Transcript: Tape 8 Side A

DATE: April 1, 1998
TAPE: Tape 8
INTERVIEWEE: Thomas Scully, M.D.
INTERVIEWER: Eileen Barker
PLACE: Dr. Scully's home, 1400 Ferris Lane in Reno
TRANSCRIPTIONIST: Teresa Garrison (Revised 2017, Haley Kovac)

---

Thomas Scully: …Rush for you, but don't rush for me.

Eileen Barker: Okay, today's April 1st. [Microphone muffled] We're going to continue now, we were in Spain.

TS: Right. Got there in the summer of '61.

EB: You said you had some more things to tell me about Spain and summer of '61, you left there.

TS: We left there in the summer of '64; so we were there three full years.

EB: You loved it?

TS: Oh yeah. I mislead you the other day, we lived on a base-housing unit, but it was not at the Air Force base. It was about 15 miles away from the base and just on the outskirts of Madrid; there was very little actual housing on the base itself. And most of that was for the colonels and the generals, but the rest of us, almost everybody, airmen and officers lived in Royal Oaks, it was called, Encinar de los Reyes. It was Royal Oaks and it was a housing…

EB: And what was the name? In Spanish.

TS: Royal Oaks. Oh, Encinar…

EB: E-…

TS: E-N-C-I-N-A-R Encinar de D-E L-O-S los Reyes R-E-Y-E-S.

EB: Kings.

TS: Royal Oaks, the Kings' Oaks. Royal Oaks. So, what happened every morning we'd all drive to work; there were several buses, you could get on a bus and several people took the bus everyday. But most of the physicians drove because we weren't on a nine to five or eight to five schedule. We had to stay there as long as there were patients to take care of. So, we carpooled and that's where I first met Ted and Parvin Jacobs, who were very influential in my life. And actually were the reasons, among others, that we came to Nevada several years later. Ted was born and raised in New York and Parvin of course was Tehran, and she was Persian and had gone to the Sorbonne and then gone to New York and got her medical degree at New York Medical College where she and Ted had met. So, they met in medical school, they got married, they did their residencies in Internal Medicine out here in San Francisco at the Moffitt Hospital in U.C. And then, like others, Ted had an obligation to the Air Force; so he was sent to Spain and Parvin was employed as a civilian physician and she would take care of a lot of the women.

EB: Both internists?

TS: Both internists. He of course was an active duty Air Force; she was hired as a civilian physician. But anyway, they lived up the street in Royal Oaks, they lived up the street from us. And we would carpool, there were several other people. So, that's when I got to know them. And they were studying to take, ‘cause they were just out of their residencies like the rest of us, they were studying to take their Medicine Boards and I was studying to take my Pediatric Boards. So, most mornings I'd sit in the back of the car, Ted would drive and Parvin would be sitting in the right seat and we would quiz each other. I would ask them questions from their list of study questions and they'd ask me. So, for a number of months in that first year, that would be 1961, '62 because I took my Boards in '63; I think they took theirs in '62. We would ride to work, was maybe a 20-minute ride, if there was a lot of traffic it might, I think, take a half an hour to get there. So, to get from Royal Oaks to the base, was a good half hour drive in the commuting hour. And we would talk medicine and at that point, I guess it was Ted's idea, I'm not sure exactly; we decided that there was no academic or educational program at the base hospital. But there was something like 18 American physicians and about eight or 10 Spanish physicians as I said earlier but we had no way of talking medicine. Once a month they'd have officers call, which meant most of the officers would go to the officer's club and have a drink or two.

EB: No, Grand Round?

TS: No, nothing. That's what I'm saying, we instituted it. We started having every Friday afternoon an education program that was Grand Rounds, but small because all we had was 20-some odd physicians all total, maybe 30 at most. But any physician who had an interesting patient in the hospital would call Ted or I like on Tuesday or Wednesday of that week and we'd say ‘Fine, come and discuss it.' And so, I got sort of interested then in putting on conferences, ‘cause then they assigned me the job of putting on conferences. So, I'd call around ‘Do you have anything interesting?' if not, one of us would give a lecture and one of us would get up. Ted, of course, was studying for his Boards, I was studying; there were several others also studying for their specialty Boards. So, we were pretty well-trained right out of our training, pretty bright and we were up to date on reading. We were reading all the time, you had to read-

EB: Library there?

TS: We had a nice library, but I put that together with Ted's help. Ted was really, as Chief of Medicine, he was sort of my boss within the structure of the hospital. So, we put together a-

EB: Pediatrics came under medicine?

TS: Uh-huh, sure. It was a small hospital, but that was administratively speaking. Ted would, for example, write my evaluations because he was senior to me and somebody else a hospital commander would write his.

EB: So, if you wanted something like books, how would you request that?

TS: We would go down at the meeting each week and we'd say ‘We need the journal of X, Y, Z; we don't have it. We need some decent book in medicine, we don't have any.' And we'd go to the hospital commander and he'd order them and he was very good about it. Because we had shown an interest, a number of us, Ted primarily was the leader, we started putting together a library, they gave us a room; so then we had a place to study, a place to work. Of course I recognized that he and Parvin were excellent physicians. As a matter of fact, Parvin helped me, I'll never forget this, helped me one night. She was at home and I was at the hospital taking care of a young diabetic who came in and had ketoacidosis, which is a life-threatening disease. And it was the first one that I had ever cared for myself; I told you yesterday that one important part of going to Spain and now out of the cocoon of the university hospital, I was on my own. I now had to fish or cut bait, if it were. So, I was nervous and I wasn't sure what I was doing, so I'd get on the phone and she'd walk me through. Because she had a lot of experience with that. She would walk me through what to do and I'll never forget that. But anyway, much later and we'll get to that, they were influential in our going to Las Vegas and coming to Nevada. So, they became very good friends, Ted and Parvin became good friends in San Francisco when they were residents there with Barnaby Conrad who wrote La Fiesta Brava and wrote about bullfighting. So, they'd got interested in it when Ted came to Spain, he used to go on Sunday afternoon and take bullfighting lessons; but with small bulls with their horns covered, but he learned all the technique of bullfighting and learned all of the history of it.

EB: What did you think of bullfighting?

TS: Well, I only went a couple of times.

EB: What did Cecilia think of bullfighting?

TS: She never went.

EB: She didn't-

TS: No, no, no. Although one time, I have a photograph I can show you later. One time we had a hospital party and we went out to a little finca which is sort of a little country estate where they had a little practice ring. And they led in this cow that had probably weighed about 200 pounds, had no horns, or maybe it had little horns and they put rubber balls on the end. And a bunch of us had too much sangria and get out there in this ring and this thing would knock us over. Ass over teakettle, excuse my French. The one time we did that I remember coming home at night and Celia said ‘You know, you were acting silly, you had too much to drink.' And I took off my pants and my legs were just black and blue where this cow had run all over me [chuckles]. Why people would do such nonsense. At any rate-

EB: Did you ever go to the bull running?

TS: No, never. I never did, up in Pamplona. Ted did, and several others went and several of my friends went; but that always frightened us. But of course Celia and I have always been frightened of crowds and we don't like to be in crowds. And besides that's a dumb thing, frankly; it was romanticized by Ernest Hemingway and all that. No, we never went and I think I only went to two bull fights in my life. At least I can say I went, Celia never went, I think I took Peter once he was maybe a four, five-year-old at the time. But, I wasn't interested. But it was interesting in Spain at the time, on Sunday afternoon the bull fights would be on TV, the way you see football.

EB: It's still like that. We just got back and it's just like that. [Inaudible]. When the matador was killed a couple of years ago and they replay that thing every 15 minutes.

TS: Oh God. Like a Joe DiMaggio homerun.

EB: It was. Talk about instant replay, but over and over and over again.

TS: One of the scariest experiences Celia had, I was telling you earlier, when we got to Spain we had enough money and time and a maid so we could go on vacations. We went to Rome and we were there when Pope John was the pope and Vatican Two was on. And we were in St. Peter's and when we got up close to the main alter where he was going to come through. And the crowd was pushing so hard we felt like we were going to be crushed and I actually lifted Celia up and sat her on the pedestal of some statue of some saint to get her off the floor. And it was crazy, absolutely craziness. So, whenever we think there's going to be a crowd of any kind, we go the opposite direction.

EB: Did you see the Pope?

TS: Oh sure, he went right by us and that was sort of an important part. And then of course subsequently, another interesting experience we had in Spain, one of the times we went south. We went south to Valencia and then down to Cartagena. Oh, we went to all those places. But this one time, went to Cartagena, went to a number of places with Celia's aunt. And on our way home, we stopped in a town in Murcia to go into a bar, it was a pretty poor town. And we wanted to get a little sandwich and something to drink and that was going to be our halfway stop and we wanted to get to Madrid that night and the roads were pretty bad, so we had a number of hours to go. So, we go in to the bar, so we're sitting there and the TV is on; ‘cause we had been on the road and hadn't paid attention we didn't read a newspaper in most of the hotels we stayed in didn't have TV's. And they were announcing the death of Pope John XXIII, but what was amazing was they're showing people all over the world mourning his death. Then Pope Paul VI was elected, and there in St. Patrick's Cathedral it shows a man kneeling there at his lunch hour saying some prayers, and it's one of Celia's neighbors from New Rochelle we hadn't seen in years. And here we are in a little bar, this tiny little TV set, 1962, I think it was 1962 and here we're sitting having a beer or a Coke and a sandwich with her aunt, watching the TV and here they're showing the mourning of Pope John XXIII, [chuckles] here's a neighbor of Celia's in St. Patrick's Cathedral. But because we had the chica we did a lot of travelling with other physicians; we went to Seville and we went to Granada, went to Gibraltar with friends of ours. He now practices in Modesto, we've been friends with them for 35 years. Of course, we've been friends with Ted and Parvin Jacobs. But other physicians who were in Spain with us who ultimately ended up in Las Vegas. When we got to Las Vegas a couple years later, they used to call us the Spanish Mafia ‘cause I think there were about nine of us that had been at Torrejón Air Force Base Hospital together all ending up in Las Vegas. But that was primarily because of Ted Jacobs, who had a friend in Vegas, they said ‘This place is growing, Nevada is going to boom someday. There are very few doctors here, you don't have to go back to New York, come here.'

EB: And you wanted to be in the southwest. Decided that early on.

TS: Wanted to be in the southwest.

EB: Who was the friend in Vegas?

TS: Well, matter of fact he tells it in his oral history.

EB: Oh. Okay.

TS: His oral history which was for the Board of Medical Examiners, Ted Jacobs has about a 30-page oral history in there. And you have a copy of that.

EB: I do.

TS: The big thick one. And in there, he tells that story. But he was the first to get out, he finished his time, I think he left in '63. He got out and he started writing back to the rest of us, telling us what a wonderful place Vegas was and it was growing. Then it was only a couple hundred thousand people, now it's more than a million and a half probably. But the man, I think, owned a radio station.

EB: Oh his friend was not a physician.

TS: No. His friend was not a physician. So, in Torrejón I learned a lot from these guys; there was Ted and Parvin Jacobs that's two internists; there was Tommy Armour, the golfer's son, and Jim Gorman they were two surgeons, they went to Las Vegas; Bill Harris was an orthopedic surgeon, he went to Las Vegas; Harry Knudson and Jim Lum were both radiologists, they went to Las Vegas and we were friendly with them for years; and then I eventually came. I think I was the eighth, there was someone else I may be leaving out. But anyway, this core of eight or nine young, well-trained physicians of different specialties…

EB: ‘Spanish mafia'.

TS: …practicing in Madrid. When each of us got out of the Air Force, and all of us were paying back time, were attracted to go to Las Vegas now. There were the other eight or 10 that were there when we were there went to other places; Dan Allen went to Modesto and one of the ENT guys went to Albuquerque. Many of that group ended up coming out to the west anyway. But anyway, it was a very, very good medical community.

EB: But you didn't go directly to Las Vegas.

TS: No, I had two more years in the service.

EB: In San Antonio.

TS: In San Antonio. I was in San Antonio from the summer of '64 to the summer of '66.

EB: We have to get to that.

TS: Yeah, we'll get to that.

EB: Tell me about the Boards. Any surprises?

TS: For Pediatric Boards?

EB: Yeah, when you took your Boards…in '63.

TS: Pediatrics at that time was a two-part Board and you had to take the written exam and if you passed that then six months or so later you would took the oral.

EB: And they paid for you to fly back. Where did you go?

TS: So, I went to Wiesbaden for the written exam. And a number of us came from all of the European theater and took the written exam there. In December of '63, I was flown back to Washington, I told you the story, I chose Washington because I wanted to see what else was available, I had two more years. The rest of these people were all getting out of the service, I still had two more years to go.

EB: That's when you looked up your…sergeant friend.

TS: That's when I looked up my old sergeant friend. But, I recall, I told you I studied several days. Actually, I think I stayed with Celia's mom and dad in New Rochelle and spent about a week; I didn't want to have jetlag. So, I spent I think about a week there studying, then I took the train to Washington, took the exam, which was a two-day oral exam. The written exam had been the previous year in Wiesbaden and that was a wonderful experience; because in those days, they would give you a little vignette, written out and a photograph of a patient and in this photograph it was a kid who had red blotches, purpura all over his body. And so, I went through the whole differential diagnosis of why a six- or seven-year-old kid, whatever it was, would have this. And in the differential I mentioned scurvy, well, the examiner sort of chuckled and they laughed and one of them, I think there were two, I think you rotated around every hour to a different examiner so you had to talk to four or five examiners and they get their heads together and decide if you pass. At any rate, he chuckled and said ‘Well now, tell me Dr. Scully, when was the last time you saw anyone with scurvy?' and I said ‘Well, I've got a patient in the hospital right now.' he said ‘You do? Where do you practice?' ‘Cause he didn't know. [EB: (laughs)] They weren't allowed to ask anything about us; it was all supposed to be objective. I said, ‘Well, I practice in Madrid and I've got this kid from a pueblo who has scurvy…'

EB: The mom boiled the milk.

TS: And he said ‘You're kidding me, what other things have you seen?' So, he got off the exam and I started telling him about seeing a kid with diphtheria and seeing a kid with an echinococcosis to the lung and seeing a kid with brucellosis, a number of other diseases which I had read about, never saw in the United States, I've never seen since.

EB: He must have been drooling to get over there and see this.

TS: [chuckles] Well, I don't know about that. He was an older professor of one of the medical schools. And then he started asking me all about those and I don't know he ever asked me another question in that exam. So, I got up and walked out and went to another room. But it was funny when he said ‘Well, when was the last time you saw a patient with scurvy?' ‘Well, I've got one in the hospital.' [Both laugh] I'll never forget that experience.

EB: He didn't expect that.

TS: No, he didn't.

EB: That reminds me of a wonderful story that you'll get a kick out of. Sister Dominga and Sister Carl were driving on the freeway down to San Rafael. And they got stopped for speeding and Sister Carl was driving, she was the dean of women at Manogue; Sister Dominga, of course, was the administrator for St. Mary's. And the policeman pulled them over thought he would be smart as he swaggered up to the car; he said, ‘Okay Sister, show me your pilot's license.' And she did. [Both laugh] She had a pilot's license.

TS: Well, the other part of that experience that I remembered, I told you earlier, I started smoking because Jack Wolfe who was the chairman and I just got a notice and he died at the age of 90-something. A professor of anatomy, but he was a chain-smoker and he allowed anybody to smoke in the anatomy lab. So, I started smoking then, when I entered medical school in '54. And on my way back from taking my Boards in Washington D.C. in 1963, December; I obviously had been studying hard, I was under stress undoubtedly, I got the flu and I had to wait a day in Washington before the plane left to go back. It would fly to Wiesbaden, then Wiesbaden down to Madrid that was the way you got there. And I got sicker than a pig and I thought it was infectious mononucleosis all over again. It may have been, I don't know because I've had that a few years earlier as we talked. And, I was on this plane, I think it was a propeller plane, it could have been a jet, but it seemed interminable; I was exhausted, I was shaking, I had chills, I had fever, of course I never wanted to look at a cigarette. Wiesbaden is socked in so they set us down in an airbase in France someplace where we sat on the runway or someplace, I think maybe they took us to the officer's club. We sat there for hours waiting for the plane. So finally, after about three days, with fever and I get home and Celia says ‘You look like you're dying.' And I went to bed I must have spent about a week or ten days; I had the flu, I had something. But during that time, I never had a cigarette. So, as I got better, two weeks gone by I've passed my Boards, the big stress is over, life is beginning to look good, I never picked up another cigarette after that.

EB: That's great.

TS: Essentially cold turkey. But for years after and I'd say even today, 30 years later, if I'm sitting in a restaurant, or sitting someplace having a good meal, I've had a glass of wine and I smell cigarette smoke go by, I think I could probably still pick up a cigarette and smoke it.

EB: My word.

TS: It was so identified in my mind with meals and smoking after dinner.

EB: You can certainly understand addictions then, can't you?

TS: I swear to it and I tell the story to people say ‘Oh, you don't know what you're talking about.' Now, of course, we avoid smoking airlines, they don't smoke anymore; we avoid smoking restaurants and hotels.

EB: Well, they do still on the overseas flights, don't they?

TS: Not anymore on American. All American now is non-smoking.

EB: Oh, is that so? Even the overseas?

TS: Overseas, they just started that last year. They had it for a couple of years where it was every other flight to whatever town you're going to. It doesn't bother me anymore ‘cause I'm not around smokers; but it's almost always after a meal and after I've had a drink. ‘Cause I always associated having a cocktail or a glass of wine in Spain with a cigarette.

EB: Everyone smoked in Spain.

TS: Oh yes, all over Europe. Isn't that funny? That's 1963, so that's 35 years ago and I could still be tempted; it obviously triggers in me this association with alcohol, I didn't drink that much, but a cocktail, wine with a meal, a good meal, and a little glass of Cognac and sit there and have a cigar.

EB: Did Celia ever smoke?

TS: Never smoked a cigarette. And you know something? Not one of my five children have ever smoked that I ever know of, they may have tried a cigar or something. They've never smoked, they claimed they've never smoked; I've never seen them smoke in this house.

EB: But they never have it in their house either; except that time when you were smoking when they were babies.

TS: And of course now I feel guilty [EB: Yes, of course.] because I smoked very heavily the last year from '62-'63 when I was studying for my Boards.

EB: The stress, sure.

TS: I would get up from the dinner table. Now, as I've said earlier, we had a chica so she'd do the dishes and Celia and I could sit and play with the kids. The kids would go to bed, we had more free time, but then I'd sit down with a book and I'd start lighting up cigarettes and read maybe ‘til midnight when I was studying really hard for my Boards. So, I was going through several packs a day, and I'm not sure who I ever said this to, maybe Lew Barness ‘cause I smoked in my residency. I don't think I ever smoked in front of a patient; in other words, I never lit up a cigarette when I was seeing a patient. Between patients, I'd go in the hallway, you could smoke or go wherever you could go.

EB: It wasn't the emphasis on the non-smoking…

TS: No, not in those days.

EB: And certainly not in the military.

TS: Oh gosh no. Oh gosh and hell they gave cigarettes away for practically nothing. You could buy them for nothing. So, as you point out, that gave me some insight into what it must be like, and by nowhere am I comparing the two, but must be like to an alcoholic or another addictive personality to be exposed to…

EB: To crave it.

TS: To crave it and then once they start not being able to…

EB: You never fell off the wagon then.

TS: Nope, never once had a cigarette after that.

EB: Amazing.

TS: I don't think I've ever had a cigarette since.

EB: Did your father smoke?

TS: No…Well…

EB: Do you remember?

TS: No. He might have when he was younger. Remember, he had a heart attack three or four years before he died. Now, we're back to the time when I'm seven or eight when he had his first heart attack.

EB: Did he make the connection between the heart attack and smoking?

TS: I doubt it in those days. Maybe it was just a matter of…I don't know. I don't recall smoking in my house; now, my brother and one of my sisters smoked for a while. My brother Bob smoked like a fiend…

[Vacuum turns on in the background]

EB: That's okay, it won't come through.

TS: Okay. He smoked very heavily and I don't know if my other brothers smoked.

EB: I'll just close this.

TS: Push it.

[Vacuum sound ends]

TS: I frankly don't remember, but I know my brother did. At any rate, that was another memory I had of Spain, going there smoking and coming home and not smoking after that. Then of course we remember most of those were personal stories about Celia and I and friends just traveling all over. As a matter of fact, it's not unlike, I guess, many Americans who never see their own country or New Yorkers who never go to the Empire State Building. Most of the Spanish physicians with whom we worked, we would go off and wander all over Spain in these pueblos and spend a weekend here or four days there, and come back and be telling them about their own country. And many of them, they had been overseas, they'd been to the United States and been to England. But many of them have never seen much of their own country. They lived in Madrid and they might go to one of the coasts for the summer. They might go to Valencia for the summer and they might have gone to the south in the winter.

EB: Did you go to the place in Granada?

TS: The Alhambra. Oh yeah. Yeah, we stayed at the Alhambra Palace. We stayed there and we stayed also at the Paradores… San Francisco.

[cross-talk]

EB: We couldn't get in.

TS: No, ‘cause they only have about 10 rooms. And we went on the off season in the middle of winter, we arranged it so we were there on a Tuesday or Wednesday and we went in. It was very nice, it's the famous, I think, Paradores San Francisco. The rest of my experiences in Spain were related to friendship that then continued on [inaudible] back to this country. What I've always felt, Celia and I talk about, is growing up as a physician; being on my own for the first time and beginning to assume responsibility for my actions, you couldn't blame anybody else, there was nobody else to look to. So you had to sort of grow up in that sense professionally and take responsibility and credit. I can remember a couple of kids that I'm sure I screwed up the way I treated them and made mistakes, but that's also part of…

EB: What was the system of checking up on, say, your cases? Did you have a Department of Pediatrics meetings?

TS: There was no department, there was two of us. It was just the two of us.

EB: If you had a patient get in trouble, who was your…

TS: I would call Lucas and ask his help and then I would call Ted Jacobs and if we were really in trouble, they'd crank up an airplane and fly the kid to Wiesbaden.

EB: So there was no review of records.

TS: Well, yes, yes, they did have record committee. And part of this Friday afternoon meeting that we instituted was we discussed all deaths, there weren't many, we discussed all complications. So, yes, there was a mechanism by where the chief of staff; who at that time was another internist Murph Chesney, who actually became the surgeon general years later, he got three stars. He became the surgeon general 20-some years later. Matter of fact, I put on a reunion in Spain in 1990 and I ran it with others and we got back about 90 physicians who had practiced in Madrid for over a 35-year period. And Murph Chesney was the surgeon general at the time in Washington. And I called him on the phone and he put me in touch with one of his sergeants; and they went through their computer records and sent me a list of every single physician that they ever knew had practiced there, from 1958 when the base opened until, the base closed in '92. At any rate, yes, he was the chief of staff and he was Ted Jacobs' boss. Yes, we did have to report to him every morning if there were any complications; so there was a mechanism.

EB: There was a system.

TS: There was a system, the Air Force had a system. Because we were fairly isolated, they would have consultants coming from Wiesbaden, but they'd also have consultants come from the United States. And I remember several professors of medicine and pediatrics and others who probably got a free trip to Madrid for two or three days.

EB: Not bad duty.

TS: Yeah. They would come out to the base, they would inspect and they would talk to us. But there was a general sense that we were practicing pretty good medicine, and there was a general sense that there was a checks and balances, there was someone always overlooking. And obviously the nurses had their mechanisms if some child or, for that matter, of any patient was in complications that would get to the chief nurse, so there was a mechanism. Ultimately the commander of the hospital who was an old GP, I guess career officer, he'd come around. Although, he, generally, didn't interfere too much in the way we took care of patients that was pretty much left to us. But there was a mechanism and you got into trouble you had someone to call and you could always get on the horn and call Wiesbaden, and if you wanted to, you could get on the horn and call someone in San Antonio. So, there was a mechanism.

EB: Did you lose any patients.

TS: Yes, there was one young child died of acute rheumatic fever. I'm not sure that I knew enough at the time if I was capable of it, but he went into congestive heart failure and had an arrhythmia and died. That's the only one I know of who died. And then the occasional infant death.

EB: Autopsies?

TS: Oh sure, we had two pathologists. We had an American pathologist and, not true, we had a Spanish pathologist, we didn't have any American pathologists at the time. So, he did autopsies, he also did the bone marrows and he also ran the laboratory like any pathologist would do.

EB: Did you have any students there?

TS: Oh no, no, no.

EB: These were all career or-

TS: Oh no, all career. Occasionally one of the Spanish physicians, several of them had faculty appointments at the University of Madrid, and occasionally one of them would bring, with permission, to the base one of their students or one of their residents.

EB: But no interns?

TS: No, no, no, no, no.

EB: These were all working physicians.

TS: Yeah, there was nothing like that.

EB: Paying back time in most cases.

TS: Yeah, by taking care of the military. It was also the first time, which later became important in my career with the Board of Medical Examiners, it's the first time that I had seen an Air Force physician who was subsequently discharged, who I won't name, who was addicted to codeine. And people suspected it and the physicians and the nurses, not in pediatrics, another specialty, with whom he worked were always concerned that he would often be late for work or he would disappear for 15 or 20 minutes. And all of what I now know to be the classic behavior of an addictive physician avoiding detection.

EB: Did you recognize it?

TS: I'm not sure…

EB: Or was it just the gossip.

TS: Well, maybe the gossip, but I'm not sure I really recognized it. But someone reported it to the commanding officer and he called me and he said he wanted me and another physician to go in with him; so there'd be witnesses, to go into the doctor's lounge and he would open the doctor's locker, which he did. And in there were piles, literally piles of empty small bottles of elixir, terpin hydrate, and codeine which used to be called G.I. Gin, which was a cough syrup. And you didn't need a prescription in the Air Force they were about two ounce bottles and you could hand them out without a prescription to anybody who had a cough. So, the emergency room or the clinic they were frequently handed out, [inaudible] people [inaudible] coughing, you could never overdose on two ounces of ETH and codeine, G.I. Gin. But, this fellow would pocket them and between cases or whenever he had time between patients and his locker was actually jammed. How anyone could possibly swallow [EB: How he could stand it.] six or eight or 10 ounces whatever it took, I have no idea. And I don't know that much about codeine addiction. Well, with that evidence, he was confronted and he was sent back to the United States and subsequently discharged. Now, I don't know, this is 1963, I do not know whether that man ever got into a drug and alcohol treatment program. Because, remember, most of our modern understanding of alcohol and drug addiction of physicians really is a thing of the ‘70s and the ‘80s. The Georgia program, and it's only been in the last 10 or 15 years that even Boards of Medical Examiners have developed and county societies and state societies. So this is 15, 20 years before that and I've never seen or heard of the man since. And the other fellow who went in and opened his locker and I was the witness, I've kept in touch with. He eventually became a professor at the University of Florida and I used to see him at various meetings and we would always remember this experience. It was the first experience I ever had of being made aware of addiction in physicians and of course everybody knew that there were officers, whether they were doctors or others would tie one out of the officer's club. Alcohol flowed like water and as long as you didn't come showing up drunk to work and you could sober up by Monday morning, no one paid too much attention to what you did Friday and Saturday night. Except it might have ruined your relationships, and your family, and your marriage and all that. So, I can recall both there and in other Air Force bases I was at in San Antonio there were a couple of physicians who were very, very heavy drinkers. But even then in the ‘60s we didn't label them ‘alcoholic' any more than we would label lots of businessmen and lawyers and others because unless you were falling down drunk and couldn't keep a job… [EB: Or showed up…] and you were able to show up on the job and put in your eight hours, whether you had martinis for lunch or in the evening and went and slept it off is nobody else's business. Well that, of course, has changed and you know full well; when you were at Saint Mary's, I'm sure, there were times where physicians were reported. But in retrospect, it was the first experience because my medical school teaching was always ‘Well, you're falling down drunk, unemployed on the street or you're a dope addict, shooting yourself up with morphine or something. But not good, upright standing physicians.' So, this was a really an eye-opening experience and then later when I got involved in Board of Medical Examiners years later here in Nevada, I saw it all the time because they'd be reported and I got involved with that later. So, that was another experience in Spain.

EB: But still, thank God, a very small percentage.

TS: Oh sure, of course it is. And ‘course there's also good programs now that there's no excuse for a physician not to get help if he or she wants it. And of course there are more women physicians and some of them also had the disease of addiction although not to the same extent as men. At any rate, that was another part of my Spain experience which I recall.

EB: So you were really starting to get this education bug.

TS: Uh-huh, yeah, right. And I'm not so sure how much of it was my own need to try to feel like I was competent; which is an anxiety all young physicians have. Now some young physicians deny it and they get so goddamn cocky they'll try anything. But most physicians down deep particularly when they're starting out or maybe for a good part of their life always are wondering ‘Am I competent? Am I staying up to date? Am I practicing good medicine? Is it safe?' And so education was a way, and I certainly was influenced by Ted Jacobs and others.

EB: Were you satisfied with what you were doing?

TS: Oh yes!

EB: You didn't have any doubts about the way you went.

TS: No.

EB: The road you chose.

TS: At that time I was very satisfied, I enjoyed pediatrics. It was a fairly protected environment. I have to say, in comparison with my experience in private practice several years later, in retrospect, it was very nice. I never had to worry about a salary, I never had to worry about how many patients came to my office each day. I didn't have to pay any nurses or overhead or malpractice insurance; I just went and practiced medicine…

EB: That's why so many professionals don't like the private sector.

TS: Of course, and in many ways the Air Force, I guess, it's like a university setting. Of course it's a problem now because many physicians have to get involved more in the whole business aspect with these HMO's and it bothers a lot of physicians. But I have to say, those three years in Madrid and two more years when I was in San Antonio, those five years in the Air Force I never thought about any of that, I never worried about it. I just went and I took care of my patients and that was enjoyable. So anyway, those are the basic experiences I remember of Madrid. Other than not only did I grow up as a physician professionally, but Celia and I then had a chance to start paying attention to being parents.

EB: And you had time for each other.

TS: Yeah.

EB: Which was nice.

TS: One other experience I'll tell you because my sister who helped me through medical school, as I told you, came back to Madrid while we were there and got a job teaching in the base school. She was on her way back from Indonesia and she said ‘Well, I've quit my job with the oil company.' I put her in touch with the school principle and I was the pediatrician, I was the school doctor. And so, they offered her a job and she started to work at the base school and used to come to our home in the evenings, periodically. And came one evening when we were having our Spanish lesson, we had hired a Spanish tutor from downtown who taught Spanish at a local school. And we had met him through somebody, I've forgotten, he used to come on Thursday evenings and come and sit with us, have a drink, we'd serve dinner and we would speak Spanish. And then he would give us our lesson. Well, he and my sister got together and he's the father of my niece. Still lives in Spain, still teaches school and my niece who's now married.

EB: Did they marry?

TS: Oh sure, they married.

EB: I wasn't sure.

TS: They got married and subsequently she carries his name. My sister's married name is Evangeline Fernandez and her daughter's name is Mary Francis.

EB: And they're still married?

TS: My sister and Paco are divorced. He stayed in Spain and she came home, did not remarry. He has remarried, he still teaches school in a town in Northern Spain. And his daughter, my sister's daughter, the only child they had, just finished her Ph.D. at Princeton in Computer Science and she and her husband who also has his Ph.D. in Computer Science now work for Bell Labs and they have two little children. And every summer they go back to Spain and visit her father and her step-mother and have maintained contacts. [Microphone cuts in and out] In fact, we introduced the two of them in our house in Royal Oaks when he came one Thursday night to give us our Spanish lesson.

EB: Divorce rate was very low in Spain, Catholic mostly.

TS: But often a traditional Spanish Roman Catholicism where the women went to church and the men didn't, many of them didn't.

EB: We saw that on TV about the Italian Americans, did you see that?

TS: No, but similar sort of thing.

EB: Same thing. Men didn't have to go because the women went for them.

TS: And they would go for the baptisms and funerals and that.

EB: And maybe Christmas, maybe Easter.

TS: The other experience with Spain that was important in our lives was the Cuban missile crisis. We were there at the time and this was kind of silly, but turned out to be important. They told us that we all had to have one suitcase packed because if we went to war with Russia, they would evacuate the base. Well, it was the stupidest damn thing I ever heard of. What are they going to do with three million [inaudible] living downtown, move them out? I mean, where are you going to go? Celia said ‘This is crazy, I'm not going anywhere. Besides, I'll stay here with my aunt and uncle and my cousins and we'll die together. Where the hell are we going to evacuate?'

EB: But there was panic.

TS: Oh, of course, of course. Now, we had no television and the only television we got from the United States was when Kennedy died. Subsequently, was we'd go next door and the satellite would go over every six or seven hours and for about half an hour you have American television and then it would disappear. That's the way we watched the funeral…

[End]