Transcript: Tape 3 Side B

DATE: March 10, 1998
TAPE: Tape 3
INTERVIEWEE: Thomas Scully, M.D.
INTERVIEWER: Eileen Barker
PLACE: Dr. Scully's home, 1400 Ferris Lane in Reno
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: Teresa Garrison (Revised 2016, Haley Kovac )

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Thomas Scully: I never heard this story directly but my brother loves to tell it. She's taking care of Brother Ryan; and she goes into the lavatory off of his bedroom, which they had set up to empty the bed pan, and there's Cardinal Spellman sitting on the toilet. [EB: laughs] My brother says 'Cardinal Spellman sitting on the can'; he had come to visit Brother Ryan and give him his blessings before he dies. So, my mother doesn't know what to do, she backs out saying 'Excuse me, excuse me.' Now, I have no verification of that, but that was the Cardinal Spellman story of my mother.

Eileen Barker: I want to stop this to tell you something. [Tape pauses for a moment]

TS: And she had every right to be in there. She didn't know he's in there. She's in her nursing outfit taking care of the poor dying brother and she walks in and the Cardinal's in the bathroom. It's nobody's fault.

EB: Tell me one thing, what was the population in New Rochelle about that time. I remember from Dr. Massoth's oral history how it was a tiny little place in his growing; he was there in the 30's.

TS: Celia and I talked about that yesterday, when we read this article in the New York Times. They say the population is now 65,000; we used to say, in those days, that it ran around 55-60,000. Because New Rochelle, by the time we were in high school in the late '40s, was pretty much as developed as it was going to get. All of these were very few apartments; most of them were single family homes, almost the entire town. There was very little place to build; I'm sure there are now downtown around the hospital there's probably a lot more. But I don't recall then and Celia's mother lived until, let's see, she came out here in 1991 or '2 and died here a couple of years ago; died right next door in that room over there. So we'd visit New Rochelle periodically to visit Celia's mother up until the early 1990's, and it was very much the way it was when we were kids 30-40 years ago. They weren't building big high rises, it wasn't becoming an extension of the Bronx in that sense. As a matter of fact, you read this article in the New York Times many of the blacks and Hispanics who have moved there in the last 20 years have moved there; many professionals, and well-educated and employed went there because they wanted to buy homes with yards. A lot of those old Victorian…

EB: To get away from the crime in the city.

TS: A lot of the Victorian homes, one of them they mentioned had seven or eight bedrooms; and many of those houses where my sister-in-law was raised and others still stand, they're still occupied, they're big enormous homes. So it wasn't a matter of coming through those neighborhoods and tearing down houses and putting up high rises, there were few of those around even to this day.

EB: It's fairly an affluent society there, wasn't it, in New Rochelle?

TS: Yeah. 45 minutes from Broadway, the famous song, James M. Cohan or someone who wrote it.

EB: George M.

TS: George M. Cohan. It was middle class, you go down in the morning to that railway station and there'd be one train after the other on the New Haven coming from Connecticut up the line just packed with business men going to New York, to the city. There was very little industry in the city itself; there were some Coke plants and a 7-Up plant and a brewery and there were some of those things. It didn't have a very wealthy class because they would often go off to Scarsdale and other places; it had a very big middle class and a relatively small lower class economically and many of them worked as house maids and that sort of thing. A very high literacy rate, as I recall it and it was just assumed; and even New Rochelle High School had a very high rate of kids going on to college. It was a bedroom community of middle class Americans, most of who commuted to New York. Now after the war and up and starting in the early '50s and '60s, as you know, many companies started leaving New York and going to the suburbs. So White Plains and other areas around New Rochelle would start getting places like IBM was up the road and a whole bunch of companies moved out in the '50s and early '60s and established their corporate headquarters either in New Jersey or up the Hudson or out near White Plains. And so then more and more people would instead of going into New York City to work, would go in their car the other direction and work in one of those corporate headquarters up in, mainly, White Plains.

EB: Same thing happened to Poughkeepsie, New York.

TS: Oh sure.

EB: 'Cause we lived there at one point. I'll just get this last thing out of the way as far as completing our first tape and that is, the year your father was born, the year your mother was born and where they were born.

TS: Yeah, 1892 in Saugerties, New York which is right across the river from Poughkeepsie.

EB: That was your father.

TS: Yeah, and my mother was 1897 and she was born in Sparta, Illinois which is right on the Mississippi River south of St. Louis, but on the Illinois side.

EB: Your father was about 51…

TS: He died at 51 and my mother…

EB: Your mother was 86.

TS: She lived to be 86.

EB: Okay, got that. The education that you had in grade school was the typical New York state curriculum.

TS: Yeah, I still have some of my report cards.

EB: Really, all F's were they?

TS: All F's.

EB: Little Tommy.

TS: That's right; we had to take Regents Exams.

EB: Was it the kind of classroom where you stayed in the same class?

TS: Always.

EB: All day long.

TS: Always, with one nun. They were saints, how the hell could they put up with these, and we had 40 and 50 kids during the war. There were 40 and 50 kids; Celia and I were talking the other day, I don't recall a classroom with less than 40. I recall double classes because, I think, through the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, Celia and I were never in the same classroom. She was in one and I was in the other; and they had Vini and I separated.

EB: I'm sure they tried to separate you and Cecilia?

TS: Well, I don't know about that, if that was intentional. I can't remember their names, but there'd be about 40 of us and there'd be two eighth grades, and two seventh grades, and two sixth grades and that school was packed with kids.

EB: And you went from subject to subject to subject; from geography to English…

TS: You got it; 8:30 went to 2:30 or 3, whatever it was.

EB: And did you have a class called catechism?

TS: We had catechism, absolutely. Had to get up and recite the catechism and then we'd have, depending upon the year; you'd have math, and you'd have English, and you'd have history and social studies, and you had art or music. No, we never had music, there was no band, and there was none of that. The only music you got was if you joined the choir and had to sing on Sunday; and I had a very good voice and was always in the choir. So, you get off one afternoon a week early to go to choir practice, which was boys and girls; because the grade schools were boys and girls, it was in high school it became segregated. So we joined the choir and I was an altar boy, you could get out of class we used to love to do this. You could get out of class if you got appointed to serve at either a funeral or a wedding.

EB: I was just going to say the funerals.

TS: The funerals were great!

EB: Kids always looked forward to the funerals.

TS: Because they were usually around nine or 10 in the morning.

EB: And you could always go over and eat afterwards in the church.

TS: Right. What you'd hope is if the priest would say to you 'You come with me to the graveyard. We need an altar boy to hold the cross while they were putting the body in. You got out of class for several hours.

EB: Yes, I remember those days.

TS: And so the nun who ran the altar boys was always a favorite, you wanted to stay on her good side, because she'd be the one who'd give you the good funerals or the weddings to serve at.

EB: But see, only the boys could do that, they were lucky. The girls could sing in the choir. You had girls in your grade school.

TS: Oh yeah.

EB: The girls could sing in the choir.

TS: Absolutely.

EB: So, we got out then too, and those masses, especially if it was a high mass was generally around nine o' clock in the morning. It was wonderful.

TS: They were good ones; that was a good way to get out of school.

EB: Yeah, it was.

TS: Then they'd say 'Well we heard that funeral was over at 10:20 and here it is quarter to 11, where have you been?'

EB: Right, out comes the strap.

[Both laugh]

EB: Okay. So, let's get into high school. Because we know the classes that you had in grade school and you went to a Catholic prep school.

TS: Had to take an entrance exam.

EB: So, it wasn't just a free acceptance.

TS: No, you took an entrance exam. First of all, you had to pass all your Regent's.

EB: The idea being that you'd be good enough to get into college following this.

TS: Yeah, the assumption was that you'd be able to do their academic curriculum, which it was. Now, this prep school, they took kids from all over West Chester. I had classmates who would come up from the Bronx on the train; I had classmates who would come down from White Plains, Port Chester, Mount Vernon. All of West Chester, those kids, and they had busses where they'd pick them up or they'd come on trains. Of course, as when they got to be juniors and seniors, usually by the time you were a senior, they'd let you drive a car on campus.

EB: So this wasn't also a boarding school, where kids could stay.

TS: No. It was not a boarding school, no. Everyone had to go home at night. They came from all over West Chester, I don't recall, but there were roughly 70 or 80 freshman when I entered. There might have been 70 or so that graduated; again, we were split into two classes. Every class I ever had there were two sections of it, but in that case the brothers would come every hour and they'd move around; the students would sit still in the same seat. But one brother would come and teach Latin the first period, then some other brother would come in. So, your home room was where you sat and you stayed there all day long. But the brothers would come and rotate with whatever subject you're on as opposed to the grade school where the nun had you there all day long. So, we had two classes and Vini and I, again, were separated. He was always put across the hall from where I was. So freshman through senior, there were always two groups around I'm guessing 35 or 40 in a classroom. And every hour or 50 minutes, whatever it was, another brother would walk in and you'd take out your Spanish homework or your trigonometry or whatever the heck you were doing.

EB: Now was this an elective, Spanish?

TS: No.

EB: Latin would have been required.

TS: Latin was required.

EB: What about the other languages, romance languages?

TS: We didn't have a French teacher when we were there, they got one subsequently. Everyone had to take Spanish; you had no choice, as a second language. Everyone had to take the same, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, whatever, that whole series. Everybody had to take physics and chemistry, everybody had to take history and social studies, everybody took Latin, everybody had to take biology. There was no choice, there was no electives, but there you did have a choice of whether you wanted to join the band or be in the glee club or join the yearbook staff, there were a few of those. Those were usually an official time period, usually at the end of the day; and then, of course, like many prep schools in the New York area, sports was a big deal. They really encouraged it, so we had a very good football team. So, most of the boys went out for something, and if you were not in a competitive sport then you were encouraged to join the band, you were encouraged to be a cheerleader, or you'd run track. I recall everyone had to do some physical exercise.

EB: Did you have a golf team?

TS: Yeah, they did; a small one. I wish I learned, I've always said to many people, I regretted that my father died when he did because he was a marvelous golfer, as a matter of fact he was club champion at several different clubs he belonged to. He had been the club champion at the Dutchess County Country Club up in Poughkeepsie for years. He was a wonderful golfer, he was a left-handed golfer. Scratch golfer, he was marvelous; but anyway I grew up playing all of these team sports, none of which I've done since. The only thing I done as a team sport, was I played hockey and so I ice skate to this day. But, I wish I had learned tennis and golf, but all these other things that you learn as a team sport as a kid, and there's probably a value to it as far as peer acceptance and all that. But the few students who didn't participate in any sport had to go one afternoon and do P.E. which was usually running around the gym or something.

EB: Calisthenics, that kind of thing?

TS: Yeah, but everyone had to do that. So I played football and I played baseball and I sang in the glee club.

EB: Well, now this is probably a trite question, but of course we're interested in how you started thinking about medicine and as most high school kids, I bet you had no idea that you were going to go into medicine.

TS: None, none. As a matter of fact, no, it wasn't my thought. I was a very good student in math; I had won the New York State math prize. I was very good in science and I saw myself going to college and ending up somewhere in engineering. That's what I saw myself doing. I had a good teacher in physics, I had a good teacher in math; biology was not well taught. My mother was a nurse, but I had no role models for medicine.

EB: Didn't you go around with her maybe when she, because you were so little, when she went to these doctor offices.

TS: Never, not once, not once. No, never.

EB: No?

TS: Never, never once.

EB: You had no mentoring there.

TS: None, absolutely none. I found out subsequently, but only a few years ago that my great-great-grandfather was a physician.

EB: What side was that?

TS: Scully.

EB: Oh, that was a Scully. Where was he a physician?

TS: In England, in Tourquay. Where we talked about earlier, where Agatha Christie comes from. He was a physician, but his son came to this country as the canal builder, the engineer and his son became an orphan and that was my grandfather. So, I knew nothing about this until I was doing family history a few years ago.

EB: That was the only medical…

TS: But I knew nothing about it until three years ago. As a matter of fact Celia and I are going to go visit there this next spring. My mother didn't know it, my father didn't know it; there was no history of medicine in my family. My mother was a nurse, but that was nothing that she ever modeled for a boy. The only physician I knew was the family physician who also was the school physician; he was not a role model for me. I didn't particularly like him and he was not someone I would have wanted to be like; so, I never thought of medicine. Although we came, as I said, from a middle-class neighborhood, most of my friend's fathers who were business men they'd go into New York City. I don't recall ever being in a doctor's home as a kid. I'm almost absolutely sure that was not even anybody in my class who came, whose father was a doctor. That was very unusual. So, I went to college thinking I was going to end up in science somewhere; and the only reason why I ended up in medicine, I can tell you later when we get to college, was because of my roommate.

EB: Let's jump into that then. How did this happen? You went from high school; you had all the college prep…

TS: And I got a scholarship.

EB: You were good enough to get a scholarship and get into a good college.

TS: I also took a New York State competitive exam and got a scholarship from New York State which supplemented the one I got from Colgate based on the fact that my father had been a veteran. If your father was a veteran of one of the World Wars, you could compete for what it was called a New York State War Orphan Scholarship. It didn't mean your father died during the war, it meant he was a veteran and was dead. So, it was open only to fatherless kids and I competed for that and got a scholarship; so, when I went to Colgate I went with a free ride. That's not true. I went tuition free, books and all that; I had to work for my room and board, which I did, I can tell you that later. I always worked for my room and board. Anyway, I get to Colgate and the first year is all a core curriculum, they called it, everybody took the exact same course for the freshman year. The Korean War breaks out; a bunch of us, including my roommate, all join the Air Force ROTC. We didn't want to go off to war, we wanted to stay in college; we were draft dodgers, if you want to call it that. Many of us joined the ROTC; in order to do that, the president of the university and the faculty said anyone joining the ROTC will have to come back for the summer after the first year and make up the classes that they would need because ROTC was going to take several hours out of your curriculum each week; marching, and putting on a uniform, and all that. So I and a whole bunch of us, including my roommate spend the first summer at Colgate in summer school. I took a math course and I took some other course, I've forgotten exactly.

EB: Was this paid for through your scholarships?

TS: Yes, and paid for by the ROTC because they gave some extra money. So, the second year comes around, now you got to start making decisions; what are you going to start doing? So I say 'What are you going to do?' and he said 'Well, I'm interested in going into medicine.' Well, we started talking about it.

EB: This is your roommate?

TS: My roommate.

EB: What was his name? You haven't told me that yet.

TS: Dick Janeway, who eventually became the Dean of the Bowman Grey School of Medicine.

EB: Oh, so he did go into medicine.

TS: He was the Dean of Bowman Grey for 20 years and he's now Vice President for Health Affairs at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

EB: So this was your college roommate.

TS: And, he had been the Chairman of the Council of Deans, which Bob Daugherty has just now been elected to.

EB: So, you've kept in touch with him.

TS: Yeah, we were at each other's weddings. So, he started talking about that and I said 'Gee, I never thought about that. I don't know anything about medicine per say.' And I didn't have any strong feelings about anything. So, he said 'Well, I'm going to take the introductory course in zoology, or biology and chemistry, whatever. Why don't you come take that with me?' well, I said 'Fine.' I obviously had an aptitude for science. He was Phi Theta Kappa; he was one of the brightest guys I've ever known and I'm sure he dragged me through some of those courses.

EB: But you had a poor biology background.

TS: Poor. I didn't have a good biology background; and Colgate had a very, very good biology department and had a very good record of getting kids into medical school, but it was different than a lot of other places. You had to get through these three or four of these courses that Charlie Foster used to teach and he, took upon himself you could argue about this, that he made those courses so damn hard that if you passed them, he would be your advocate. He almost had a 100% record of getting kids into medical school, but only about 30% who signed up as sophomores ever got through his courses. So, he became the funnel, the conduit, and you could say 'Well, there are other places that say everybody can take the courses and we'll let the medical schools decide who will get in.' At any rate…

EB: That's why they had such a high rate of acceptance rate then, by the time people got through him, they knew.

TS: The schools could count on him, and the schools knew his graduates. Now, it was a very small school. Colgate, when I went there, it's bigger now, had 300 students per class, just about 1,200 students and of those maybe 60 started out as pre-meds in their second year and of those we only graduated 25 pre-meds, and all of us I think got into medical school, all but maybe one.

EB: So, when did you declare?

TS: So, I started taking in my second year, with him, and I started doing very well. Someone gave me terrible advice; they said 'Well, if you're going to go into medicine, you better take German; because all the scientific articles are written in German.' Well, that was 40 years behind the time and I took German and I absolutely hated it. Why I didn't get out early, I don't know; but I was ill advised. I don't blame this on Dick; he didn't tell me to take it, some faculty advisor. Well, I joined a fraternity, Dick and I go to the same fraternity along with several other pre-meds.

EB: What fraternity?

TS: Sigma Nu. During the second year we're there and they're helping me, I was probably the least talented of the four of them; and we had this little study club. All four of us did eventually go to medical school, so they helped me get through and I did all that. But I took German, and I don't know why, I should have taken Spanish, because I ultimately ended up going to Spain, I married a woman who speaks Spanish, her mother was born there; I should have taken Spanish, I didn't. I took this German, to finish this story, I bombed the final exam. The only 'F' I ever got in my life, the only 'F' I ever got. It's on my record, only 'F'. Well, that year, another roommate and I decided we were going to go to Alaska and work on the Alcan Highway. It was at that time a territory and his father had contracts with the government, so he got us these jobs. So, the summer of 1952, we're now finishing our second year; he and I get in a car, we leave New York and we had to drive to Anchorage in six days. We drove 900 miles a day non-stop, we stopped only to go to the bathroom and get a shower and eat. In his car, we drove all the way to Anchorage in six days because we had only eight days to get there to get these jobs; we had to be there on the 15^th of June. So, we get to Alaska and we work all that summer driving trucks with gravel while they were paving the Alcan Highway; we're paving the Alcan Highway and I come back home and we get back and it's about a week before school starts and I walk in the house and my mother is in tears, she knew I was coming home. I had kept in touch with her, I wrote letters, I was writing letters to Celia, and she said 'We got this letter from Colgate and they're taking away your scholarship because you got an 'F' in German.' I borrowed my brother's car and my mother and I drove up, made an appointment to see Dean Griffith, the very man who admitted me two years earlier. I told him the story, I said 'Yeah, I should have stuck around, but I had this job and I needed the money to go to school and I needed the money to help my mother' because we made very good money that's why we went. They were paying wonderful money 'and if you take one of my scholarships, I'll just drop out; I have to drop out. I'll join the army' the Korean War was still on. He said 'Alright, I'll make a deal with you. We'll give you a part scholarship for the first semester and if you do well, we'll give you back your scholarships.' He may have even given it to me I have forgotten and my mother, I'm sure, cried on his shoulder. So, I said 'Okay' and it was probably the best thing that happened to me, it was a real kick in the teeth; because it was the only 'F' I was sure that was going to keep me out of medical school. So, I'm now started my junior year and I'm taking the most difficult curriculum for pre-med. I took organic chemistry, I took comparative anatomy, I took embryology, I took physics, I took chemistry; 18 hours or something and I got straight A's. I studied my tail off. I got straight A's and then the next semester I got another straight A's. So, in my senior year when I applied to medical school, I had straight A's in all of the toughest courses; yes, I had an 'F' in German.

EB: There was no way of getting that…

TS: No, well, I guess I could have gone back and taken it, but I said 'the hell with it'.

EB: Never did it.

TS: No, never did. I didn't care. Who cares about that? So, when I went to be interviewed at several medical schools, every one of them asked me where this 'F' came from; so I told the story, just like I'm telling you to the directors of admission and two of them said 'I can understand that, it won't bother us'.

EB: Oh, great.

TS: 'We understand. Those things happen and you don't need German anymore; you were ill advised and you should have done something about it, but we're more interested in the rest of your record which is good.' Dick Janeway was helping me all through this and of course, as I said, we kept in touch all those years since. I'll tell you another story about him much later, when it deals with the medical school, but I don't want to get bypassed. That's the issue about getting involved and interested in medicine and it was mostly, I'd have to say, through the back door. It was really generated by an interest by my friend and then the fact that I did well in all of the courses that were pre-requisites; because my mother said 'If you go to medical school, you're going to have to take care of that yourself.' Well, I had taken care of everything up to that point, that's not totally true. My older sisters and brothers would every once in a while send me some money. One of my older sisters, one of the teachers who was employed at the time, she'd send me some money. My older brother would frequently send me a check for $50 or $25, so I could buy some clothes or something like that. I had cash, thanks to them. So, no, my older brothers and sisters were generous.

EB: So you worked all through college? The first summer you had that summer school.

TS: Summer school, but I worked that summer as well as in the…

EB: Alcan Highway.

TS: That was the second year, first year I was back at college for the ROTC, but I worked in the kitchen. I always worked in the kitchen and in the three years in the fraternity house; I had full ride scholarship, but the fraternity house gave me room and board and I would get up at six o'clock in the morning and cook breakfast for 60 fraternity brothers. I made enormous pots of scrambled eggs and slopped, I don't know how many on this enormous grill, these pancakes and these guys would come down and devour this stuff.

EB: It's good preparation for med school.

TS: It was. I waited on the tables at the fraternity house. In my senior year, I didn't do the breakfast anymore; I would do the dinner dishes, because I was busy with other things. So I would get in line by coming in after dinner was all over and I think they fed around 60 fraternity brothers, three meals a day and I would clean up the kitchen, do the pots and pans and all that sort of stuff.

EB: With all these activities what was your GPA?

TS: You got to throw out the 'F', I had almost all A's in college. I think I had all A's, well I'd have to go back and look but I might have gotten a 'B' in history or some other damn thing.

EB: So, by that point, you're really liking the sciences.

TS: Liking the biological sciences and getting a lot of encouragement from my roommate as well as several of my faculty members. Dr. Foster, who I told you earlier, was sort of the gate-keeper, you had to get through his courses and he liked me very much; wrote me some very lovely letter I still have when I got accepted into medical school and when I graduated four years later. He always liked me and he might have had some sympathy for me, not sympathy, but some understanding that I'm a kid without a father and my mother was struggling to get us all educated. So, he was always the sort of guy that would look at the underdog, I didn't feel an underdog at all; I had a good college education, I didn't miss out on much. I was dating Celia all through college.

EB: I would venture to say you really had God looking out after you lost your father; in addition to having a wonderful family, wonderful mother who was a strong person; all these people who helped you along the way.

TS: Oh yes, and probably one of the things that I've always been most interested in, in my professional career, is students.

EB: I think that's probably why you're giving it back and have been all these years.

TS: Yeah, I've always been interested in students and giving them always a second chance; now, a third, fourth, fifth chance, that's a different story. I don't think anybody should be thrown out because they made a mistake. [Tape stops for a moment] I think you're right, I'm sure that doing that you make mistakes, but I've always felt grateful that along the way a lot of mature men supported me and gave me a second chance. Certainly the Dean gave me an extra chance when I got an 'F'; he could have said 'Oh, sorry.'

EB: Oh sure.

TS: But he didn't, but then I proved myself. So, when I was given the second chance, I proved myself and there were other times when I was given a second chance. So, I'm at Colgate and I'm in a fraternity and I'm, as they said, slopping the hogs every morning and doing pre-med; and then the other thing I did the most was become a member of the Colgate Thirteen, and I traveled all over the country singing for four years. In my senior year, I was the leader of the Thirteen and, I think, we gave 100 and some concerts.

EB: What was that, what was the Colgate Thirteen?

TS: It's a singing group, the closest I can come to is sort of like the Whiffenpoofs, it was an a cappella group of men singers which is actually rather world famous now.

EB: I guess I never heard of it.

TS: Oh sure, we sung all over the place. I sang on the Red Skelton Show and I sang for Doris Day.

EB: Dr. Coddington belonged to a group here where the men sing, what is it that they call it?

TS: A cappella? [Tape cuts out] These are 13 college students at Colgate and we were founded in the 1940's and it was an honor at Colgate to get elected, first you had to have a good voice and we went all over the country singing, sang all over the place. So, that took a lot of my time and in the senior year, I was the leader; so every weekend, we'd leave school Thursday night, it turned out to be very fortuitous that the fact that I took those extra courses in the summer of my freshman year meant that I had enough credits to graduate in January of my senior year, I didn't I stayed on and I took a couple of extra courses, but then I essentially traveled. We went to Hollywood and we went to Nassau and we sang at the Apple Blossom Festival in Washington, and I sang in the Pump Room in Chicago, sang in the Red Skelton Show, we sang in concerts all over the place. But it was essentially a cappella men's group, very much like the Whiffenpoofs at Yale.

EB: That was a big deal for a kid from New Rochelle and west of the Hudson River.

TS: Oh yeah, well that was the first time I ever was on an airplane, I guess was when we flew from Chicago to Denver and on to L.A. to do a series of concerts in the spring of 1953 and we drove to Chicago and then we flew on the private airline of the president of United Airlines whose son was a member of our group and his name was Patterson, that's his name. Mr. Patterson was the president of United Airlines in those days, so we sang all over the place; I've got a whole folder, I won't bring that out. But it probably gave me the first experience; I'd always been a good singer, as a matter of fact I sang all the solos in the church choir and I sang solos in high school for the glee club.

EB: What did you sing? Tenor?

TS: Baritone.

EB: Baritone.

TS: Mostly show tunes. So, I had been on the stage before and I had a fair amount of stage presence, I was never frightened of that; and then being the leader of the Thirteen, I got up in front of all sorts of people on TV and then, large and small gatherings, we sang at sororities, we sang at fraternities, we sang wherever people would listen to us. Usually what we would do is sing for nothing, they would give us our supper, or they'd maybe pay our transportation, or put us up overnight in a hotel; but as the Thirteen I had to arrange all that and I had to be the person that met people. So, I think that was probably my first experience in being a leader of a group and learning some of the skills of getting people to work together, college kids you had to keep in line, especially if couple of them drank too much or they acted up.

EB: Did you have a manager or a teacher?

TS: No, no.

EB: There was no head adult? I mean you were adults then, but…

TS: No, as a matter of fact it was not an official sanction function of the university and we refused to have a leader, we were doing it on our own and we did it on our own time, we always were approved by the university and they were glad to have us because we were great PR and we were well behaved, but we weren't a glee club in the sense that we had some director or some faculty leader, we did it all ourselves. We made all of our own arrangements, we traveled.

EB: Were there 13 people?

TS: Well, there were about 30 of us in the group, but 13 would sing at any one time; because it was three quartets, essentially. Three basses, three baritones, three tenors and three first and second tenors and that would be twelve and then one leader.

EB: When did that start?

TS: Started in '42.

EB: This was not for school credit.

TS: Oh gosh, no. It was all extracurricular; did it on your own.

EB: The word I was trying to think of was Barbershop quartets, that kind of sound.

TS: Yes, I did sing in a Barbershop quartet as well in my freshman year at Colgate, but this was not Barbershop singing. We sang show tunes; you can listen to this, the kind of tunes we sang.

EB: I'd love to.

TS: Kind of the tunes we sang. As a matter of fact, some of these I think my voice is even on here. What we did was put together all of the recordings we had done through 30 years, we just had our 50^th reunion.

EB: My word. Did you know Fred Coddington, Dr. Coddington?

TS: No, no. Well, I know him.

EB: You do know him?

TS: Oh sure, but I knew nothing about his singing.

EB: And you didn't continue that in your post-school days.

TS: No, and I've often sort of regretted that. Celia plays the piano and we'll sing around here when we want to, but no, I've never stayed in an organized group, dropped by the wayside through medical school.

EB: Well that's understandable, but what about now, through your church?

TS: No, I sing when everybody else sings and I don't know exactly why, maybe I overdosed on it; I'm not sure. 'Cause I sang in organized from, I think, I entered the choir and church when I was maybe, fifth grade. That's a good question I can't answer, but I don't think I've ever been in an organized singing group since I got out of college in 1954.

EB: Well, you were pretty busy; having your practice, raising your kids.

TS: Well, it was four years of medical school, then there was the residency, and then there was the Air Force and all the rest.

EB: Let's get out of college; we'll come back with other questions on that. Did you take MCAT's? At that time, were there MCAT's?

TS: Yes, they had just started; you're absolutely right. The MCAT's had just begun, and Dick Janeway and I and a couple of others went up to Syracuse to a building in the University of Syracuse campus. It was an all day Saturday exam and with pencil and paper and we took those exams; 'cause it had just come out, it was relatively new, whether that actually influenced people getting into medical school I have absolutely no idea. 'Cause subsequently when I went to Albany Medical College, which is Union University in Albany, New York; Union, the parent university, is in Schenectady. We were one of the first to use the National Boards as a final exam at the end of the second year, in order to go on, and at the end of the fourth year, in order to graduate. The National Board Examinations were just being started in the early '50s and they were not accepted by every school for a long period of time, many states did not accept them. Nevada didn't accept them when I came out here, you had state exams; hell, Texas just recently began to accept them. So, nationalized standardized exams began in the '50s, but weren't really accepted nation-wide until much, much later. But yes, there was an MCAT, I did take it, I haven't the slightest idea of how I did.

EB: You don't know.

TS: No, they didn't give us any grades and I have no idea whether it influenced my getting into medical school or not.

EB: Where did you apply?

TS: I applied to three schools. I applied to Cornell, and Columbia, in New York City, and I applied to Albany. I interviewed at all three of them, I got accepted in Albany and that's where I went.

EB: How did you rank them?

TS: No, it was mostly wherever you were going to get in; and Charlie Foster said 'I don't think you're going to get into Columbia or Cornell, but apply; but I'm quite sure you can get into Albany and what Charlie would do with the 25 or so who had gone through his rigorous pre-med program. He would wander around the country and talk to the deans of admissions and say 'Well, I really think Scully will fit into your school and Janeway will fit into your school.' And it was funny, it was nothing like it is today; we sort of accepted him as the father who would see to it and take care of us somehow. Frankly, when I applied, although I had done very well in my junior year, as I told you after coming back from Alaska; I applied and I knew Dick and the two other guys who were going to get in because they were tops in the class, I was not. I was a good student, but not tops; and so I said 'Well, I'm going to leave it at this; if I get accepted, I'm going to medical school, if I don't get accepted, I join the Air Force' because I was in the ROTC and I would owe them back, I had to pay back my time. The only reason I didn't have to pay back the Air Force my time is because I got accepted into medical school, they deferred me and then later in the medical school, the end of my second year, I joined the Air Force in order to have enough money to marry Celia and finish medical school, because I had no money. So I joined the Air Force program at the end of my second year; having been a ROTC student in the Air Force at Colgate and I graduated as the distinguished military graduate, I did very well in the ROTC. When I applied at the end of my second year in medical school, they took me right away, gave me a commission, gave me a salary every month, Celia and I got married, I spent the next ten years in the Air Force.

EB: But you stayed in medical school.

TS: And they paid my way as a medical student.

EB: But you were in the Air Force at that time.

TS: In the Air Force, on active duty. They sent me a check every month.

EB: Boy, you must have thought you died and went to heaven to get a salary.

TS: I did, as a matter of fact, Celia and I got married at the end of my second year; when Celia and I left medical school, we had more cash in the bank than we had for probably the next 10 or 15 years, because she worked until she had Peter, our first son, and we got a nice check from the Air Force; we banked her check and we lived on mine or vice versa.

[End]