Transcript: Tape 10 Side A
DATE: May 15, 1998
TAPE: Tape 10
INTERVIEWEE: Thomas Scully, M.D.
INTERVIEWER: Eileen Barker
PLACE: Dr. Scully's home, 1400 Ferris Lane in Reno
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: Teresa Garrison; corrected by Dr. Sohn (Revised 2017, Haley Kovac)
EB: There we are, there it is. Okay, today is May 15th and we're talking to Dr. Scully and we're going to pick up where we left off and you said it was New Jersey.
TS: Yeah, right.
EB: Okay Dr. Scully, what year are we talking about?
TS: I was in Las Vegas from July of 1966 to June of 1967. I got out of that private practice with Tony Carter; it was actually Holy Week, I remember it very well, of 1967. And I went to work for a few months with Otto Ravenholt at the Clark County District Health Department as an assistant health officer. He needed some help because Paul Laxalt at the time, the governor, had asked him to come to Carson City and take over the State Health Department while they were searching for a State Health Officer. So, I worked in Clark County for the last couple of months in the Health Department. At that point, a classmate of mine, Jim Hogan, who was teaching at the New Jersey College of Medicine and was Chief of Medicine at St. Michael's Medical Center in Newark called me and said that they needed someone to run the pediatric program, run the residency. And so, it was clear to me, at that point, that private practice was not my thing and I certainly didn't want to make a career out of public health; although, Otto Ravenholt was very good to me. I flew back, I looked at the job and decided to take it. And that July or late June, I've forgotten exactly when of 1967, Celia and I picked up the five kids and went to Newark, New Jersey and I took the job as Program Director for the Department of Pediatrics at St. Michael's Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the New Jersey College of Medicine. It was a very eventful summer; historically, as you may recall, the Newark riots, and the Detroit riots and the...
EB: Watts.
TS: Watts. Central Watts, excuse me, Watts in Los Angeles, all took place that summer. And I remember Celia's family, of course, lived in New Rochelle, New York which is only across the river few Newark. We arrived and spent a few days with her parents with the five kids while I was looking for a place to live. We finally found a house to rent in Summit, New Jersey. Well, anyway, we were headed down the Garden State Parkway in our little car with the five kids, going to Summit, New Jersey. We crossed the George Washington Bridge headed for Summit and the kids, I've forgotten who said it, said something to, 'Hey Dad, there's a parade. Look at all the Army tanks and look at all the Army.' And we followed down the Garden State Parkway a whole bunch of, what turned out to be National Guardsmen going to Central Newark during the riots. I've forgotten the exact date, it seems to me they were around the 15th or so of July.
EB: These riots were all race-oriented, weren't they?
TS: Yes, they were, but there were probably lots of reasons for it; the country was in a turmoil, as you know. We hadn't yet lived through the assassination of Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but there was a lot of racial tension. One of the things that started the problem in Newark, actually, was the movement of the medical school from Jersey City to Newark. Briefly, the story was that Bishop Boland, the Catholic Archbishop, wanted to get out of the medical school business. Seton Hall, which is as you know, run by the Archdiocese of Newark; Seton Hall University, had a medical school, the first medical school in New Jersey.
EB: Was that named after Mothers?
TS: Mother Seton, yeah. Mother Elizabeth Seton. And Seton Hall is a university in New Jersey and it had opened after the war in the '50s, a medical school in Jersey City. After, I think, New Jersey did away with its antivivisection laws; actually, New Jersey was one of the last states in the country to have antivivisection laws, which of course, prohibited cadavers. At any rate, Jersey City Medical Center became the center for Seton Hall Medical School and it operated for a number of years, but finally the bishop and the powers that be there decided, at Seton Hall, they were going to give up the medical school. So, they actually sold it to the state of New Jersey, the legislature passed a law, they bought out, I don't know all the details. But, they essentially bought the debt of the medical school and essentially transferred the medical school, lock, stock, and barrel, literally, from Jersey City where it was at the medical center there, closed down the Seton Hall Medical School, opened it up in Newark within a matter of months and called it the New Jersey College of Medicine. And they put that medical school in downtown Newark at what had been the Martland Medical Center County Hospital, they put it there. They put up Quonset huts, they put up temporary buildings and they literally moved the medical school in a matter of a few months. Well, what happened was, the people who now were going to run it for the state of New Jersey, it was going to become under the Regents of the State of New Jersey as a state school, wanted something like 35 acres of land in downtown Newark which was occupied by almost a totally black community. Well, the blacks were furious, they said 'Why do you need 35 acres for a medical school when you go across the river in New York and at Columbia and Cornell, they have a couple of acres and they build their medical schools 40-50 stories in the sky like Cornell and Columbia?' So, finally, they decided to scale back their needs and I'm not sure exactly how many acres they ended up building on, but they also decided to start reconstructing much of that area of Newark, which was a shambles. Well, at any rate, that was a lot of the history of what was going on in Newark in the late spring of 1967. We arrived, not that we had anything to do with it, but we arrive in July and the riots break out; and if memory serves me well, 25 people, I think, lost their lives. A significant number of people lost their lives. And of course like many riots, there was looting and burning of their own houses and burning of their own what essentially were black neighborhoods. Well, I went down to the edge of the riot, I took my kids and Celia to the house we had rented in Summit and I drove in, the riots went on for three or four days. But I remember going in and identifying myself to the National Guard, since I could get to St. Michael's by going around where the actual shooting was taking place, was able to get to the hospital. And I remember helping the nurses and other physicians moving cribs and beds away from the windows into the hallways because many of those buildings around the central ward were being shot at. And once a riot begins, people shoot who knows what. And I remember a few people being brought into the Emergency Room at both, I think there's a Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, there's a children's hospital, there's the Martland Hospital which is the county hospital now it's called the University Medical Center, I guess, and St. Michael's. These hospitals, all sorts of wounded and sort of thing; well, anyway, the riots ended that was the end of that. And then, as you know, shortly thereafter Robert Kennedy was assassinated and then Martin Luther King was assassinated. And I remember going with a large contingent of people from all over Newark and walking in a silent procession on a Sunday, which was called for by all the different churches in Newark to commemorate Martin Luther King, Celia and I went to that. Anyway, back to the story, I took this job at St. Michael's Medical Center and my job there was like any other director of a residency. I think we had about six residents a year, we had medical students coming from what now was the old Seton Hall, was now the New Jersey College of Medicine. It was no longer in Jersey City, it was now only a few blocks away in these temporary buildings and Quonset huts. In the last 30 years they've developed a large medical center there, and of course, in addition to that the new medical school at Rutgers, which is in New Brunswick, was attached. So, now I think the New Jersey College of Medicine and the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School are all under the umbrella of the state of New Jersey's medical authority, I guess the Regents, whatever they call them. At any rate, it was an interesting job. I would get on the train every day, there was a little train stop on the Erie Lackawanna, only a few blocks from St. Michael's. And I would take the train down in the morning, occasionally I'd drive my own car, but Celia with five kids, in a new town where she knew no one of course, had to have the car.
EB: What kind of a place it? Was it Summit?
TS: Summit, New Jersey. It's a very nice suburban community, 20-some miles from downtown Newark.
EB: White, primarily?
TS: Almost all white, very well to do. We rented a fairly nice, lower-middle class neighborhood, rented a home. I had a two-year contract and we didn't know whether we were going to stay and I didn't have any money.
EB: Was it a good salary?
TS: Yeah, it was an average salary, but not enough. I didn't have any money to buy a home, so we just rented a house. And there was a Catholic school there, one of the reasons we settled there and there was a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school. We were going to put our kids in the Catholic school, but it turned out we were on the opposite side of town and there was a public school right around from where we had rented. So actually, my three older boys, I guess, Peter and Chris who had started school in San Antonio and in Las Vegas and Geary who started school in Las Vegas; they all went to this public grade school very near where we lived. Marty and Leslie were still little ones and they were at home. So, most of the time I left the car at home, Celia had the car to be there with the kids and I'd take the train in. I didn't have a private practice, as a matter of fact, they prohibited me from having a private practice as a part of the contract, which was probably smart; because the local pediatricians didn't want competition from somebody else. And my role was really to spend full-time administrating the department, supervising the residents, being sure that they had teaching rounds every day, as you do, and being sure that the medical students who came there were getting adequate teaching.
EB: You had never done this before though.
TS: I had done it in the Air Force in San Antonio, but I wasn't in charge there; but I certainly had been involved with residents in my last two years in the Air Force in San Antonio. There was no education program in Las Vegas. I did that, it was okay; it didn't seem to have much of a future and it was very clear to Celia and I that, as a place to live, we really wanted to be back out west. We loved our time in El Paso, when I interned there; we liked our time in San Antonio; we liked our time in Las Vegas as a place to live, but there just wasn't a medical school. So, I always had my ear to the ground, but I was going to work every day; it was mostly eight in the morning until five or six in the evening. Because of all the turmoil at the time, I got involved developing a free clinic several evenings a week in the basement of a Catholic church run by Monsignor Carey who became a very good friend of ours and he got several of the physicians from St. Michael's to come over and open this clinic, a free clinic, in the basement of his church. Essentially for the indigent blacks of his neighborhood and as I said the neighborhood that his church was in, Queen of Angels.
EB: Doing all kinds of things?
TS: Yeah, well, I would do pediatrics and some of the others would do medicine. [EB: They could come in with anything.] They came in with anything. And of course they had... [EB: Surgery?] No, no surgery.
EB: I mean, you wouldn't do it there.
TS: No, no.
EB: Surgical problems?
TS: Then they'd be sent over to the county hospital.
EB: And they'd be taken care of by the county?
TS: Well, part of the problem was the county had such a terrible record of health service. And of course, as you know, part of the problem in those days and even today, in many communities, the black communities distrusted the County Health Department, distrusted the system; they weren't aware of how the system worked. So, we did that.
EB: Trauma cases?
TS: No, most of that would be sent to the hospital, this was mostly medical problems. And a lot of it was children who had no immunizations, kids who had never been examined, a lot of that.
EB: Did you run an immunization clinic there?
TS: Yes, we did get some help from the Health Department. The priest that ran this parish clinic and some of the nuns would beg, borrow and steal whatever they could get to run it.
EB: Now these were blacks, so they weren't Catholic.
TS: Very few of the black patients were Catholic, but the church was right in the center of the Catholic...
EB: But they would come to the church.
TS: Yeah, they'd come to the church, sure. And look at it as a social agency in many ways. There was a fair number, I guess, we'd call parishioners. No, in that area of downtown Newark, the only white people who were seen were the doctors and the nurses at the hospitals; and the priests, there were very few black priests in that dioceses at the time.
EB: What about crime?
[cross-talk]
TS: No, but I never went over there by myself. In the evening when I'd get off work, I'd usually do it two evenings a week or maybe one, depend on the week; and the others who donated their time, we were all donating our time. One of the younger Catholic priests or Monsignor Carey would drive from there over to St. Michael's pick us up and take us in their car, which was perfectly safe because they were well-respected, take us to the clinic and when we were finished at nine o'clock at night, would drive us back to the hospital where we would pick up our car and drive home. We didn't drive through that neighborhood in those days because of the...
EB: Because of the anger? Were you going to say anger?
TS: Yeah, anger toward the death of Martin Luther King, anger toward the whites, anger towards themselves. I'm not a sociologist and I don't know all the details or all the reasons for that, but it was a time, as you know, Watts, Detroit, Newark, all those things. There was a lot of crime, at any rate, that itself was not the real reason; I think the real reason was that we weren't very happy living in New Jersey. I think, I was sort of on the rebound in Las Vegas when I realized that I wasn't going to make it in private practice with Tony Carter. We decided I would to take any job essentially that was available in teaching. Well, it turned out to be a very good experience; it gave me a lot of background on how to run educational programs, because then I didn't have to worry about running an office, didn't have to worry about seeing patients. I spent all my time becoming involved in education and learning about education and how to teach better and all that. Well, anyway, to make a long story very short and we'll get out of this. The winter of 1969, we've been there now about a year and a half. January, I'd say, maybe February, of '69, we've been there about a year and a half; we get a phone call from an old friend of ours in Las Vegas, Dr. Jim Gorman who was a surgeon. We had been in the Air Force with him in Spain, he was one of the people who encouraged us to go to Las Vegas in the first place. He was on his way back with his wife to visit in Madrid. He was at the Kennedy Airport waiting for the plane to leave, and he picked up the phone and called; we chatted, he said 'We're going back to see friends in Madrid.' We said 'Fine, tell them we love them and all that sort of stuff and say hi.' He said 'Oh, by the way, it looks like they're going to start a medical school in Nevada. There's a bill in the legislature and it looks like it may very well pass.' And I said, 'Oh you're kidding.' He said, 'No, and there's been a lot of talk about it. It looks like it will be a two-year school and it's going to be put in Reno.' Because at that time Reno was still more populous than Las Vegas and also there was a University here and the Southern University, UNLV, was at that time I think called Nevada Southern, it was an extension of UNR. At any rate, I said 'Oh, thanks for letting me know.' So, I had my ear to the ground. Well, shortly thereafter, I don't know the exact sequence, I'm guessing somewhere around March or April, I started looking in the New England Journal for job opportunities, because my contract at St. Michael's [EB: Oh sure.] was going to come up. Although, they were happy to have me stay; they were disappointed when I decided to leave. But I saw an advertisement for Director of Medical Education at Washoe Medical Center in Reno, contact Robert Barnett, MD, and he was the chairman of the search committee. I had forgotten the rest of what it said in the ad. It might have been the JAMA, but I think it was the New England Journal of Medicine. And I immediately said to Celia, 'This might be an answer to our prayer. Jim tells us there's going to be a medical school' Jim Gorman, 'we think. And there's an ad for Washoe.' I think I called him on the phone and he said 'Send me something in writing right away.' So, I sent him a letter indicating my interest. Apparently, according to Carroll Ogren, who I just visited with in Las Vegas last week, and Nevada was very small in those days; Carroll and Bob Barnett and others checked me out in Las Vegas. They called the people who knew me in Las Vegas, Otto Ravenholt and others and apparently got positive references. So shortly thereafter, I get a phone call from Carroll Ogren or Bob Barnett, actually excuse me, it was Bob, 'Could you come out and visit? We'd like to visit with you.' So, I flew out, I'm guessing in late April, I flew out and met with that committee. It was Bob Barnett, Bob Myles, Dave Roberts, Bill Teipner, Jack Sargent, Ernie Mack, was chairman of the board, but he wasn't on the committee, Fred Anderson and George Smith. George had been hired in 1967 by the Regents to do the feasibility study for the starting of the medical school. And at that point, he, and Fred Anderson, and Ernie Mack and the rest of them were heavily involved in the legislature trying to get that bill passed. So, I came out and they said 'Yeah, we think it's going to pass. Here's the feasibility study, we'll know soon.' As you know from the history of the school that I gave you earlier, I think that bill in 1969 passed by one vote, I think it was only one vote, or two. It was a very, very narrow margin. But, either while I was here or shortly thereafter, the bill passed authorizing a two-year school at the University of Nevada Reno to open in 1971. And George was going to be the dean, well, I had met with George. So, I said to Celia, 'They would like me to take this job and it looks like the medical school is going to go.' My conversations with Carroll Ogren and Dr. Mack, from Washoe's perspective was they wanted someone to be there to run the educational program, but also to develop the affiliation with the medical school, coordinate any activities. Because at that time, a two-year school was going to be all basic sciences, but they would still need help of physicians. So, I turned around and came back a second time, not more than a couple weeks later; the school passed, I think it was in April of '69, I can look up the date later. Fred Anderson and I and George Smith met and they said 'Yeah, we'd like you to help us.' And I met with Dr. Mack and Carroll Ogren in the old office, the building's now torn down. I remember Carroll's office was [EB: I remember it well.] paneled in dark wood, and it sort of came out this west end of the old building there. [EB: inaudible] Yeah, it was. And there was a rickety stairs that went upstairs to a couple of offices, one of which they gave me and also a little auditorium. At any rate, Dr. Mack said, 'We'd like you to come, the committee is positive, they recommended it.' And I think they gave me an enormous salary for those days and I remember there was an editorial in the newspaper about why they were paying this doctor from New Jersey to come here and start educational programs, but the need was for an affiliation. I think...
EB: Now who was paying? Oh, go ahead.
TS: Washoe was paying me. I think the salary was $30,000 that first year.
EB: But who was paying George Smith?
TS: George Smith was being paid by the university. He was being paid by UNR, [cross-talk] oh yes. After the feasibility study, he was hired on a contract and it passed, they hired him then as the acting dean or I think they actually made him the dean at that time.
EB: What was his background?
TS: George was a pathologist.
EB: Had he run a medical school before?
TS: No, never. But he was well-trained, he came from Harvard. He came here, of course, to get his divorce and like many physicians in those days, came to Nevada for a divorce and then stayed and worked in the emergency room. But also he started working with Bob Barnett in the back, putting in pace-makers in sheep and doing a lot of that stuff. And Fred Anderson asked him to stay, and of course, there was a feasibility study for the '67 legislature, but it never passed, it never got anywhere. So, it was the '69 legislature that actually passed it. So, George had been working on this with Fred and others for several years. Dr. Mack and the board at Washoe was thinking of putting up a new building that would get a lot of federal funding which would have a lot of educational space.
EB: Was he out here in locum tenens?
TS: Who?
EB: George Smith.
TS: No, no, no. He just came.
[cross-talk]
EB: He did have a private practice.
TS: No, no. He came as a pathologist, he worked part-time with Salvadorini. [EB: Oh, he did.] Yes, but most of the time, those first couple of years worked in the emergency room as an emergency room doctor. But there was no full-time emergency room staff in those days, they would hire people. And I don't know all those details and Carroll Ogren tells about that in his oral history.
EB: Well, the full-time medical staff just had to take turns.
[cross-talk]
EB: ...except a few on locum tenens.
TS: A few. So what they did was, George then gave up the emergency room, he did a little consulting with Sal and used to do autopsies over at the VA. But was essentially employed by UNR as the dean of a medical school on paper, once the legislature approved in 1969. And his job was to put the whole thing together. Well, at any rate, I then took the job; I went back, resigned from the job back there, packed up my family and I had a contract. I liked Carroll Ogren, and I liked Ernie Mack, and Bob Barnett and Bob Myles, the rest of them, they were all very nice to me. They were all enthusiastic at that time about the medical school; Fred Anderson was very nice. I said 'Well,' to Celia, 'this may be a chance in a lifetime. There's no guarantee that it's going to succeed. But you don't get many opportunities in life to be on the ground floor of something new. And I want to take a chance.' We wanted to come back to Nevada, we didn't know anything about Reno when we lived in Vegas. I'd met George before, I knew a few of the doctors through the State Medical Association, but basically there were two separate communities; separated by 500 miles of desert as you know. But, I said 'Okay, I'm going to take the job.' So I came, we got here the middle of August of 1969, 29 years ago now, almost 30 years. There had never been a director of medical education, there had never been a dean at the medical school, it was all new. So, I said to Carroll and Dr. Mack, 'What do you want me to do?' and they said 'Well, you'll have to work out the job. You'll have to figure out what's needed.' [EB: inaudible] But I got a lot of help, I must say, from Barnett, Myles, Dave Roberts and there were a few others. At that time, the regional medical programs were very active.
EB: Are you talking about WICHE?
TS: Well, no it wasn't WICHE. It's a different program now, different program. But the federal government had put money into regional medical program with the idea that with the coming of television technology and satellites and all this futuristic stuff at the time that there could be medicine connected in rural areas. And so Salt Lake City, the University of Utah and the University of Nevada and the University of California, Davis were going to all combine and sort of take care of the rural areas of the Great Basin. They put in, I think, about 20% of my salary and I was to coordinate that also out of my office. And Jane Matthews, who had been working for Bob Barnett at the time, was then assigned to help me with that. The university, I think the second year put in maybe 15-20% of my salary, because I was to coordinate all of the activities of the medical school at Washoe Medical Center and vise versa. My job was going to be to get physicians, all of whom were in private practice as you know at Washoe. And in those days, as you know, the staffs at Washoe and Saint Mary's were pretty much the same group. [EB (mumbles): One in the same, mostly.] Subsequently they split and became cross-town rivals in many ways. But at that time, they were essentially the same group. So I could then spend a lot of time, which I did, I talked and talked until I was blue in the face meeting with a lot of different doctors. What sort of interest did they have in medical education? What sort of time were they going to commit to it? There was going to be no salaries obviously, because a two-year school was going put its little bit of salary money into basic sciences, anatomy and physiology and biochemistry, that sort of thing. And they would hope the physicians of the community would volunteer their time, but that took a lot of organization. So, I simultaneously did a little work for the regional medical program. I would set up conferences in Lovelock and Winnemucca and Elko and other places; and I would get a couple of the physicians to go with me and we'd put on clinics or we'd put on educational programs at that turned out... [Tape cuts out]