the meat house,” and they didn’t trust the surgical pathological diagnoses. The clinicians also were upset with
the clinical lab, which was being run by technicians. There was
a strong movement to change the director of laboratories. They
turned Dr. Hill out.
My friends Dr. Jack Edwards, a Dallas internist, and Dr. Jesse
Thompson, a surgeon, started recommending me for that job. At
the same time, I was having some tremendously lucrative job
offers back in St. Petersburg and West Palm Beach. They said,
“Come on back down here and this time we’ll pay you even
more.” Mr. Boone Powell, Sr., was the executive director at
Baylor Hospital. I liked him. He was a very energetic, intelligent
man, and he had a lot of ideas. He said, “If you’ll come over here
and build us a lab, I’ll give you what you want in the way of support and money. We want a good lab. We want a full-service lab.”
Although I liked Florida and going to Baylor was not going to
be much better than Florida intellectually, Baylor was in Dallas
and both Anne and I had many relatives and friends in the area.
Mr. Powell kept saying, “You’ve got to make the decision, but if
you come, we’ll really support you.” I finally accepted. I left the
medical school to become chief of pathology at Baylor on September 1, 1959 (Figure 6). Mr. Boone Powell, Sr., became my
mentor and friend (Figure 7).
The first thing I did was to examine how surgical pathology
was operating and beef it up. I spent every morning doing frozen
sections. The surgeons just loved it. They were a wonderful, very
GEORGE JUSTICE RACE, MD, PHD, MSPH: A CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR
277
Figure 8. The electron microscopy laboratory at Baylor in 1961. Dr. Race and Dr.
Kingsley with Emil Sanders, operator.
supportive, top-notch group who greatly appreciated the help.
The only pathologists when I went to Baylor were Theo Anjus,
a pathologist from Turkey without a US license, and Fred Preuss.
Fred Preuss was an excellent surgical pathologist trained in Europe. There were only the 3 of us. Surgical pathology was upgraded
rather quickly with the help of the chief histology technician,
Freida Carson, later Dr. Carson. We encouraged her to go to
graduate school, and she received her PhD in anatomy. She was
superb and produced excellent histology sections. Then I focused
on autopsies. There were 200 autopsies in the record book for
which there were no records. I tried to complete those 200 records.
No histology sections were available on most of the cases.
I was trying at the same time to recruit staff, and I couldn’t
succeed because Baylor Hospital had a poor reputation then.
Everybody said, “Don’t go to Baylor Hospital. Pathology is so
screwed up, and Dr. Hill is going to bother you. The administration won’t support you.” Nevertheless, I recruited Dr. Gwendolyn
Crass, a former hematology technician who had gone to medical school at Galveston and received pathology training there.
Dr. Marie Shaw, who was in Lubbock, wanted to come back to
Dallas. Dr. Shaw had been a class ahead of me in medical school
and had trained at St. Paul under Dr. Goforth. Therefore, I was
able to recruit 2 board-certified women pathologists. I got Dr.
Gwen Crass to run the bone marrow and hematology service. Sol
Haberman, PhD, who was already there in microbiology, did a
wonderful job in that area. Robert Speer, PhD, ran the chemistry department very well. With Drs. Crass and Shaw we staffed
surgical and autopsy pathology and were able to enlarge the
Baylor laboratories.
WCR: What was day-to-day life like as a pathologist in your early
years at Baylor, say about 1965?
GJR: It was a lot different than I believe it is today. First, it
was getting there by 6:30 or 7:00 AM because the surgeons would
be either having a meeting at 6:30 AM and wanted the pathologist there or else would be starting their operations and frozen
sections at 7:00 AM. I spent a lot of time in the operating rooms.
I’d spend all morning in a scrub suit working in and out of the
operating rooms—going in the room and looking at the pancreas
278
or the lung or whatever and talking about which biopsy to do.
That was great fun, and I shot the breeze with the surgeons all
the time about everything. Because I’d had a year of surgery, I
knew enough surgical technique that I could talk their lingo. I
enjoyed that tremendously. At that time, our lab had a 3-day
reporting cycle on surgical specimens. I said, “That’s not necessary. At Terrell they’re reporting results overnight.” We’d cut the
gross one day, do the tissue that night, cut the section the next
morning, and provide the report usually the next day. Quickly,
we cut the reporting time from 3 to 2 days. The surgeons loved
that.
As soon as the morning surgical pathology and the frozen
sections were over, I made lab rounds and did administrative
work. There were noon and afternoon meetings every day. I always said that the chairmen of the committees and the administration decided what you were going to do and then got the
committee together to rubber stamp it. Baylor had good strong
central administration with Mr. Powell, Sr., and Mr. David Hitt,
who was Mr. Powell’s right hand. Mr. Hitt later became the president of Methodist-Dallas. The administration got involved in
everything in the hospital.
The radiologists were expanding, buying new equipment and
providing new services. The orthopaedic surgeons wanted to
have some stored bone chips, and that had to be done aseptically.
We had to set up that system. Cytopathology was just burgeoning and everybody was interested in it, and we started a cytopathology laboratory. We started a virology lab because I knew that
Duke had started one and it was going strong. We also started
an immunology laboratory. We got a commitment from Mr.
Powell and from Mr. Charles Sammons. One of Mr. Sammons’
first gifts to Baylor was funding for the virology lab and the electron microscopy lab (Figure 8). He gave us $200,000 to $300,000
and we bought all the equipment. Then we looked for somebody
to run it and hired first Dr. Abbas Bebehani and later Dr. Dighton
Rowan from Stanford in California. We got Dr. Clayton Loosli,
a Nobel Prize winner and dean of the University of Southern
California School of Medicine, to speak at the dedication of the
virology laboratory. There was a lot of hullabaloo and pictures.
As things happened, he came with one suitcase and one suit for
one day’s stay. He went into the surgical pathology lab where we
had the big old-style cutting microtome with its razor-sharp
blade, which was sticking out. He was talking and expostulating and kept backing up until he backed into this blade, which
cut right through his coat, right through the bottom of his pants,
and into his buttocks. He started bleeding, and it was a catastrophe of several magnitudes (clothes and injury). We got him
patched up with a stitch or two, and some of the ladies mended
the back of his coat and his pants. He went on to give his speech.
That was a wonderful dedication with pictures in the Dallas Times
Herald and The Dallas Morning News.
A little later we got the electron microscopy lab started at
Baylor. We were able to buy the electron microscope, get some
space, and get it set up. We hired Jim Martin, who was then an
electrician, to help us with it. He later got a PhD from Baylor
University. Dr. Martin ran the electron microscopy lab at Baylor
for 20 years, and he became a dear friend of mine. He helped me
enormously with many things. He was from East Texas, and
whatever Jim thought was right, that’s what we would do.
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We recruited Joe Lynn, MD. Joe, who had been at the University of Chicago for a year and wanted to get out of the cold
climate, came to us as a resident but was already a well-trained
electron microscopist. He published a lot of papers at Baylor.
Every time I saw somebody like that who could be recruited as a
resident, I’d try to get him or her. One was Dr. Samih Alami, a
native of Palestine (the Gaza Strip) and from a prominent family. His father had been shot in front of him as a boy. His family
were all refugees. He had deep scars from his painful experiences.
He came to the University of Oklahoma and got a PhD and then
an MD. With Dr. Alami we started the immunology lab, which
later with Dr. Joe Newman was transferred over to Dr. Marvin
Stone. The immunology lab still exists, but it’s not in the pathology department. Dr. Alami was a wonderful man who went back
to the American University of Beirut, where he became chairman of the Department of Pathology there. His wife was pregnant when he was a resident in Dallas. He sent her back to Beirut
so the little boy, Walid, could be born in Lebanon and have Lebanese citizenship. Walid grew up, however, mainly in the USA,
went to Baylor College of Medicine, became naturalized, and is
now a nephrologist at the University of Washington.
We appointed many good people: Dr. Tony D’Agostino, a
neuropathologist from Southwestern; Dr. Bill Kingsley, a surgical pathologist trained at Rochester, New York; Dr. Mac Nickey,
a surgical pathologist from the air force; Dr. Norman Helgeson,
a microbiologist and surgical pathologist from Massachusetts
General Hospital, who had a graduate degree from Wisconsin in
microbiology, his main interest; and Stephan Ritzmann, an immunologist and immunochemist who later took over the chemistry laboratory.
WCR: You got to the hospital quite early. What time would you
go home?
GJR: Sometimes I could get out by 5:00 or 5:30 PM. A lot of
times the internists wanted their meetings at 6:00 or 6:30 at night
after they had made their rounds. I got in a box of having to be
there at 6:30 AM for the surgical meetings and 6:30 PM for the
internal medicine meetings. It was a lot of time and a lot of work.
I finally started dividing up the meetings among the staff. Everybody worked on Saturdays. The Doctor’s Club always met at
noon on Saturday, and they often asked me to join. I said, “I can’t
join because there is surgery going on at Baylor until 2:00 or 3:00
PM on Saturday and we have to do frozen sections.” I never did
join. On Saturdays I got off about 3:00 or 3:30 PM.
WCR: Although you started in pathology at Baylor, you were
involved in a number of different things there. You started the continuing medical education department, you started the Baylor Research
Institute, you started BUMC Proceedings. How did these other activities evolve?
GJR: I always thought that Baylor was the Massachusetts
General Hospital of Dallas and that it could function in that capacity independently if it would just make its connections and
get enough really good things going. To that end, Mr. Powell,
Sr., David Hitt, and the others organized the Baylor Foundation,
a fundraising arm. Mr. Powell, Sr., ran it and raised a lot of funds.
When Mr. Powell, Jr., came in 1981, he recruited Gordon
Caswell to run the foundation, and Mr. Powell, Sr., became engaged in other efforts.
JULY 2001
Figure 9. First issue of BUMC Proceedings in January 1988.
We started the Baylor Research Foundation with the help of
Dr. Larry Wilsey. The idea there was not to raise money but to
establish a research institute. Mary Crowley donated a large
amount to fund cancer research, and Louis Beecherl donated
$250,000 in cash to launch the research institute. We obtained
space in the building on 3812 Elm Street. My idea was to set up
some basic science laboratories, and that is what we did. Dr. Les
Matthews was heavily involved. Les was very interested in getting patents on blood processing projects that he had.
Mr. Powell was the first chairman of the Baylor Research
Foundation (now Institute), and I was the second. In September 1989 I was feeling quite tired of meetings and administrative
duties and Mr. Beecherl said to me, “If you step down we will try
to recruit a prominent person from Boston.” The person never
accepted the job, and after a year Dr. John Fordtran was made
president instead of chairman. Dr. Fordtran completely reorganized the Baylor Research Institute (BRI). He removed Boone
Powell, Sr., Lawrence Wilsey, Les Matthews, myself, and others
from the founding board and appointed Drs. Dan Foster and
Jonathan Uhr from the medical school. Mr. Powell, Sr., strongly
objected to removing these founding members from the board,
but he let it pass. BRI went in a different direction. Most of the
laboratories that had been established in the preceding 3 years
were eliminated. I’ve had nothing to do with BRI since September 1, 1989, when I retired after 30 years.
WCR: Not only did you start BRI, but you also started BUMC
Proceedings. How did that come about?
GJR: During the 1960s we displayed electron microscopy
exhibits at various national pathology meetings. At one, David
Miller, a book publisher at Harper and Row, asked me if I would
do a book. The result was the 6000-page Laboratory Medicine, a
green loose-leaf volume that we edited and updated through 13
revisions. Rose Kraft worked assiduously preparing manuscripts
for Laboratory Medicine and other publications. She worked with
the senior editors at Harper and Row and learned all about their
routine for editing, cutting, indexing, and referencing. Rose
ended up guiding the 6000 pages and 2000 illustrations for the
Laboratory Medicine volumes.
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Figure 10. With A. Webb Roberts in 1972 upon the opening of the A. Webb Roberts Center for Continuing Education.
As a result of this experience, residents and others at Baylor
wanted to publish. I suggested that we publish a small journal as
part of BRI. Rose agreed, and we put together a journal (Figure
9). We gathered manuscripts from staff and residents and published the first issue of BUMC Proceedings. How did we decide
on the name? We looked at the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, at the
Michael Reese Hospital publication, the Henry Ford Hospital
publication, the Mount Sinai publication, the Cleveland Clinic
publication, and the New England Journal of Medicine. We decided the name would be Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings. The origin of the journal really can be traced back to
the origin of the Laboratory Medicine book with Harper and Row.
Some BRI directors did not support the journal. Dr. Fordtran
did not like the journal and tried to kill it 2 or 3 times, but Boone
Powell, Jr., would never agree to discontinue it. One day in a vote
in BRI about killing the journal, Bill Hutchison, who was on the
BRI board and had given all the money to fund the Hutchison
lab, which Dr. Charles Roe now runs for metabolic disease, said,
“I don’t know why you all are talking about killing it. I’m on the
board of Presbyterian Hospital and they’re talking about starting one: ‘If Baylor does this and it’s so good, why can’t we do it?’
I don’t know why you would kill it.” About that time Boone
Powell, Jr., stood up and said, “Yes, we’ll continue it.” It has continued ever since but was taken out of BRI. The articles are better and better. It has won several awards. I think it’s in the league
with the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic journals.
WCR: How did you get the A. Webb Roberts Center for Continuing Education going?
GJR: The continuing medical education (CME) topic was
coming up everywhere. Physicians were wanting CME credit and
asking if Baylor could provide it. A. Webb Roberts, who had
given us money for the lab, was interested in continuing education because as a banker he found no place to obtain training: “I
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had to learn the banking and real estate businesses on the job
and lose money when I didn’t need to. Medicine needs that but
it’s got to be not just for doctors, but for nurses and technicians,
too.” We agreed. He said that he would give us $1 million to start
an A. Webb Roberts Center for Continuing Education (Figure
10). That was December 1972. He gave us title to some property that didn’t produce much and still had a note on it, but we
had the income from it. We only got about $60,000 a year out
of it, but it was enough to get started. We got space for the office in an area between the dental school and the Baylor library.
We hired a number of people.
We accommodated Mr. A. Webb Roberts with a symposium
on the foot and ankle because he had hurting feet. Dr. Leon Ware
organized that course. Orthopaedic surgeons at that time did not
have a subspecialty of feet. They do now. We had a wonderful
meeting. Dr. Robert Sparkman wanted to bring together all the
great surgeons who had trained at Hopkins under the Alfred
Blalock tradition, and he was able to put together a symposium
on Blalock Contributions to American Surgery. Surgeons who
spoke included Drs. Mark Ravich, Rainey Williams, Warren
Cole, Michael DeBakey, Lester Dragstedt, John Gibbon, Charles
Hufnagel, Charles Huggins, David Hume, Alton Ochsner, and
Owen Wangensteen. They are listed on the board outside of the
dean’s office.
We had many gifts for the A. Webb Roberts Center that had
been given to the foundation—$50,000 from Albert D’Errico,
neurosurgery chief, for a neurosurgical program, and others in
many other specialties, including nursing programs. We then set
about to get the center accredited and went through the usual
problem of confusion with Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and Baylor University in Waco. We finally got the accreditation, which was separate from that of the medical school. The
A. Webb Roberts programs and the medical school programs
were run together the first 3 years because I was the director of
both. I mixed the staff and faculty until a state auditor said we
couldn’t spend money outside of the institution for programs at
Baylor. We had to separate the finances. We still continued to
have a staff at the medical school and a staff at Baylor, and they
complemented one another. If either had a big program, the other
would help out. The programs at Baylor were mainly organ related (breast cancer, for example), and the medical school programs were directed more at what was new in obstetrics/
gynecology, or in surgical pathology, or in nephrology. As the
associate dean at Southwestern and the dean at Baylor, I accredited them whichever way was appropriate.
When we first started the A. Webb Roberts Center, Ralph
Tompsett and I went to Los Angeles, Seattle, and Minnesota to
see their programs. At UCLA, a retired surgeon ran the program
as a private venture. At the University of Southern California,
the program was operated out of the alumni office in Los Angeles. Seattle’s program was operated out of the regional medical
program, and the big beer makers in Washington state sponsored
the program. The man who was running it was the son of the
president of one of the beer companies. The program at Madison, Wisconsin, was operated out of the agriculture department.
They had an office in every county in Wisconsin. I, with Dr. Phil
Manning and 20 others, ended up helping start the national organization, the Society of Medical College Directors of Continu-
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VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
Figure 11. A letter from Boone Powell, Sr., upon Dr. Race’s 20th anniversary at
Baylor.
ing Medical Education, along with other people in California.
It was originally made up of mostly MDs, some of them full-time
faculty, some clinical faculty. It later evolved to include a number of PhDs in education, who made it really strict, which it is
now. It is now virtually totally controlled by PhD education specialists. The Society for Medical College Directors has been a
good thing. CME was the name that we gave it and they changed
the name recently to the Academic CME Society.
WCR: George, you’ve obviously done a lot of different things at
Baylor. As you look back on your Baylor years, what are you most
proud of?
GJR: I would say the “most proud” thing was building the
great Baylor laboratories that exist today. Boone Powell, Sr., my
friend and mentor, also was most proud of the laboratories (Figure 11). He told me shortly before he died, “We really created
something in those labs.” He thought that the labs were the thing
that made Baylor. He recognized early that Baylor must have topnotch laboratories and radiology support.
The second thing probably is starting BRI and the journal. I
think the journal is here to stay. Although BRI didn’t go the way
I would have run it after I left, I think the idea of having a research institute is great. And the transplant services that Dr.
Göran Klintmalm organized are great.
I never got heavily involved in Baylor staff politics, partly
because I didn’t think I was suited. I frequently made people mad
by saying what I thought about things. I was never that politically oriented, and as a result I was never president of the staff
or chairman of the medical board. The Dallas Southern Clinical Society also promoted CME, which led into the starting of
CME at the medical school. Baylor eclipsed the Dallas SouthJULY 2001
ern Clinical Society, and that organization ceased when we
started doing all the CME in the hospitals. I’ve been remiss in
not spending more time with the Dallas County Medical Society. It is a great medical society, but I was always involved in
Baylor or Southwestern or something else.
WCR: George, how were you able to keep your connection to
the medical school going while you were so busy at Baylor?
GJR: When I left the medical school to go to Baylor, it was
quite a close relationship. We had meetings of the Baylor lab and
the medical school lab staffs, and everything was pretty good for
a while. As Baylor grew, our pathology residency program grew.
I wanted a pediatric pathology rotation and a forensic medicine
rotation for the Baylor residents. Dr. Arthur Weinberg at
Children’s Hospital agreed to take our residents. We eventually
sent our forensic pathology residents to Feliks Gwozdz, MD, and
to the Fort Worth Medical Examiner system. We also sent some
residents to Fort Worth Children’s Hospital.
Because the pathology staff was heavily involved in teaching at the Baylor Dental School, for a period of time I was chairman of pathology in the Baylor Dental College. I found that
teaching pathology to dental students is very different from
teaching it to medical students. The dental students were far
more interested in the head and neck than in liver and kidney
disease. That, I thought, was kind of sad.
You asked how I kept in touch with the medical school. With
the commencement of the A. Webb Roberts Center, Mr. Powell,
Sr., talked to Charles Sprague, MD, president of Southwestern
at the time, and both decided that continuing education at both
institutions should be directed by George Race. That was a tremendous gift to me because it automatically meant that I became
an associate dean at Southwestern, which gave me tenured status. The appointments were officially made on January 1, 1973.
I knew a lot of people at the medical school from the time I was
in pathology there. I later learned that Charlie Sprague took my
CV and passed it around at the faculty council and said, “We’re
going to get George back to do continuing education and I want
to know if any of you have any objections to this. We’ll have to
grant him tenure and figure out how he can be in 2 places at
once.” He apparently passed that CV around and I later heard
from 3 or 4 people secondhand, “I can’t believe you did that many
papers after you left Southwestern.” I had 100 or more publications, including that big book, at that time. Dr. Sprague appointed me associate dean and professor of pathology, and Baylor
made me the dean of the A. Webb Roberts Center. I directed
them together. Every day, I was at both Baylor and Southwestern, sometimes going back and forth 2 or 3 times a day. That was
very strenuous, but it was fun. CME just blossomed throughout
North Texas and rapidly became a major deal.
WCR: Here you were running a very busy lab at Baylor, expanding it. You were involved in all these committees with meetings that
you had to attend. You had your large family. How did you keep up
your investigative endeavors?
GJR: The investigative endeavors ceased during the publication of the book. I just couldn’t do any more. I turned over a
lot of the running of the Baylor labs to very competent staff. This
was an action I shouldn’t have taken, because in retrospect it
created an unfortunate rift in the pathology group. During 1979,
1980, and 1981, I was working for Governor William P. Clements
GEORGE JUSTICE RACE, MD, PHD, MSPH: A CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR
281
Figure 12. Two blackbuck antelope on Dr. Race’s ranch.
as the chairman of the Higher Education Committee to study all
of the Texas schools of higher education and make recommendations. That project was fascinating but very time-consuming.
The Texas university systems, the A&M system, the state system, the community college system, and the Texas State Technical Institute system were all competing. The committee
included Rita Clements; Charles Sprague; Norman Hackerman,
the president of Rice; Abner McCall, the chancellor of Baylor;
and Dan Williams, a University of Texas regent. The people involved in that study were absolutely spectacular. They made recommendations that have since been followed for the most part:
grouping some of these schools under the A&M system and increasing collegiality between North Texas and Texas Woman’s
University, whose administrations would hardly speak to one
another at that time but have since instituted common libraries
and common payrolls and saved a lot of money. The same thing
happened in West Texas and in South Texas.
The other thing I did at Governor Clements’ request was to
head the brucellosis campaign. At that time brucellosis in cattle
was a terrible problem. The federal government policy was that
any animal that had a Rose-Bengal card test positive for Brucelli
antigens should be shot and the farmer paid $40. That was not a
popular program. Nobody wanted to have their prize cows shot
for $40. There was a heated protest by the cattle industry. Dealing with these crusty Texas ranchers was fun but time-consuming. That gradually took me more and more away from pathology
and from CME. However, neither Boone Powell, Jr., at Baylor
nor Charles Sprague at the medical school objected to it because
it was dealing with the public policy of Texas. The only people
who objected to it were my partners in pathology, because they
thought I was spreading myself too thin. I got out of pathology
and went forward in these other areas.
WCR: You have a lot of hobbies. Tell me about some of your
nonmedical interests.
GJR: I like animals. As a boy, I had a horse, a goat, and a
pig. I had a farm in North Dallas that I later sold, and then I
bought the ranch in Lampasas. I got interested in raising exotic
deer. I now have herds of axis deer and blackbuck antelope (Figure 12).
I’ve always liked to fly, ever since I was a little boy and saw
barnstormers land and take off in pastures close to my grandmother’s house. I always thought that was grand. While at flight
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surgeon school in 1949, I flew T-6s. I learned much ophthalmology, more otolaryngology, more high-altitude physiology (oxygen, hyperbaric medicine) at the Randolph course. In Korea I
flew all the time (10 combat missions) and received an Air Medal
and an Army Commendation Medal, sometimes evacuating the
wounded and sometimes taking care of major injuries in my tent.
The MASH hospital was started right next to my tent on the
Korean K-2 Airstrip. The laissez-faire, unregulated operation
produced good medicine but terrible military. They established
that fabulous operation. They could move within 2 hours.
When I got back to Dallas I started flying again and bought
the Tripacer Piper aircraft and commuted to Fort Worth. I sold
the Tripacer because, while filling out the log book after a flight
with the engine idling, I didn’t notice that one of my sons had
gotten out the door and was walking right toward the propeller.
I managed to kill the engine with a switch, and it stopped just
as he got there. I sat there in a cold sweat. I could hardly get out
of the airplane. I never flew it again. I sold it where it sat. I didn’t
fly for 10 years. Fred Wendorf, the chairman of anthropology at
SMU, was flying a Cessna 182. He wanted to buy another 182
and knew that I had a pilot’s license. I went in halves with him
and started flying again. I eventually bought him out and I’ve
had an airplane ever since. I got depressed in 1994 after I retired.
I thought my life was over. I sold my airplane and gave away some
of my guns. It was a mistake. I sold a really good airplane, which
I shouldn’t have done, and I’ve been sorry ever since. I bought
another one and flew it and then sold it. I bought another one
that turned out to be a dud. I still have one, but it’s not much of
an airplane. There’s solitude when you’re up there. I can look at
the crashing sea waves and the wild animals on King Ranch or
the Armstrong Ranch. It’s also easy to get from Redbird Airport
to Rockport in 2 hours and to South Padre Island in 3.
WCR: Do you fly now to your ranch?
GJR: I don’t because I can’t get this current airplane fixed
mechanically.
WCR: How many acres do you have in your ranch?
GJR: About 3000.
WCR: How many animals do you have there?
GJR: I don’t know, but I’d guess 200 blackbuck antelope, 50
axis deer, 25 Barsinger deer, maybe 5 red deer, 5 sika deer, and I
don’t know how many white fallow deer. I also have about 25
scimitar oryx, those big old white animals with big curved horns.
They are wonderful. I had some eland but found they were hard
to handle. I bought them as babies, but the male grew into an
1800-lb animal. I was afraid of him and got rid of them. I also
have some ostriches. I enjoy seeing the animals grow, develop,
and multiply. I like to photograph them. The problem is that they
proliferate so quickly that now I have too many. Running the
ranch plus running the cattle and exotic animals on the ranch
with another man has become a 2-day-a-week job. I own about
300 beef cows. My cow man and I split the cost of feed and the
sale of calves. I furnish the land and he furnishes the labor.
I’ve done a lot of buying and selling of real estate and I’ve
tried to farm, but it is impossible if you’re not living on the place
and dealing with the US government. I disagreed with the Department of Agriculture and its control of land. I believe that
the land ought to be run by whoever owns it for the time they
own it. The environmentalists say you can’t kill your coyotes. I
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VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
disagree: the coyotes are killing our baby goats, our baby deer,
our baby blackbuck. All these counties have a coyote killer, a paid
hunter who works for the county. That’s all the man does, go
around and set traps for coyotes. You never hear anything about
it from Greenpeace, but they wouldn’t like it. I forbid the hunters to set any cyanide guns. They set up bait and when the coyote eats it a dart gun goes off in its throat and the dart is full of
cyanide and that’s the end—too dangerous to use.
WCR: You are obviously a multifaceted man with a lot of hobbies. You’ve spoken about flying and your love of animals and your
ranch. Would you discuss your love of traveling and how that has altered your life?
GJR: I have always been curious. My interest started in
World War II. I was 14 or 15 years old and saw these places in
the newspapers and newsreels at the movie theaters. I determined
that I’d like to know about the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Egypt, and the pharaohs. I had this acute interest
but no time and no money. As a result, I started taking in an awful
lot of pictures. I had an old Argus C-3 camera with a roll of
Kodachrome film in it. Everywhere I went I took pictures. I suspect that I’ve probably got 12,000 Kodachromes from various
travels. I fell in love with seeing something new and different
when I first went to Baton Rouge and New Orleans. East Texas
and Louisiana were very different from where I had grown up,
with all the trees, the moisture, and the green grass. I always
carried a camera with me and took pictures of everything in sight.
I was doing that in the middle of the Korean War. I was saving
my film in my tent. Marguerita Higgins, a Time-Life photographer, was there and she’d come in every night with a bag full of
exposed film. I said, “Don’t you waste a lot of film?” She looked
at me as if to say, “How stupid can you be?” She said, “I take every picture of everything in all directions, unposed. And then I
send them to New York, and the next time I see the picture it
may be on the front of Time or Life magazine. They pick out the
good stuff. It’s only when I go back to New York that I can sit
down and look at all of the pictures I’ve taken that weren’t used.”
That was a good point. Film is cheaper than travel expenses. I
learned early that if you’re traveling, take pictures right and left
and throw the bad part of it away. As a result, I’ve accumulated
a lot of film. It’s been fun to do that.
One of the first things I wanted to do when I had any money
at all was to see London. In 1955, Anne and I flew to London,
went up to Coventry, bought a TR2 sports car, and drove it all
over England, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, and as far as
Naples in Italy. We brought it home along with tons of pictures
of France, the Riviera, Paris, Rome, the great cities. We were just
enthralled with that. That whetted our appetite, and within the
next few years, we went to Greece and the Greek islands. Later
we took a trip with all the children to Egypt—Luxor, Abu
Simbel, seeing the pyramids, Cairo, and photographing everything. We went to Kenya and the Olduvai Gorge to see the
Leakey Man Australopithecus type of people. We wanted to
understand what the Great Rift Valley was in the middle of Africa; how Africa could have generated so many animals, so many
species of everything, including humans; and what the migration
routes of humans were up the Nile and into and around the
Mediterranean Sea. Every chance I got we made a trip. We went
to Vienna and Berlin to see the opera. We also traveled to New
JULY 2001
Zealand, Australia, Java, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. Those
were just wonderful trips.
In more recent years, I went on a hiking trip with Trammell
Crow and some of his people to the outbacks of China—
Kunming, for example, which was where the American volunteer group, The Flying Tigers of World War II, was located while
protecting Burma and fighting the Japanese. We also went to the
Himalayas and the rest of those mountains, where travel was
nearly impossible. We walked on paths that were no more than
18" wide along the mountainside, with a 2000-ft drop down into
a gorge. You don’t stumble there, and you always lean in toward
the inside. When we entered this area I had to give up my passport, which I didn’t want to do in the middle of nowhere in
China. The Chinese Communist Army had a good reason. They
said, “If you don’t come out of there, we’ll come in and get you.”
That area is not controlled by the Chinese government; it’s controlled by various tribes. China has a number of internal ethnic
tribes that came out of Thailand or Vietnam and even one Caucasian group, left over from Marco Polo with Italian ancestry, that
have maintained local tribal areas under their own governments.
Trekking through the rice paddies was really wonderful, and
there’s always a military highway not too far away on the sides
of the mountains.
My desire to travel came from an insatiable curiosity. Having an interest in flying has always made me follow military aviation. I have hundreds of tapes of flying and bombing—World
War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. I have a 16-mm
film of the Korean War with strafing and bombing. I’m leaning
over the side taking Kodachromes and 8-mm movie film. I was
curious about war. I determined that war was total confusion.
Mostly nobody knew what was going on. There were a bunch of
soldiers out there going in a general direction supporting one
another. The actions may be planned razor sharp, but once you’re
on the ground, you’re on your own, doing whatever you can do
to defeat the enemy or keep from getting killed yourself. That’s
a very different look-see. One of my friends in Korea said that
he was having fun in this wonderful war until he saw these little
dustballs jumping around his feet and realized somebody was
shooting at him. He said, “Those people are trying to kill me.”
It was a great revelation; it changed my whole outlook.
I think those types of experiences are fun to look back on,
but they weren’t fun at the time, particularly the below-freezing
weather. All the roads were gravel and dusty. It would be snowing at 16°F, and you’d be breathing in dust and snow off the road.
It was bitterly cold. The motor pool mechanics would take a 55gallon drum and set it up as a stove and put a piece of pipe in
through a hole. They’d put a curl in the pipe, connect the pipe
to a gasoline drum outside, and heat the pipes. The hot pipe
would begin to vaporize the gasoline and it would blow out a
beautiful well-heated flame into the barrel. Once I got up next
to it when it was red hot and burned the whole back out of my
only overcoat.
We had the 3 older boys and then 2 little girls. They were
the center of my life. One daughter died of leukemia. That was
very traumatic. I would have liked to go into the space program
and was offered a position with the air force as a major to head
the pathology laboratory and work with the aviation group in
San Antonio in 1958. I really couldn’t see the children being
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Figure 13. The 6 Drs. Race: George, Mark, Anne, Elizabeth, Clark, and Bill.
uprooted and moved. They had a grandmother in Dallas and a
grandmother in Fort Worth. The children had Texas roots. I
turned it down. If I had been single, I would probably have done
that and gone on through flight training, fighter pilot school, and
maybe into the astronaut program. I kept finding I had to turn
down things.
About that time, I saw some petechiae on my daughter’s back.
I thought she must have really hurt herself. Then she was getting petechiae everywhere. She had rampant acute lymphocytic
leukemia, the type that goes wild in children. Having been at
the Brigham Hospital in Boston, I knew Dr. Sidney Farber (“Slick
Sid”) who later started the Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s
Hospital Cancer Center in Boston. I knew Dr. Farber was starting to treat some of those cases massively with drugs and radiation. I also knew that there had never been a survivor of leukemia
of that type. Dr. Eugene Frenkel and all the powers that be in
Dallas all looked at her and said, “What do you want to do?” We
decided to treat her as best we could here. She got sicker and
sicker and then died at home in bed. I’ve always been sorry that
I didn’t take her back to see Dr. Farber.
WCR: How old was she when she died?
GJR: She was 8 years old.
WCR: How long was she sick?
GJR: About 18 months. She got one good remission out of
it with drugs, and we took a nice trip with all of the children to
Mexico to see the pyramids at Teotihuacan, Monte Albán,
Uxmal, and Chichen Itza and all those fantastic archeological
sites.
Elizabeth, our younger daughter, is now a physician on the
faculty at Parkland. She spent 4 years in Boston and has been
back in Dallas for about 3 years now. She said that she felt guilty
for a long time about her sister. Later, in Boston, she saw some
of those surviving early patients from the Farber Cancer Center
treated for leukemia. At that time they were basically 35-yearold dwarfs, deformed, without secondary sex characteristics, very
odd-looking people. She said she quit feeling guilty about her
sister’s not surviving. That was very painful to all of us. Each son
thought he might have done something that had caused her leukemia, like hitting her in the stomach. Our younger daughter
assigned a guilt to herself for being the survivor when her sister
died. I don’t understand the psychodynamics of that. That was
a sad day for our family.
We kept on going and traveling and taking pictures. I wanted
the kids to have a pony. I bought a little piece of land in the
North Garland/Richardson area for $250 an acre. Anne’s big
rancher cousins in DeKalb said, “What do you want that old
worn-out North Texas farm for? That’s no good for anything.” I
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wanted it because it had an old house we could fix up; we could
camp out and keep a horse. Of course, his idea was that it was
no good as farm land. I wanted a place for a pony. As it turned
out, we bought some more land, and it was a great investment.
The land went from $250 to $20,000 an acre. I wished I had
bought more. I tried to get all my friends to come in with me,
but none of them did. I essentially traded 1 acre in Garland/
Richardson for 20 acres in Lampasas County. Pricewise it was
about a 20-to-1 trade. I ended up with a nice ranch in Lampasas
County, northwest of Austin, southwest of Waco, in the Hill
Country. I go down there every week. That’s where I have all the
animals.
WCR: When was that?
GJR: It was about 1983 when I moved out of the north Garland/Richardson property and established a ranch at Lampasas.
That trip to Egypt, Nairobi, and Kenya got me interested in
anthropology, and I started taking courses at SMU in anthropology with Dr. Fred Wendorf. He was a boy from Terrell who was
bright. In World War II his left hand was shot up. He ended up
in Boston being taken care of by Dr. Henry Beecher of Massachusetts General fame as a surgeon and anesthesiologist. At the
same time, he was going to Harvard and obtained a PhD in anthropology. Fred is the only faculty member of SMU who is a
member of the National Academy of Sciences. We jointly wrote
some papers. Fred was studying Egyptian prehistory archeology
before the Aswan Dam was flooded as part of a consortium of
European and American archeologists. He was the director of this
consortium, and his friend was the Egyptian director. He’s gone
back every year. Two years ago I went with my daughter Elizabeth and the registry museum people at his suggestion, and we
examined some burials in the desert. These were common people
burials, not tomb burials. Common people, when they died, were
taken away from the river and buried in the dry Egyptian sand.
Also, I went to evening law school at SMU for a year, where
I learned about contracts, torts, legislation, and government.
That knowledge has been very valuable. It makes me a lot less
afraid of lawyers and a lot more able to cope with signing contracts. I was interested in that. I did not like the law with all its
confrontational argument about every case. My idea was the
medical one: let’s get all the information we can and put it together and see if it makes sense. I’m more of a builder, scientist,
and organizer than I am a confrontational adversary, in spite of
the fact that because of my size and gruff voice people think I’m
very harsh.
WCR: George, let me ask you about your family. You and Anne
had 5 children. You mentioned the unfortunate leukemia in one of your
daughters. That left you 4 children. I understand that all of them became physicians. Both you and Anne must have had an enormous
impact on them. What did you try to instill in your children?
GJR: The number one thing we tried to instill was to “paddle
your own canoe,” be honest, and think for yourself. The idea is
that you are on the mountaintop by yourself and you have to
survive. What are you going to do? Make your own decisions.
One reason the children went into medicine was that they heard
us talking about it. Anne and I were probably always talking
about interesting medical cases or things that happened that were
fun. I think that the osmosis to the kids was that a) medicine is
interesting, and b) you can make a good living at it and it is a
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VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3
worthwhile endeavor. Three of them went to The University of
Texas Medical School at Galveston and one went to The University of Texas at Houston. They’ve all done well (Figure 13).
The oldest, Bill, went through a psychiatry residency in Dallas
at Timberlawn and practices in Austin. He has now gone into
administrative medicine and is the executive vice president of
the medical staff at St. David’s Hospital in Austin. Clark, our
second son, is an orthopaedist in Austin. He trained in orthopaedics at Parkland. The third one, Mark, went through the
physical medicine rehabilitation program in San Antonio at a
time when there weren’t many physical medicine and rehabilitation doctors. He went to Tyler as the only person in that specialty there. He then became the medical director for the Texas
Rehabilitation Commission in Austin. For about 18 months he
traveled all over the state looking at all the rehabilitation
projects, but he preferred practice. His wife, Deborah, is an attorney in Tyler and she didn’t like his traveling back and forth.
He went back to Jacksonville (near Tyler), where he practices.
WCR: What does your daughter do now?
GJR: Elizabeth is a clinical assistant professor of internal
medicine at Southwestern. She is in the infectious diseases section. She had her undergraduate education at Stanford and then
went to England for a year and jointly authored some good research papers, which helped her be admitted to medical school.
After her residency in internal medicine at Parkland she went
to Boston and did 2 years of fellowship in infectious disease, had
2 years of public health, and ended up coming back to Southwestern and Parkland with a master’s degree from Harvard in
public health and a master’s of science.
WCR: All your children are married?
GJR: Yes. Bill’s wife, Randy (Elizabeth Randolph), is an interior designer. Clark’s wife, Annie (Anne Morris), is a registered
nurse. Mark’s wife, Deborah (Johnson), is an attorney. Elizabeth’s
husband, Estil (Estil Vance III), is an internist.
WCR: How many grandchildren do you have?
GJR: Eight and 2 great-granddaughters. Bill and Randy have
3 sons: Josh, who’s at Stanford Law School; Eric, who’s at
Emerson College in Boston; and Ryan, who’s at Worcester College. Clark and Annie have 5 children: Gray, who married Page
and has a daughter, Addie, in Austin; Berkley, who married Jay
Dyer and has a daughter, Jane-Perry, in Austin; Chandler, who’s
at The University of Texas at Austin; Brandon, who’s at the
Citadel in Charleston; and McKinley, who’s at St. Stephen’s
School in Austin.
WCR: Do you ever sleep?
GJR: I frequently stay up at night but usually go to bed at
11 or 12. I can go 3 or 4 nights with fairly little sleep and then I
have to sleep. My normal sleep requirement is 8 hours to really
feel good.
WCR: Do you read a lot?
GJR: I do not read a lot; I’m more of a visual person. I enjoy
the History Channel. I see a lot of documentary films. One reason I like surgical pathology is that I like looking at tissues and
making the diagnosis with the visual connection—“swimming
in the microscope,” so to speak. That’s been a great deal of my
JULY 2001
fun. I never liked administration, although I’ve done a lot of it.
I get my kick out of looking at the slides and not out of arguing
for a new piece of equipment for the chemistry lab. I did that huge
book on laboratory medicine, but I wouldn’t do it again. That’s
too much work and not that rewarding.
WCR: Do you have any regrets? Are you glad you spent most of
your career professionally at Baylor versus the medical school? You
had many options and I understand that you were offered the chairmanship of at least one medical school pathology department.
GJR: I am glad to have spent my career at both Baylor and
Southwestern (30 years at Baylor and 21 years at UT Southwestern Medical School). I was offered and accepted the chairmanship of the department of pathology at Oklahoma and then ended
up not going. I realized I had more residents, more departmental backing, more department money, and more personal money
at Baylor than I would have had at OU. I interviewed for the
University of Tennessee chairman’s job one time. I’ve been offered nonchairman jobs at Kansas, Georgia, Duke, and Harvard.
The attraction of Dallas was that Anne’s parents were here; my
parents were here; and there was a root of culture in the Southwest that we both wanted to maintain and to instill in the children. We are rooted to this area geographically because of our
past ties. I came up in the departments of pathology at Duke and
at Harvard. After that one is supposed to become chairman,
particularly at Duke. I really felt guilty about that, when I left
that year to go to Florida to get out of debt.
WCR: What year were you offered the chairmanship of pathology at the University of Oklahoma?
GJR: 1964.
WCR: It looks like your capacity for friendship is very good. You
have a lot of friends around Dallas.
GJR: I like doctors. My other-than-doctor friends are few,
but they mostly have come to be my friends through Anne’s being friends with their wives or having gone to school with them.
Also, living here in the Park Cities for 35 years allowed contact
with certain people, and friendships resulted. My friends are
mostly in the medical field. Jack Edwards, Jack Grammer, James
Holman, Bryan Williams, and I were in school together. Jack
Hyland, Herb Steinbach, and I were at Baylor with John
Denman, Jesse Thompson, and Shields Livingston. Fred Wendorf
and Frank Sogandares and I were at SMU together. Those are
long-term associations that I cherish. Most of the friendships with
couples have been Anne’s friendships, and I go along. Yes, I’ve
had some very good friends, some from high school, and particularly from medical school. I want to recognize and cherish my
greater teachers and mentors, including Tinsley Harrison, Carl
Moyer, George Caldwell, Jim Gill, Wiley Forbus, Gus Dammin,
Arthur Hertig, and lastly Boone Powell, Sr.
WCR: George, I want to thank you not only for myself, but on
behalf of the readers of the journal which you started, namely Baylor
University Medical Center Proceedings. It’s really been a pleasure
to get to know you and Baylor and this community better through your
stories.
GJR: Thank you.
GEORGE JUSTICE RACE, MD, PHD, MSPH: A CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITOR
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