Oral history interview with William McRae, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: William McRae
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: December 17, 1990
[Begin Side A]
LD: Dr. McRae, can you tell me when you came to UNCG [University of North Carolina at
Greensboro]?
WM: Yes. I came to UNCG in 1970, after working in student health for a few years at
[University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill in the late '60s.
LD: And you came in what position?
WM: I came—really, I was hired to come as director of student health, but I wasn't officially
made the director for two or three months after I got here. And so, really, director of
student health was my position.
LD: And what responsibilities does that include?
WM: It includes managing the medical program for the university, for the students and
worker's comp [form of insurance providing wage replacement and medical benefits to
employees injured in the course of employment in exchange for mandatory
relinquishment of the employee's right to sue his or her employer for the tort of
negligence]for the university.
LD: The staff?
WM: The staff and faculty and also just the worker's comp for staff and faculty. And then, of
course, the managing of the medical personnel and support personnel to take care of a big
outpatient clinic and inpatient service situation. Sort of like running a small hospital.
LD: I think most people when they think of the health service think of the clinic. But there are
other things that you did besides just the clinic, weren't there?
WM: Oh, yes. We—of course, the outpatient clinic is the main focus of the student health
service, but student health, in general, includes a lot of emphasis on health education,
preventive medicine, all of those aspects, as well as sports medicine. And it involves
coordinating and working with the university community, particularly the academic
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community and the student affairs offices on the campus.
LD: Were students required to have any particular vaccinations before they enrolled back in
1970?
WM: Yes. They were required, but the requirements were not mandatory. They were supposed
to have been mandatory, but they were not. In effect, nothing was done about the fact that
students didn't follow the recommendations or the requirements. Nothing was done about
it in those days.
LD: You couldn't prevent a student from registering as you can now?
WM: As we can now because it's the law now. And the university wasn't willing to kick a
student out, in effect, for not getting "medically cleared"—that's what we sort of refer to
it as, getting the proper immunizations and medical information on them. If a student
didn't get medically cleared, theoretically they were supposed to have not been allowed to
continue at the university, but—or really were not supposed to have been allowed to
register—but that was never given any teeth by the administration until it became law,
until the state of North Carolina passed legislation making certain immunizations
mandatory.
LD: Do you remember when that was?
WM: It was in the late '80s, 1980s. I can't remember the exact year right off the top of my head,
but it was, I would say, roughly 1987, something like that.
LD: It was fairly recently?
WM: Yes.
LD: What immunizations did they try to get students to have?
WM: Well, the big thing that brought it about was measles, the measles epidemic, not the
German measles, now, but rather the red measles. Rubeola is the medical term for it.
Epidemics that were taking place on a lot of college campuses, and the infectious disease
authorities in the country thought that they pretty much had measles under control, and
then all of a sudden we started getting epidemics break out on college campuses. And it
was realized that there were two problems basically. One problem was that a lot of the
college students had not been immunized like they were supposed to have been. A lot of
them had been immunized, but were immunized too early. If they were immunized before
they were a year old, their immune development systems were not advanced enough to
actually build the proper antibodies to throw off the disease. And so those were the two
main problems. And then they found, just more recently, and they are now requiring two
immunizations for rubeola. They found that, that really one immunization oftentimes
didn't seem to get the job done, so now two immunizations or inoculations for that
disease are recommended or required. The others that were required were tetanus
immunizations that needed to be updated every few years. Rubella, the German measles,
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and also ones that were not necessarily required but recommended were the polio and—
well, polio was required—was mumps and the polio, but I think the polio became a
required one also.
LD: What about tuberculosis?
WM: TB. Tuberculosis was a skin test, not an immunization. And that was one of the
requirements on our campus, but not a state requirement, not one that was legislated, that
students all get a tuberculin skin test before they are allowed to register.
LD: Teachers used to have to have it every year.
WM: Sure.
LD: And I've been told, I think, that North Carolina has a rather high incidence of
tuberculosis.
WM: It seems to be on the—it has seemed to be a little on the upswing in the last few years
too, and that makes it even more paramount that that requirement be fulfilled. What
would happen if somebody had a positive skin test, it didn't necessarily mean that they
had tuberculosis. That is a broad screening test, but if somebody had a positive test, then
we would go ahead and examine them more thoroughly and get a chest x-ray to see if, in
fact, they did have a problem. And you can imagine if a person has active tuberculosis on
a college campus living in a dormitory. We had that happen one time since I've been
there, and it was quite an ordeal getting everybody that they had been in close-living-type
contact with tested and then having go retest them to see if their test converted three or
four months later, and the ones that did convert had to be treated for a year for exposure
to tuberculosis. So it's a—that's another part of student health that is very, very big and
important is the public health aspects of it, living in a—lots and lots of people living in
very close contact in a very close-knit, small square foot, so to speak, per individual
environment. So public health is really a big, big factor in student health in general.
When I came to UNCG in 1970—you remember that UNCG had been the Woman's
College of the University of North Carolina for many years, and it was in the—I can't
remember the exact year, but early to mid '60s, it changed over.
LD: '63 to '64, I believe.
WM: '63 to '64. I believe that's right. It changed over to UNCG and became suddenly
coeducational. And when I came in 1970, there was still the old, traditional, very
conservative women's college image there in most areas, not just in student health, but
we're talking particularly today about the student health area. And the old image of health
care on a college campus was very conservative and really was already very outdated, but
that's what I found when I came. The old-style nursing, where the nurses just did the
traditional nursing care, but had no skills nor training in physical assessment, so that they
were really—the nurses were unable to do anything for a student without a specific order
from a physician. The physicians were also very, very conservative and using the old
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style, where everybody who came in after hours got admitted so that the doctors wouldn't
have to come in to see them. Since the nurses couldn't do anything for them, they just put
them to bed and sort of do routine nursing care overnight so that the doctors could see
them all when they came in the next day.
When I came to UNCG, there were a hundred beds in the infirmary. I stress the
word "infirmary" because that's what it was called. And that was the traditional name for
places like that. It was an infirmary, in fact. And the students hated that kind of thing.
They would just refuse to come unless there was just no other way. And a hundred beds.
It was like a hundred-bed—you couldn't call it a hospital, exactly, because they didn't do
that level of care in those days, but it was a hundred-bed inpatient facility of a low level.
And they even had their own kitchen. It was like a big hospital, hotel-type kitchen. They
had three shifts of people—just one person on each shift there just to prepare food for
inpatients, if you can imagine that.
LD: What was it—what was the typical level of occupancy?
WM: Gosh, I don't have those statistics, but much, much higher than it should have been. And
so anyway, that sort of sets the—I think sets the image for what I found when I came,
sets the stage for that. And then, of course, our work was cut out for us. What we had to
do—well, let me mention four other things that had happened, as you could recall,
historically along about that time that really made changes absolutely necessary and
mandatory.
First of all, as I had already mentioned, WC had become UNCG and had become
coeducational. The pendulum had swung from very conservative, post-war, late forties
and early fifties—the pendulum had swung from very conservative to very liberal to
much more liberal in our country. The Supreme Court had made several big rulings that
were considered very liberal. Of course, the rulings involving civil rights changes and
also the ruling involving abortion for one, making abortion not illegal under certain
circumstances. The birth control pill had been in effect now and had been in broad use
for, I guess by then, approximately ten years or so. And the sexual revolution had taken
place in the '60s, definitely had taken place in the '60s. The student activism had taken
place in the '60s and carried over into the '70s, as did the sexual revolution, and started
off being related to the Vietnam War [military conflict that occurred in Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Laos 1955-1975] protests and civil rights protests, but continued in many
other areas. And then the fourth thing that really had—other than the pendulum swing,
the sexual revolution, and changing from Woman's College to coeducational. The fourth
thing that was really big was the drug abuse, other than alcohol—drug abuse that had
begun to take place on college campuses in a big-time way, particularly the abuse of
hallucinogenic-type drugs that were very frightening to the medical personnel because
they didn't know about them. They didn't know how to deal with them. They were totally
turned off by it all and didn't want any part of it as did—they didn't want any part, also,
of the sexual revolution. They wanted to close their eyes and pretend that things like that
weren't going on on college campuses and in the nice young women that were their
students, that they were responsible for. So I don't think any pelvic exams, for instance,
had been done there before I came in 1970. I just don't think things like that had been
being done at all. At least, I couldn't put my finger on any indication that things like that
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had taken place.
LD: So if girls—if you wanted that kind of medical care, you had to have a private doctor? Or
do you think it just wasn't common for women to get yearly exams, for instance?
WM: That was one thing, but all of that, of course, was changing. The girls—they would not
go to a place like a student health service to get birth control information. They were
afraid to, and they didn't trust "the establishment." And we were the establishment, the
old image of the infirmary and of personnel who worked there. And they were right. I
mean, it was not the place to go to get information or assistance with things like that. And
so when I came in 1970, there were so many things that needed to be done and needed to
be done now that it was mind boggling. It was almost—it was just absolutely, totally
mind boggling to me as to what all I needed to do and all at the same time. And I only
had twenty four hours a day, and I would work on nights and weekends and holidays and
everything, doing things like, first of all, writing a nurses' manual giving standing orders
for certain kinds of—trying to cover the broad gamut of all the different kinds of patients
that would walk in the door after the doctors left, indicating to the nurses one, two, three,
four, cookbook, how they should handle those things, what they should do. And then
having to train them to be able to do the physical assessments, to evaluate the students
themselves to decide what kind of problem, in effect, they did have, so that they could
then call the physician who was on call and have the physician—and give the information
to the physician and then the physician give them specific orders or come in and see the
patient, as the case may be. And when I first came, of course, I had to come in on—and I
was called about every patient that came in because the nurses didn't do anything on their
own. They didn't have the training, and they didn't know how, and it wasn't in their—they
didn't think they were supposed to, I'll put it that way.
LD: They didn't have the confidence to do it.
WM: And it was the old image of nursing that was there. So we started training nurses; we
started writing manuals; we got rid of the hundred beds and made more examining rooms
and health education-type space to do more things other than just put people in a bed
when they come in.
LD: Are we talking about the same building that still—?
WM: Same building, yes. Same building.
LD: On whatever that street is called that runs through the middle of campus?
WM: Gray, Gray Drive.
LD: Gray.
WM: And we closed down the food service, the health center food service, phased out those
three jobs. That was a problem in itself, because unfortunately, those people were black,
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and at that particular time, if you ever did anything like that, it was a racist act, and we
worked real hard to try to get those people placed in other positions on the campus, but I
pointed out to the administration that I could have the food catered every day, flown in
from the Waldorf-Astoria [luxury hotel in New York City] for the price that we were
paying for the food after we changed the style from an inpatient infirmary-type situation
to an outpatient-type. Of course, we still had some infirmary beds or some inpatient beds,
but nothing like a hundred. More like, you know, fifteen or twenty.
LD: How did you handle food for the ones that stayed?
WM: We worked out a deal with the food service on campus and had the food catered from the
food service, and they could provide a fairly good variety of different diets and so forth.
And the doctors and the nurses would work with them about a particular patient's need.
And then, of course, we had our own— the nurses—we had microwaves and things like
that up on the floor so that the nursing assistants could fix quick things, toast and juices
and grits and soups and things of that sort for those that needed that kind of thing. So we
continued to do that, but on the floor by the nursing staff and nursing assistants. So all the
way, see, it was not only that all these things needed to be done, but the staff was very
resistant to these changes.
And so, it—when I started, we started looking for sexually-transmitted diseases
and treating them. And before 1970, sexually-transmitted diseases were not looked for.
They were—they weren't supposed to be there, so we're not going to look for them. It
was that kind of a situation. And there was great resistance, of course, to that kind of
thing. Here's a young liberal physician coming in here from Chapel Hill, you know. And
so they were extremely suspicious of me at the beginning. And so the first really big
challenge to me was having to win the confidence and the respect of the staff. And that
was a big job, but I was fortunately able to get that accomplished. And—
LD: You chose to do that rather than to replace personnel?
WM: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We replaced personnel as they—by regular attrition.
LD: Retirement?
WM: Retirement or somebody resigning for one reason or another, except for the three jobs I
phased out. They were really not nurses. They were more food service kinds of people.
And so, yes. And then about that same time we started working closely with the School
of Nursing that had just gotten going big time about that same time. In fact, they got their
start in the basement of the student health center, the ground floor where the counseling
center is now that used to be the nursing school down there. And they had moved out of
the building before I came, just before I came, over to their new building and so forth,
across the campus. But we worked out a really great relationship with the School of
Nursing. And in fact, three of my younger nurses who were inclined to do it were
enrolled with the nursing school in an experimental program that the nursing school had
started—brand new. Nobody had ever heard of this before; this was all brand new, called
a nurse practitioner course. That was not something that had been done before or heard of
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before. There was also a new kind of thing if they came along about that time as the more
liberal trends were taking place in medicine too. And, of course, you know what that is. I
mean, nurse practitioners—
LD: Everyone's got one in their office.
WM: Yes. Nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants. That was also starting about the same
time. But we had three nurses, in effect, enrolled in the School of Nursing. They would
spend one day a week for a period of two years and actually finish the course and, in
effect, became nurse practitioners, which became then a great, great help in doing the
physical assessments and in training our staff, the rest of our nursing staff, setting the
proper tone and example for the other nurses. And so we got a foundation there the first
two years that I was there in really changing the direction of the nursing program in the
health service.
But the first thing we did was we changed the name of the health service from the
Anna Gove [second physician of the State Normal and Industrial School, now UNCG]
Infirmary to the Anna Gove Student Health Center. And we had a lot—we generated a lot
of publicity in the student media and so forth about that, trying to, here again—in fact, I
got that old scrapbook out with a lot of these old Carolinians [student newspaper] and
things in it from back in that time just to remind me of some of these things that I'm
talking to you about because it seems like in some ways, like it's been a long, long time
ago, and in other ways it seems like it was just yesterday. But to try to put this together in
some kind of a format that I felt like would be reasonable, I sort of reviewed some of my
old scrapbook notes and things to put this together.
Anyway, we did manage to change the image of the health service by first
changing the name and then writing the manuals, training the nurses to do physical
assessment, trying to change their attitudes toward dealing with things that were reality—
sexuality problems, birth control, things of that sort. Writing the nurses' manuals—and
actually, we still were not allowed to do—officially do family planning clinics on college
campuses because it was not something that was done up to that time.
And so in 1970, it was still in 1970 toward the end of the year I think or was in
the late fall. I came in the early summer, I think. And Dr. Ed Hedgepeth, who was the
director of the student health service at Chapel Hill, where I had just left, and I had spent
four or five years trying to convince him there that we needed to do some things like that.
But over there I was not allowed to write a prescription for birth control pills. I had to—I
could do the examination and make the assessment, do the history and physical, decide
on the need, and if I felt like it was a young lady who was sexually active and who, yes,
in fact, really needed to be on birth control to keep her from getting pregnant, then—and
she came requesting it— then I was able to help her, but I was not able to sign the
prescription. I would have to run up two floors to the OB/GYN [obstetric/gynecological]
residents and get them to sign the prescription for me. It was illegal; it was against the
rules of the university for me to do that as a member of the student health staff there. And
the same type thing, of course, was everywhere else around, I guess.
So I tried hard to convince Dr. Ed Hedgepeth, the director over there, that we
needed to do something about that. And couldn't convince him while I was there, but
after I'd gotten over here for a short while, he agreed that something needed to be done.
He was an older doctor. And so he and I met before—we went before the Board of
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Governors [of the University of North Carolina System], headed by Dr. William Friday,
not Dr. William Friday, headed by President William Friday. He was a lawyer, not a
doctor and not a PhD. And we pleaded the case for the health services in the state system.
[phone rings] Excuse me a second.
[recording paused]
So anyway before we were interrupted, I think we were talking about Dr.
Hedgepeth, and I went before the Board of Governors and President Friday to plead the
case for allowing us to have formal sex education programs in our health service and to
have formal family planning services in our health services. And there were also directors
there from other campuses arguing against doing that, if you can believe it.
LD: From where, do you remember?
WM: Oh, NC State [North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina], two or three
others, as I recall. I remember State very, very, very well. I remember that. But Dr.
Hedgepeth and I were pleading the case for allowing us to do that.
And we got this answer from him. They said, "Next fall, next October when we
have our meeting," that would be October, 1971, "we will make a decision concerning
your request, and we will let you know whether or not you can start having family
planning programs and services officially on your campuses." Okay. So Dr. Hedgepeth
and I decided that whenever that next October, whatever the date was, came and went, if
we did not hear anything at all from them, we were going to assume, hopefully correctly
but maybe not, but we were going to assume that they were not telling us not to do it. So
that we were going to start simultaneously doing it on our campus. And that, in effect, is
what happened. They didn't—they never mentioned it again. They never let us know one
way or the other, so we started. And probably would, and I'm serious about this—.
[phone rings; recording paused]
LD: So the following fall of '71—?
WM: —of '71, we actually started publicizing the fact that we—just on our own campus to our
own students, not publicizing to the world, but publicizing to our own students the fact
that we did— that they could come to the student health service for these services and
also for problem pregnancy counseling and so forth. Now the problem was that—oh, and
I met lots of resistance to all this.
LD: I was going to say, that must have been quite a—
WM: Oh, oh, oh, a lot of resistance to this, not only from within our own health service, some
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of the older nurses particularly, a couple of the not-so-old nurses, as I recall. But also
from the campus in general. I remember being at a reception one time right after this, and
a professor walked up to me and said, and somebody introduced us and he said, "Oh,
you're McRae. You're the guy that's giving out birth control pills in the student health
service." Or in the infirmary he probably said. And I said, "Well, yes. I guess I am that
person that you're talking about." And he said, "Well, if you give my daughter birth
control pills, I’ll see you in jail." And he said that right in front of a lot of other people.
So it was that kind of a reaction from a lot of people that I—that we faced.
LD: But it was not against the law to prescribe them for unmarried girls?
WM: Oh no, not at all. Oh no, it wasn't against the law, and particularly after the legal age
became eighteen. When I was at Chapel Hill, I forgot what year that happened, but also
that was something that happened. The legal age went from twenty-one to eighteen, so
after the legal age became eighteen, there was no way legally that they could do anything
to me if a girl was eighteen and came in requesting birth control. She was an adult,
officially adult, and could be treated like an adult and was treated like an adult in our
health service. And that was something they weren't used to either. The in loco parentis
[Latin for "in place of parents"]—
LD: Well, the university—I was going to say, that's when in loco parentis went out.
WM: That's what I'm saying. All of these things were happening all about the same time, and it
was just—
LD: That was when I was in college. I remember it well.
WM: Oh, it was an exciting time. But it was also frustrating because so many things needed to
be done all at one time. It was almost impossible to deal with it all. But it was exciting. It
was really exciting.
LD: It sounds also like the legislature and maybe the university administration was a little bit
more liberal than some of its component parts.
WM: That's the reason they recruited me to come over here to try to make these changes. Or, at
least, I thought that's what I was recruited for.
LD: Well, it would have been a mistake to get someone from Chapel Hill if that wasn't their
intention.
WM: And somebody younger, unless that was their intention.
LD: What about your staff? Did you encounter—did you have as much success with the other
doctors as with the nurses?
WM: Had no problem with the—well, that first year, we had a lot of things happen with the
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doctors. One doctor felt so uncomfortable—and I'm going to use a term so that nobody
will ever be able to guess who I'm talking about—that they resigned. They took early
retirement. Another one had a lot of personal problems. There were four doctors counting
me in those days. One of them resigned, one after a fairly short time. Another one we had
to let him go because of a lot of significant problems that weren't professional. And
another one died the first year I was there—had a heart attack and died. That was the
other problem. I was short staffed, trying to improve—
LD: Were these doctors working full time for the infirmary?
WM: Yes. Yes. All of these were. So I was trying to recruit, and in those days, you could
hardly beg a physician. You had to get down on your knees and beg a physician who had
a medical license to come and work in a place like that full time because of the lower
salaries and so forth—for a lot of reasons. But that was a struggle for the first, I'd say,
eight years or so. It was a real struggle to try to get good, quality physician personnel
here. But finally we were able to overcome that. Jumping ahead a little bit, we were able
to overcome that by putting together—not higher salaries—we couldn't do much about
that with the state system, but we did manage to put together some attractive fringe
benefits to add to it in the way of health education benefits and things of that sort that
helped me to be able to attract a better-quality-type physician. And, of course, a lot of
other things happened too that over the years started making a big difference. But now
you can—a lot of physicians go into student health as a career right out of their
residencies like I did. And I was the first one I ever knew who did that. I never knew
another doctor besides myself at the time that I did it who had gone into student health as
a career. I was the first one that I had ever [unclear].
LD: Where did you go to medical school?
WM: Bowman Gray. Wake Forest [University] and Bowman [both Winston Salem, North
Carolina] and worked at Chapel Hill after the [United States] Navy. Anyway, the other
problem, as I had mentioned, was the drug abuse problem. In the early '70s it was very
common for almost every night somebody would come in on a bad trip or something.
Several times a week we would have that. So we had to train our staff to—that was
frightening to medical personnel, like it was frightening to all medical personnel. It was
strange and new, and they didn't know how to deal with it. They didn't want to have to
deal with it. It was very uncomfortable. It's very uncomfortable to deal with a person
who, in effect, is crazy— is out of their mind, just like it's uncomfortable to have to deal
with drunks. But it's more—it's less uncomfortable to have to deal with drunks because
that was something that was not strange to us at least. But this was strange. People were
on bad trips; they were tripping out; they were hallucinating and all these things; and so
we had to train the staff. There was a lot of resistance there too. They wanted to call the
police and have them shipped off.
LD: I was going to ask you—what was your relationship with the campus police in matters
that involved drugs?
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WM: The campus police were very cooperative in helping us work out on-campus programs
for dealing with these kinds of things.
LD: Did they bring students to you?
WM: Yes, yes.
LD: In an effort to keep these things on campus?
WM: Yes. And to try to take care of the students rather than just take them someplace and
throw them in jail or take them to an emergency room and then have them dealt with that
way. Okay, so, what we found—okay. We were trying to deal with all of these strange
and new drug abuse kinds of problems. We were trying to deal with sexuality kinds of
problems. We were trying to deal with psychiatric and emotional kinds of problems. We
were dealing with students who were liberalized, didn't trust the establishment, didn't
trust us. Even though we were developing these programs and trying to train our staff and
condition our staff to accept and deal with these things in a professional kind of a non-judgmental
manner, the students wouldn't come voluntarily. A few would, but most
students wouldn't come over there voluntarily with these kinds of problems unless they
were somehow forced to by having no other alternative. And so I tried to figure out what
to do about that.
And so we came up with the idea that we would start our own switchboard, crisis-control-
type peer counseling organization. And so we handpicked a fairly large group of
students who were interested in this sort of thing, who wanted to be trained in these areas,
and we started a crash training program. And the students organized themselves, became
a student government-sponsored organization, and they called themselves "Friends." And
they had an office, a room, in our health service building with telephone lines coming in.
They manned these all night, seven nights a week, overnight, manned these phones. We
also had a room with mattresses on the floors, psychedelic lights, padded walls, where
these students could take fellow students who were on bad trips and team-talk them down
and take care of them with our medical staff backing them up, of course, at all times. And
so, the Friends organization was created and helped us then over the period of the next
few years to bridge that gap between not coming to the health service and going to the
peers with their problems. And, of course, one of the main things, of course, that these
counselors, these students, the "Friends," did was to convince the patient with the
problem, the fellow student with the problem that they could come to the student health
service to get the help that they needed, to be taken care of. And so it was a real need,
and it filled that need in that transition period of a few years there in the early '70s.
And what we would do, we'd go out to Piney Lake [campus recreation area] on
weekends and spend the whole weekend. Take our sleeping bags and everything and do
whole weekend training courses. We had Dr. John Edwards from the counseling, who
was director of the counseling center; Dr. Robert Whitener, who was one of our
psychiatrists on our staff, a part-time psychiatrist staff, and myself; we did most of the
training. But we also invited in experts from other places, the Chapel Hill staff and so
forth, to come and assist us with part of the training. And that was an interesting time,
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too, doing all of that. These students were trained in suicide prevention, drug abuse,
dealing with drug abuse problems, dealing with sexuality problems, problem pregnancy
counseling on a peer-level basis. Mainly here again, trying to get them to come in to see
the professionals, convincing them that they could come in and see us and get help
with—be presented all the alternatives and it be very confidential and not get them in any
kind of trouble, that kind of thing.
About this—all this same time, we also created our own ambulance service. Back
in those days, as you recall, I don't know if you recall that far back or not, but—
LD: Well, I only came to Greensboro in 1976, but—
WM: Well, wherever you came from it was probably the same way, but before that. But the
funeral homes, the funeral services, the funeral homes were the ambulance service. There
was no professional—there was no such thing as EMTs [emergency medical technicians]
and paramedics and people like that. That had never been thought of or created or done
yet, certainly not in this area, not in the South. And so what we did—I always felt it was
a great conflict of interest to call a funeral home to come and take somebody in a medical
emergency to the hospital. It just didn't seem right to me to do that. Talk about conflict of
interest. [LD laughs] What we did is we also got another group of students who were
very interested in emergency medicine, who were interested in first aid and things of that
sort, and we trained them. And we trained them with the same kind of training that later
became the official EMT training, even before we had access to that kind of thing.
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
LD: You were saying that you bought a vehicle. What kind of vehicle?
WM: Yes. What we did is we—well at first we had a vehicle that was already there that was
a—it was a station wagon. I think it was a Chevrolet station wagon, and we converted it
and we had a red light and siren and we had it worked out with the police in town that we
could run emergency traffic. In other words, we had permission to do all of that. And we
had these— some—I started to say young men. It was mostly men, but we had a few
women who were interested and involved in this program. And we had them trained. And
we had the emergency procedures published in the manuals and all of the things on
campus. It involved our little ambulance service with, of course, the city, the community
ambulance services backing us up, since we only had the one vehicle. But anyway—and
so that served a purpose for a good while, but it was very soon after that that the
paramedic concept and the official ambulance services and the Guilford County
emergency transportation service was developed. And one of the young men who helped
me develop my ambulance service—I say my—our ambulance service on the campus—
went to work right out of school, and he went to the PA [physician’s assistant] training at
Bowman Gray, and then he went to work for Guilford County helping them to develop
the Guilford County Paramedics and Emergency Transportation Service and is still to this
day, the head of—
13
LD: Do you remember his name?
WM: Ed Woodard [James Edwin Woodard Jr., Class of 1973] is the guy's name. I'm sure he
wouldn't mind me—I don't like to use names in something like this. But in that case, I'm
sure he wouldn't mind.
LD: Since it's a flattering—
WM: Yes. In fact, he was—we had traditionally had a male student live in the health service.
We'd give them a room free of rent for them to be there for security reasons at night with
the nurses, the two nurses who are there overnight. And he was this person when I first
came to UNCG. He was the resident student who was living in the student health service,
and so for many years now he's been head of the Guilford County Emergency
Transportation Services and paramedics. So you're proud of things like that.
LD: Yes. You should be.
WM: After Guilford County developed their paramedic emergency transportation service, we
did away with the campus ambulance service, to say the least, because that need was not
there anymore. In fact, it was really dangerous to have that kind of program when we had
the real full-time professionals who could be there in five minutes if we called them. So
we changed the emergency procedures then to the Guilford County Emergency
Transportation Services rather than our own services, once that became available. But
that was also an interesting thing. And then, back again in 1975, I think somewhere along
there, there was still an interest in emergency medicine, paramedics, EMT training, and
so on and so forth. And there was a large group of students on campus who were really
interested in this sort of thing. And there was a young man by the name of Bill Atkinson
[Dr. William Atkinson, Class of 1979], who developed—who organized a student
organization, a student government-sponsored organization, sort of like the "Friends"
were, except in this case, they were oriented—. About that time we did away with the
"Friends" because they weren't needed anymore, and most of the calls that they were
getting by that time were crank calls, and so we did away with them. The calls were
coming into the health service by that time, so Friends served their purpose and faded
out.
Then the EMA, the Emergency Medical Association which was a student
organization, started. And they did all kinds of things. Their primary purpose was to
educate the students who were interested and the community at large in the need for
emergency medicine and emergency medical programs in the various communities
around the state and the South and the nation. And using Guilford County as a good
example of a real good one, and one in Seattle [Washington] at that time was a very, very
good one that they liked to talk a lot about. But they had like weekly meetings, and they
had guest lecturers and films, and everybody there became certified EMTs. Every
member became a certified EMT, emergency medical technician. And the—they would
have a MAST demonstration, a MAST—M-A-S-T—demonstration, a disaster
demonstration on campus every spring, where the MAST helicopter would fly in from
14
Chapel Hill [University of North Carolina School of Medicine], and there would be this
big simulated wreck on campus with all these automobiles and maybe one on fire and so
forth. The EMA group would rush in and do all the proper first aid and transporting them,
getting them out of the vehicles with the jaws of life. We'd have wrecked cars and stuff
brought in. And they would demonstrate all these things.
And, of course, with the help of the Fire Department and Guilford County
Emergency Transportation Service, who were also there with—demonstrating their
equipment and all sorts of things. It was a big day. And the helicopter would come in,
and then the victims would be transported by helicopter out to supposedly to Duke
[University Hospital, Durham, North Carolina] or someplace like that. But they would—
they'd just fly them around town and then bring them back again. [chuckles] But it was
interesting. Chad, in fact, was a victim one time. He volunteered to be a victim and got
transported out by helicopter.
LD: Your son? That must have been fun.
WM: Yes. He enjoyed that. But that went on for several years and was really big and very
popular. And then these people that were—Bill Atkinson and his—the young man right
after him that was so active in it, Dan Summers was his name. They graduated and left.
In fact, Dan Summers is now—I told you about Ed Woodard being—he's the head of the
emergency transportation services and paramedics in Guilford County. Dan Summers is
head of the emergency services in New Hanover County [North Carolina]. And Bill
Atkinson is the executive director of a big Humana Hospital near Denver [Colorado]. So
it makes you proud to have been a part of some of these people and to have some
influence. And, of course, I was—the health service worked real closely with all of these
groups and all of these people. I was always the—what was it they called me? The—I
can't even remember what they called me now, but chief advisor, or something, chief
medical advisor or something. Each student organization, I think, has to have a faculty
advisor, and I was always that.
Let's see. In the mid to late '70s—oh, one of the other things the EMA
organization did was they covered the sports events and the concerts and lectures,
lectures where large crowds would gather, and they would have the—they would cover
those things from a first aid standpoint.
LD: Did the teams on campus all have their own physicians or did they use—?
WM: No. That's what I was fixing to get into next. That's a good question. We really didn't
have any sports medicine on campus in those days. I remember talking to—what was her
name? Dean, the dean of the health, physical education, and recreation back in those
days. Dean—I can't think of her name right now. [Ethel Martus Lawther] It leaves me.
But anyway, I had lots of meetings with some of those people trying to influence them to
hire a trainer. You know, that we at least needed a full-time trainer, professional trainer,
to coordinate the sports medicine kinds of things and the sports training that was taking
place on campus, even though we were [National Collegiate Athletic Association]
Division II. And eventually that was done. I mean, they eventually did hire a trainer. In
fact, it's the same trainer that we still have to this day, Dan Henley. And then Dan, of
15
course, began to train his assistant trainers that were students and, of course, the health
service—originally myself, but later on as we got other doctors that were more student
health-oriented and like-minded, I guess I should say, began to take part in it too. And so
we developed—working with Dan Henley and the directors of athletics and the coaches
we developed sort of our own little sports medicine-type program, which has a lot of
room even still to grow and will have to grow now that we're going to Division I. But I
used to do all the athletic physicals, for instance, on the males and the females each year
and that kind of thing.
LD: Do you think that we're going to have trouble with things like steroid abuse?
WM: Oh, there's always some of that. As far as having trouble with it, we haven't had probably
as much trouble with it as a lot of the schools that have the more the big time sports and
so forth. But that's—
LD: What do you do for an athlete that makes it so attractive, since it's so—it's been
publicized how dangerous it is. What does it offer that is so attractive?
WM: Well, it helps them to develop more muscle mass and actually gives them more—it
makes them stronger. It really does. But it's dangerous. It's very dangerous. And it can
cause very permanent, severe medical problems that I don't want to get into, really,
because that would get me really sidetracked from what we're trying to do here, but it's
not a real big problem, has not been a real big problem on our campus, but it has been
somewhat of a problem. We have had students, and not necessarily students who are
members of our athletic teams, but students who are individually interested in weight-lifting
programs and things of that sort are usually the kind of students who tend to abuse
that kind of thing and get the black market steroids. But anyway, we've begun to develop
a sports medicine program with the athletic department.
Also I began a program—it was—I got the idea that since it was so hard to hire
young, well-trained physicians to come into student health as a career, I got the idea that
well maybe they're like I was. I had never thought of student health as a career until I just
sort of fell into it. In my case, I was sort of, I think, sort of led into it because of my own
individual health problems and so forth, and I started seeking out certain kinds of jobs
right out of the [United States] Navy. But most people have probably never—most young
doctors probably would never even think to consider student health as a possible career.
And therefore we were still having trouble hiring real good, well-trained young
physicians to go into student health. And even though I was getting a much better quality
physician, I felt like we could improve on that, and I know that a lot of schools out there
weren't able to get good, well-trained physicians who had the right kind of background
and interest and attitude. Most doctors who went into student health went into it because
they wanted to semi-retire. They'd been in private practice and made a bunch of money,
and they wanted to start sort of slowing down. They looked at it as a semi-retirement
kind of a job. And that's totally wrong and bad and—but that's the way it was. They
either had a health problem or they wanted to slow down or something like that. But
those were the kind of doctors that went into it. And I wanted to do something to change
all of that.
16
So I worked out a—I went over to [Moses] Cone [Memorial] Hospital
[Greensboro, North Carolina] to the teaching program over there and talked to Dr.
George Wolfe, who was the head of the family practice teaching program, and convinced
him to let's enter into an arrangement whereby he would send each one of his third-year,
final-year family practice residents, would spend one month at our student health service
under my supervision and training. And that did two things really. The main reason for it,
of course, was to expose young well-trained physicians to what a modern student health
program and student health service should be like and to try to interest some of them in it.
That was the main focus, but it also gave us another physician manpower to work. They
were working, of course, under my supervision, but after all, they’d been a doctor for
three years by then, and they were in their third year of residency training and so they
were very capable medical students. So it gave us an extra doctor that we didn't have to
pay to work.
And so that worked out very successfully, and we also—then that also grew, and
the senior medical students from Chapel Hill and Bowman Gray did some rotations there.
Of course, they were much more closely supervised in everything that they did. And also,
we developed a program where PAs [physician assistants] from Bowman Gray, not from
Duke, but from Bowman Gray, that physician assistant students in their—toward the end
of their second year, some of them also would rotate through our health service for four
to six weeks as part of their training. In their case, it was elective. With the residents, it
was not elective. It was a mandatory part of their training program where they could be
exposed to the—. Looking at it from Dr. Wolfe and Cone Hospital's point of view, the
reason they were interested in doing it was it was the only good way that they were able
to get exposure to young adult, adolescent-type medical problems. You just don't get that
in a regular residency in a medical center. And so they were supposed to be family
doctors. Well, here was an area that they weren't really getting well trained in and this
was an opportunity for them to. So they had the sexuality problems and all of those type
things that they just weren't getting like they could get working in student health with us.
Okay, so another thing that we did—and that worked real well. More recently had been
done away with, with the past director, the director between me and now, but it's
beginning to be started back now with the newest director.
LD: When did you retire?
WM: Well, I just retired this summer, but I resigned as director about three years ago. Yes, I
think that's right. I think it was about three years ago now. For health reasons, still. I just
couldn't—I just got to the place I couldn't bring it all home with me every night, the
administrative part. And we didn't have an administrator as long as I was director. Of
course, immediately after I resigned, they hired an administrator, so that the medical
director also has an administrator to do the budgets and a lot of the personnel kinds of
problems and those kinds of things. I used to try to do all of that, and it was really hard to
do it all. I was spread real thin.
Okay. We broadened the outpatient scope as we got better-quality people. We
developed a sports medicine clinic where we would have, as a trade-off a sports medicine
specialist from the teaching service at Cone Hospital. Came over one afternoon a week
and the sports medicine problems, orthopedic-type problems that we had that we weren't
17
able to—didn't feel real comfortable with or hadn't been able to figure out exactly. Rather
than referring them to a specialist in town and costing them a lot of money and so forth,
they would be seen by this specialist from Cone Hospital in sports medicine at our clinic.
We also developed a dermatology clinic a half day a week, and then it grew to
one full day a week—little specialty clinics like that, so our clinic, outpatient clinic
coverage was broadened in terms of—the scope was broadened in terms of the kinds of
problems that we would see without having to refer them out. And after all, the students
were paying all this money for health fees, and we wanted to give them as much for their
money as we possibly could. We developed a pharmacy. In fact, we were—we and
Chapel Hill—here again, were the first two schools in the system and in the state to
develop a licensed pharmacy for our students. And we were able to—have been able to
save the students just much, much, much money, lots of money because we were able to
buy drugs on state contract and sell them back to the students at non-profit-type rates and
so forth.
LD: Is that still offered here?
WM: Oh, yes. Yes. Big time.
LD: Oh, I'll have to go down there.
WM: It's a good deal.
LD: Did you find that your—the students who were using the health center were mostly the
ones who lived on campus or were you getting fairly good use from others?
WM: We got—the one study that was done in the early '80s—I forgot which year it was—but,
the one study that was done by the institutional research people on campus, Don
Reichard [director of Office of Institutional Research] and those people. Seventy-five
percent of the entire student body made at least one visit to the health service in the
course of the year, seventy-five percent of the entire graduate, undergraduate, on-campus,
off-campus. So we are well-utilized by the students, much more so by the on-campus
students, I'm sure. It just stands to reason that that would be the case. But as medical care
became more and more expensive and medical insurances became more and more
expensive, more and more students wanted to take advantage. In fact, we have students
who sign up for a course, one course or something, so that they can have—so that they
can be allowed to pay the health fee and have access to the student health service if
they're living in the Greensboro area. More and more of that kind of thing has been done
in more recent years. We also broadened our inpatient services, not in terms of numbers
of patients admitted, but we became much more able and much more capable of taking
care of students with much more significant medical problems that used to always be
shipped right out to one of the big hospitals. I mean—for instance, we could give
intravenous antibiotics and things of that sort in our student health service. We improved
and developed the laboratory and x-ray facilities and personnel, too, during all this period
of time.
LD: Have you had any epidemics?
18
WM: Oh, yes. Yes. We had a couple of famous epidemics. [chuckles] In fact, those two—I
can't remember the dates of them right now. Things like that—I forgot about that in my
notes, and I didn't look up the time frame, but we did have—the first big epidemic that
we had was a gastroenteritis type, stomach-type virus, and the CDC [Center for Disease
Control] actually came to our student health service, to the campus and did a—
LD: From Atlanta [Georgia]?
WM: From Atlanta. A team came and actually conducted a big study and so forth, and their
final conclusion was—I mean, we had hundreds, hundreds of students who became ill
with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea within a period of three or four days. Hundreds.
LD: You obviously can't put them all into the health center. What do you do?
WM: Well, we keep the—in the case of an influenza epidemic, for instance, getting back to
something that we see. We see influenza every year and sometimes in a semi-epidemic
proportion. We had two of those, incidentally. We had two different of those
gastrointestinal-type things in the course of about two or three years, and it turned out to
be a Norwalk-like virus is what the CDC finally—and it was in the medical journal
reports and so forth, and the CDC didn't publish this. But in a case like that, in the case of
influenza epidemics, we had developed guidelines in these manuals that we wrote, where
certain, patients with certain-type medical complications have to be the ones admitted.
The ones with the—for instance, if a diabetic gets a gastrointestinal infection and can't
eat.
LD: That's very serious.
WM: You see what I'm saying? People like that have to be, are the ones that you have
to admit. Ones with the more complications, and the others, you have to develop a
system for taking care of them in the dorms. Or else let their families come and
get them and take them home. But we had a system worked out with the food
service and the—it's an "epidemic disaster plan" is what I actually called it. And I
worked out the specifics, and I guess it's still in effect. I would imagine it is. The
food service and the campus security people and the School of Nursing and the
health service—
LD: Worked together?
WM: —worked together in a case like that. The food service will allow fellow students to take
out fluids and foods and so forth to their sick friends, the sick roommates and so forth in
the dorm. The campus security would assist with the transportation problems, and the
School of Nursing assists with manpower.
LD: So did you actually send people around to the dormitory rooms to check up on people?
19
WM: Yes. That's the plan. Rounds would be made in the dormitories once a day by an RN
[registered nurse], either from our staff or the School of Nursing. We got off the track a
little bit, but that was an interesting question, and it's something I should have in here.
LD: That's what everybody, of course, wants to know—epidemics.
WM: Yes. And, in fact, the media picks up on—any hint of an epidemic, the media is on me or
is on the director of the health service like a bunch of vultures. And they totally occupy
the director's time. You're being called by newspapers and television crews from all the
different channels, and you can't even get your work done for having to deal with the
media. And so we also worked closely and developed a working relationship and plans
with our campus media people, the news office people. Wilson Davis [director of the
news bureau] is the one that I used to work so closely with, and he would try to keep as
much—I would keep him informed, and he would keep as much—we learned that the
hard way. I mean, they just about did me in during that first epidemic, and we learned the
hard way that we needed to do something like that, so Wilson would—he would talk to
them, and I would talk to him. [laughs] And I'd keep him informed and updated, and he
would try to keep the media off of me as much as possible. But he couldn't keep them
totally off of me. They insisted on going over there with their cameras and hopefully
getting a shot of somebody lying on the floor looking really sick, vomiting or something
like that. But—
LD: Did you ever have any food poisoning incidents on campus?
WM: Well, that—they weren't ever able to prove—these two epidemics possibly were spread
through food contamination, but they weren't ever really able to prove it all. It was
suspected that it was either food or water contamination that spread to hit that hard that
fast. It almost had to be something like that. But—
LD: That hepatitis scare last year makes big news.
WM: Yes. Things like that are always big news. The media loves that. So I guess I'm sort of
starting unwinding here a little bit, winding down. We really have been—I suddenly
found myself sort of the dean of the directors of all of the state. I— just a very few years
after I had come to Greensboro, the older doctor, Dr. Hedgepeth at Chapel Hill, retired.
And so very shortly after I—I hadn't been over here but about ten years or something like
that, I was sort of the dean of the health service directors, meaning that I was the one who
had been in it the longest and was sort of being looked to, somewhat, as the leader. In
fact, President Friday started a—in order to deal with a lot of the controversial things and
the things that would keep coming up, like insurance problems, and pharmacy problems
and the immunization—developing the immunization program, particularly after it
became law. Things like that. President Friday, when he was president, developed a
committee called the student health advisory committee of which I was the—What do
you call it?— the chairman of it for a lot of years. And I would meet with certain
directors from other health services around the state in the sixteen-campus system, and
we would discuss and research and try to make plans and recommendations for how to
20
handle various kinds of things.
In fact, the immunization law, even before it became officially the law, we started
a—at UNCG we started doing a trial run and trying to work out a program for doing the
medical clearances and screenings and so forth, so that we could pass that information
then on to the—to our state authorities, infectious disease authorities, and also to the
other health service directors around the state. So we were actually doing the
immunization clearances on our campus really a couple of years before all the other
campuses had to start doing it. And by that time, we had discovered all of the different
kinds of bugs and problems and—bugs meaning difficulties in trying to do something on
a mass scale like that. It was a terrible—it was a very hard job, a lot harder than you
might imagine. And so—looking into insurances, immunization programs, things of that
sort.
And then later, we developed an AIDS task force. And the AIDS [HIV/AIDS, a
disease of the human immune system caused by infection with human immunodeficiency
virus] task force did all of the preliminary work. We met in Chapel Hill at General
Administration and did all the preliminary work to organizing and devising the
recommendations and procedures and policies regarding AIDS that all the campuses
would follow and then divided up into teams and went around from General
Administration. I was on one of the teams as the physician. And we had a lawyer on the
team from General Administration, a physician and a student affairs administrator, like
Vice Chancellor [Jim] Allen—in fact, was on our team, and then a health educator and a
group of four, a team of four people then would go to the other campuses in the sixteen-campus
system and actually have a training session for a half a day on the AIDS policies
that the University, the General Administration, recommended and to help them to get
started in developing those policies and carrying out those policies and procedures on
their campus. And I'm just mentioning those kinds of things to show that UNCG Student
Health Service sort of took a leadership role for a lot of years in the state in helping with
these kinds of things through General Administration.
LD: Does the health center do AIDS testing, blood testing?
WM: We don't actually do it in our lab, but we count—we do the preliminary counseling and
follow-up counseling and actually order the test. We can draw the test and send it either
to the—well, in our case, we send it to Cone Hospital. But a lot of people—the students
have to pay for that. In order to get it free, we refer them to the [Guilford County] Health
Department program. And it's done in a very confidential sort of a way. Of course,
everything that we do at the health center is done in a confidential way too. I didn't mean
that, but they don't even have to use names when they go to the health department. They
just use numbers.
So I'll sort of end my spiel by saying that I guess one of the highlights of our
health service was in 1984 when we co-hosted with Wake Forest University, the
Southern College Health Association meeting. And then I was the president-elect that
year of the Southern College Health Association and was responsible for the program, in
effect, at the annual meeting, and then served as president of the Southern College Health
Association the following year, 1985. The Southern College Health Association is the
organization for college health professionals. The American College Health Association
21
is the national organization for college health professionals, physicians, nurses, health
educators, technicians, everybody. And the Southern College Health Association is the
regional affiliate of that. And it covers North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida,
Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. So we were president of that in 19— that
organization in 1985 and hosted, co-hosted with Wake Forest, the annual meeting the
year before that. So I'm going to hush. I've talked a long time. I'll let you ask your
questions.
LD: Did you travel when you were president of the association?
WM: I was also an officer in the—on some committees and things with the national
organization during those about three years. What you do, you start off as like president-elect
and then, and you're real busy that year, responsible for the annual meeting. And
then you have your year as president, and you could be very busy with that, and then
your follow-up year is— you're past-president, and you have a lot of responsibilities also
with that. So it's really about a three-year period there that I did do not a lot of traveling
in terms of maybe two or three trips a year related to that on the regional and national
levels. So it didn't involve a whole a lot of time away from work, but it took a lot of my
personal time.
LD: Those things always do.
WM: Yes.
LD: Very time consuming.
WM: They really do. Anyway, I'm tired of talking. [laughs]
LD: Well, I appreciate the interview.
WM: I hope this is the kind of thing that you—
LD: It is exactly, and it was—and you were very well organized. And I wouldn't have known
to ask you all those things, so I'm glad you were prepared.
WM: Well, you asked some questions that I forgot to put in my little outline too. So I hope—
I'm sure I forgot a lot of really interesting things, but—
LD: Did you ever have any big accidents on campus? Anybody try to blow up the science
building or—?
WM: We've had some significant emergencies on campus. We've never had any major disaster
like we were trying to train for with the Emergency Medical Association and so forth.
Nothing really like that. Interestingly, we've only had one successful suicide the whole
twenty years that I was at the student health service, the seventeen years that I was there
in the leadership capacity. We only had one successful suicide. And that was off the top
of the library, the new library.
22
LD: That must have been before I came.
WM: It's been a few years back. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but we had a few
off-campus suicides over the years that we weren't really able to be involved in at all.
LD: Do you think it's a growing problem or is it beginning to ebb? I noticed it has gotten a lot
of press.
WM: I don't really think it's a growing problem. It's always been a problem and it always will
be a problem, but I don't think in any sense that it has been growing.
LD: You don't think it's getting any worse?
WM: I don't think so. I think it's gotten worse in terms of younger adolescents, children, as far
as suicides. But in terms of young adults, I don't think it has gotten any worse. At least,
things that I’ve read haven't indicated it. And certainly our experience hasn't indicated it.
We've always had a pretty good mental health program on our campus, too, with the
counseling center and our part-time psychiatrist that we've been able to do, I think, pretty
well. You can always improve, but you always need more money and more hours of
professional time. The counseling center has always been backed up, but the counseling
center people, I'll let them speak for themselves in terms of their interview with you. But
it's been an interesting, a very interesting twenty years for me. And I don't feel like I
wasted my time. I feel like—I'm very—I feel very fulfilled in having done student health
as my career, and I wouldn't change anything really. There are some things I would like
to have been able to improve on. I would like to have known more. I would have liked to
have been able to have done more personally, but, all in all, I think it was a really
interesting and fulfilling career. And I hope that our new director will be able to say that
in twenty years too. He's really a fine young man.
LD: Who is the new director?
WM: Dr. Bobby Doolittle. Dr. [Robert P.] Doolittle.
LD: Dr. Doolittle. Well, it sounds like you accomplished a great deal.
WM: Oh, it was amazing where we started from and where we wound up. It's just absolutely
mind boggling. And those nurses—two of the older nurses that retired quite a few years
ago who were there when I came—visited me Saturday, Saturday afternoon. They came
and visited—they heard that I'd been sick with the pneumonia and so forth, and they
came to see me, and we reminisced about some of these things. And they talked about
how things were in their training and how they had to totally change from their concept
of nursing to something totally different and how hard that was for them. But, basically,
it came about because of their willingness and their respect for me and for my leadership,
and it just worked out really well. Some really funny stories I could tell. I could tell a lot
of stories. In fact, I've always said that I wish that I had kept a journal and just jotted
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down just little things on a daily basis—
LD: Doesn't everybody?
WM: And then I could have written a book now. But things like the spaghetti girl. Have you
ever heard about the spaghetti girl?
LD: No.
WM: There was a student who was extremely talented in art, very talented, very bright, who
was extremely unusual and eccentric and got involved in drugs and hallucinogens. She
was one of the ones who was over there on a regular basis on a bad trip and stuff. But,
anyway, the funny thing was that this young lady, for her part in an art exhibit, she did
this giant vat of spaghetti and took off her clothes and got in it, in this giant vat of
spaghetti, and she became known as the "spaghetti girl." And she made Look or Life—I
think it was Look magazine that—Look magazine got that [laughs] and that was just one
of the funny things that pops into mind. But the reason it was so interesting to us was
because she was one of our regulars [LD laughs] in terms of freaking out, bad trip kind of
things that we had to deal with. There are a lot of stories. I think we've probably served
this purpose, hopefully, very well.
LD: Well, thank you.
[End of Interview]