Transcript: Tape 8 Side B
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)
Eileen Barker: Yeah, we're on side two now.
Thomas Scully: So anyway, Celia said 'This is craziness!' [aside: It's going okay now]. She said 'What's going to happen to [inaudible]? We go to war, we're not going to go anywhere.' She said this was nonsense, but she was eight and a half months pregnant.
EB: Oh dear.
TS: So, I said 'Uh-oh. This is fourth child. I delivered the third child, Geary, in the parking lot, well, the hallway of the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia. Christopher John in El Paso, she delivered herself because the doctor had gone down the hallway to get a cup of coffee and she just delivered. She had very fast labors. So, I said 'Well, we're not going to get to that hospital, they may have the roads blocked, who knows what. So I brought home a precept pack, the nurses gave me a precept pack with all the necessary stuff. So, a few days later, I think the Cuban Missile Crisis is still on; she nudges me in the middle of the night and says 'The baby's coming, we're going to have a baby very soon.' So, I got up, turned on the light, yes, the baby's crowning; I open up the precept pack and I deliver Marty in bed, he's our fourth son this would be November of '62. But with the commotion, Peter and Chris heard it and they came to the door and was watching their little brother, Marty, being born. And the chica, Rosalio, who lived with us, they were all live-in maids, she came to the door and she didn't speak very good English. But she was saying 'Mamma Mia' [inaudible] the usual, typical stuff; and I instinctively, this is the truth, I instinctively turned to her and said 'Go boil some water' [both laugh]. I saw too many movies and got her out of the way and then Celia said to her in Spanish 'Go up the street and get Dr. Allen, Van Allen who's the physician who now practices in Modesto, he was another neighbor up the street. So, she ran up and got the neighbor; Marty was already born and I had the cord clamped and cut. But I had trouble, I couldn't get the placenta delivered and Van tried but we said 'We're not obstetricians.' We got her in the car and took her out to the base and took Marty with us, he was an infant. Fortunately we had maids, so she stayed with the other three Peter, Chris, and Geary.
EB: Thank goodness these were all uncomplicated deliveries. Although you handled them.
TS: Yeah, they were, and Marty was fine. So, we went out and she spent the evening and the next day.
EB: The baby was full-term?
TS: Yes, Marty was full-term and then the obstetrician came in and subsequently was able to deliver the placenta and she had no more complications. So that was another experience is delivering Marty at home in the middle of this Cuban Missile Crisis when they're saying we may have to evacuate at any moment and Celia said 'This is crazy! We're not going anywhere! We're staying right here!' I can't remember too many other things…
EB: You were there when Kennedy died.
TS: Oh yes. That was the next year.
EB: Did you see the way the Spaniards took it?
TS: Yes, it was amazing. It was absolutely amazing.
EB: That had to be an eye-opener for you.
TS: Well, first of all, that afternoon and that evening and the next day many of Celia's relatives and other friends drove out to Royal Oaks, came to our house to offer their condolences. [EB: Oh my.] Secondly, they had memorial masses in the cathedral downtown; thirdly, the embassy opened up its doors with a book, the line at the Madrid embassy was not unlike what happened in England and other places, went on for three days and three nights. Something close to a million madranos came to the embassy and signed that book, I don't know where any of those books are, they're probably in the State Department. And that happened all over Europe.
EB: I heard that.
TS: Oh yes, absolutely.
EB: You saw it, you actually saw it.
TS: Saw it?! They came to my home. We got cards from all of Celia's relatives, they were offering condolences to us as though it was our brother or our sister. It was amazing and the most amazing thing was the churches rang bells in Madrid, the people came to the embassy. I mean, he was a beloved man as far as many Europeans were at the time. Not unlike what was going on in the United States, I mean it was a horrendous thing here and we knew nothing about it other than seeing the satellite pictures every few hours. But when we came home the next year, Celia's dad and mom, they had kept Life magazine and New York Times and all of that, told us about what that event was like in New York. I mean, people were glued to their televisions for the hours.
EB: I remember I was here, in Reno.
TS: Well, the Spaniards, the outpouring of emotion and devotion and grief. And many Americans who lived on the economy, not all the Americans lived on the base, many who lived on the economy gave the same stories how their neighbors and friends or total strangers if they knew you were an American would offer their condolences as though this was your father or your brother that died. It was a very interesting experience
EB: It was a kind of growing up so many people.
TS: Well, we hadn't had an assassination since Lincoln, 100 years earlier.
EB: Well, you just read about it in history books.
TS: At any rate, that was another important part of Madrid. I'm not sure other things, well, my sister came and met her husband.
EB: What we can do is we will be filling in things because when you read the transcripts of this part of Spain.
TS: I'm sure will bring back other things.
EB: We'll go back to it. So, if you'd like, we can talk now about going to San Antonio. And how that came about.
TS: Okay. Alrighty, well I told you I was in Washington in December, I had six months more on my tour of duty in Spain. I went to see the sergeant.
EB: Were you in Spain for only a set period.
TS: Three years.
EB: …finish your other two years there if you wanted.
TS: I could have and I went and talked to one of the colonels and he said 'Well, we have extended people for one year, but it's not likely you would get permission to stay for five. And frankly, I knew I had two more years and I figured if I had two years…he advised me actually, he said 'If you have two years, you're likely to get a good assignment; if you stay here for four and have only one more year to go, they'll use you as cannon fodder and fill in any old place. Who knows where you'll go.' But also, Celia and I were also beginning to see something that we've often talked about; our children being raised more and more by the maids.
EB: Oh, of course.
TS: And concerning ourselves, because we had given thought, as many Americans had, sort of the fantasy of living there becoming an expatriate. Getting out of the service and living there and practicing medicine 'cause it was certainly a need for good doctors there and living high on the hog. Well, that was nonsense and naïve, but we had the feeling that we wanted to go back home before our kids were ready to start school. We wanted, at that time, to go to a Catholic school, which they started, the base school was perfectly okay. But also, that we might be losing touch with our own kids. There was a variety of those things, but I think the overriding thing is if they had said 'You can spend another year here and then we'll give you whatever you want your fifth year.' But they didn't say that, as a matter of fact as I'll say later, one of the reasons I got out of the military is they moved people around. If they had said to me later, 'You can stay in San Antonio for 10 years and teach' like I could in the medical school 'you could make a career here and we're not going to move you all over the place.' But when I subsequently talked to Murph Chesney before he became Surgeon General and several others, I talked about that and they said 'Why are you getting out of the service, you have 11 years, you're now finishing up the two years in San Antonio, you're a major' I was promoted 'you have a wonderful career ahead of you, you might someday go up the line and become an important officer.' And I said 'The problem is, I'm first treated as an officer, not a physician.' And I said to a couple of them, I don't know if I said this to Murph, I said to others 'I'm an officer because I'm a physician. I'm not a physician because I'm an officer. You don't make me a physician. Because I'm an officer first in your mind, you're going to move me around whatever the Air Force needs are.' And that's understandable and that's what a career officer has to understand. I'm sure Eisenhower didn't like going all over the world when he was a young guy and a lot of other career officers bounced around, their wives bounced around every two years.
EB: It's not always a case of need, just a case of that's the Army routine.
TS: Or the Air Force routine. They move you and we don't want you to get stale or stagnant and so they move you. And I said 'Well, if you told me I could have even two assignments in the next 10 years; five years here, five years someplace else, both of them are teaching hospitals.' 'Cause I had made the decision I'll be involved with residents and interns and all that, then I might have stayed. But no, there was nothing like that; they said 'We're sorry, you had your three years here, you go to San Antonio for two. We don't know what will happen to you after that and some sergeant in Washington will reassign you when the time comes.'
EB: You were lucky to have the three years actually.
TS: Right, exactly. At any rate we came back, you know that story.
EB: Well no, do I know the story of why you decided. Oh, the sergeant got you assigned.
TS: Well I asked to go to a teaching hospital and at that time they only had several.
EB: So, this was a new hospital in…
TS: Lackland Air Force. It was called the Wilford Hall Hospital, named for somebody, at the Lackland Air Force base. And they had opened their teaching programs there a few years earlier in the early '60s, this is now '64 and they had a residency in pediatrics with interns and they had residents in medicine and surgery and all the rest, still is to this day it's a big teaching hospital, it's part of the University of Texas now in San Antonio. So I said 'Fine, if I could go there I'd love it.' So I got assigned there and I told you that story already and I also told you the chairman of the department didn't know he was going to get an extra doctor [chuckles]. So, I show up.
EB: And this was what year?
TS: I'm there now in July of 1964. So, Celia and I arrive back with four little kids and she's pregnant now with Leslie. So we have four little boys, Peter is coming up on seven and Leslie's about to be born, there's a seven-year difference. We have four little kids, we rent a house out near a Catholic school near the freeway so I could drive to work each day. It was about a 20 minute-half hour drive to the base, we did not live on base, not too many people did there. And I got assigned, I went in and signed in and they assigned me to the pediatric clinic. So then I ran the pediatric clinic for two years and had a couple of cardiologists and we had a guy in infectious disease and a guy in endocrinology and we had a guy in kidney and we had two or three people running the nursery. So, by then a fairly sophisticated department of pediatrics, maybe 10-12 full-time pediatricians.
EB: There again all…
TS: All full-time for the Air Force and their dependents. But also a referral hospital for much of central United States. So when they'd have sick kids in little small Air Force bases in Texas and Oklahoma or wherever, they'd fly them in because that referral.
EB: But military.
TS: Military, because that was the referral hospital for most of the central United States. If you're on the west coast, you go to Travis which is just opening up and if you're on the east coast they send you to Andrews or Walter Reed or someplace. So anyway, it was fairly sophisticated and most of these other fellows had fellowships by now. Fellowship training was just becoming popular, I never had fellowship training; probably in today's world I would, all three of my sons have had fellowship training in today's world. But in those days it was just getting started, so the cardiologist and the rheumatologist and the infectious disease guy and the people running the nursery they all had not only the two years of pediatric residency, like I had, they all had a couple years of fellowship and subspecialist. So, I was the least well-trained of them all. So I was assigned to the clinic which was fine and I would have a couple of residents there and a couple of interns and occasionally we would get a couple of students from the University of Texas, but I don't remember much of that at all. And so I ran the clinic, I saw patients walk-in and by appointment whatever they had I supervised the residents. So there was my first taste now of being a couple of years out of training having had a fairly good medical experience in Spain, feeling fairly confident, but also knowing upstairs in the pediatric department there were six or seven colleagues who were smarter than I and better trained, I could always call them. So, we had specialty clinics and cardiology and that sort of thing. But I always had some residents and interns and my job was to see some of my own patients, I would develop a cadre of private patients and I took care of a lot of the other doctors' kids. A lot of the other doctors in the hospital, their wives would come and I'd be their private pediatrician in that sense; private, small 'p'. And I got to be friendly with some of them.
EB: All the doctors were military.
TS: All of them. All of them were Air Force, absolutely because over the other side of town was Brook Army Hospital which was an Army hospital that had the same programs, but for Army doctors and Army personnel and their dependents. So they now mix them together, which makes sense as a tax-payer I can understand that; but in those days. The Air Force was on one side of San Antonio and the Army was on the other side of San Antonio and you went to one of those hospitals and you seldom, except in a true emergency were ever were taken care of.
EB: Very proprietarian.
TS: Oh yes, craziness, craziness. And the same thing in Washington, can you imagine Walter Reed and Bethesda in an Air Force hospital. Lots more cooperation, but then in those days there wasn't, although they'd occasionally have meetings together. At any rate, that was my job for those two years and it began clearly to dawn on me that the Air Force was not my career. I had talked to a few people, I said 'If I extend and stay in a few more years, do I have any guarantees?', 'Well, no. Because they may need to send you to some other place.' And it was so vague…
EB: What a shame that the mentality was such because they would have kept an outstanding educator.
TS: Well, they didn't know that at the time.
EB: Well, you were starting teaching, weren't you?
TS: Yeah, but hardly outstanding; the other people were more experienced.
EB: Well, look at the people they lose because the mentality is so rigid.
TS: They did lose a lot. I can name several who went on and became professors of pediatrics elsewhere. One of the neonatologists went to Wisconsin, one of the endocrinologists went to Chicago, the cardiologist got out and went to Memphis. Now, they did keep a couple, there were several who just stayed on and one of the cardiologists, I think, spent his entire career in Lackland and never moved him; that's not true, he went to Germany for a couple of years. So, I can't say it was universal, but when you would talk to the colonels and the big-shots it was all, 'Well…'
EB: No guarantees.
TS: No guarantees. Well first of all, the Vietnam War is on and this is 1964 and Linden Johnson, Kennedy's dead, Linden Johnson is getting on the TV every day talking about the war. So there was even less likelihood that they were going to make any commitments to anybody except 'You may go to Vietnam'; although as a pediatrician that was unlikely. But all those other physicians could have been picked up and in 24 hours-notice go to Vietnam, just as military. So it was also at the time where there was no particular looking at trying to encourage career officers to stay with any kind of perps. Interestingly though, about 15 years later, come 1980, they went out and recruited all over the country former Air Force and Army, particularly Air Force officers. Because they were losing them trying to bring them back in and they would sign bonus contracts, I knew serval guys, one here in Reno. As a matter of fact, Angus Marshal, who just died, remember Angus Marshal? The EMT guy, he just died.
EB: Yeah, I saw that.
TS: He went back into the Air Force. He practiced here for seven or eight years, went back in the Air Force, rose to be a colonel; I don't know the particulars of his situation.
EB: Pretty tempting wasn't it.
TS: They gave bonuses and they said 'If you come and sign up for three or four or five years; we'll assign you, we'll tell you in advance where you'll be sent so that your family can move and the kids in high school, okay? And here's a bonus.'
EB: What a self-serving thing.
TS: Of course, and we'll make you a colonel. I remember getting phone calls and I said 'Sorry, I'm now the dean at our school here. I don't want to do any of that.' Be that as it may, in the era of '64, '5, and '6 when I was in San Antonio and when I was making the decision to get out or to stay, Vietnam was on so in all fairness to the people making decisions they couldn't know the future. Hell, the anti-war things were going on.
EB: I'm surprised you were permitted to leave when your time was up when you think about it 'cause we're in war.
TS: Well, it wasn't a declared war.
EB: …so you could be mustered out.
TS: Well, the Tet Offensive and all that stuff was a bit later, but by the time I was getting out; besides a pediatrician is not essential to any war effort. Now, I guess if I'd been a surgeon maybe they wouldn't have let me, I don't know. But anyway, finally, I spend a lot of time talking to the chief of pediatrics and he and I have kept in touch for the last 30 years. He's a wonderful person, he got out, he spent his 30 years in, retired and does some practice still to this day. He's probably 10 years older than I am, if I'm 65 he might be 72, -3, or -4. So ultimately I said okay 'Alright, I'm out.' and Celia said 'No, I think it's time to get out.' We want to settle down. Well, turns out we didn't settle down for a couple more years, as you'll soon know; but at least we broke all of our ties. I paid back my time, I got an honorable discharge, I was discharged as a major in June of 1966 and I'd been in the service about 10 and a half years. And it was a good time I have no regrets, and my experiences in San Antonio were very good; I mean, I learned a lot of medicine there because I was seeing, again, referral patients coming from all over the middle part of the United States. And the staff there was excellent and I was learning from all of them; I learned from the guy in infectious disease and the guy in cardiology they were teaching me a lot, but I was also learning how to be a good teacher. And they recognized me the residents and the interns recognized I was a good teacher.
EB: And you were finding a niche for yourself.
TS: Yes. The last six months, Celia and I decided, we started calling our friends and there was a guy in New Jersey, who worked in the New Jersey College of Medicine said 'Come here, we'd like you to come here.' And I looked at a couple of jobs in academic medicine, I looked at a job in Philadelphia, and I looked at a job in St. Louis, actually went and got interviewed; to get out of the Air Force and go and join the faculty of a couple of medical schools, but we just didn't want to go back east. So, we started talking again with Ted Jacobs who had already settled in Las Vegas and the other eight physicians I mentioned. The surgeons, the internist, the radiologist, the ortho, seven or eight people; they had all preceded me and gone to Las Vegas. Initially their hope was to start a multi-specialty clinic that never got off the ground, but when Celia and I were not sure what we wanted except to stay out west. We had no reason to go back east except for family, but that was not a sufficient reason. Ted put us in touch with a pediatrician who had been in Vegas a couple of years, Tony Carter, and he needed a partner. And Vegas was beginning to boom, remember Vegas was in 1966 was maybe 300,000, it was beginning to grow and there was a need for doctors. So, Celia and I flew out there, we got a neighbor and one of the Spanish maid, the Mexican maids 'cause even in San Antonio, we now had five children, Leslie was born there. We got a Mexican maid who would come over a couple of days a week and spend the day and help Celia if she needed help trying to raising five kids. So, we got on the plane, and we went out; stopped in Albuquerque to see the one doctor there, we stopped in Vegas.
EB: You never thought of staying right there in San Antonio? In private practice?
TS: No, we could've. But San Antonio was a fairly sophisticated medical community. I didn't have much awareness that there was a need for a pediatrician there. But Vegas really did, I think I was the first, or maybe the second or third Board-Certified pediatrician in Las Vegas. There was Tony Carter and myself and there were three other pediatricians; but most of the child care in Vegas was [EB: Do you remember who they are by any chance?] done by family physicians. Tony Carter and I were one group and the other one was Ryan [Sychess?], I don't know how to say his name, but I can look it up and Dick Baker. Dick Baker is still there, he's semi-retired and Dick Baker served on the Board of Medical Examiners with me 20 years later, same with Tony Carter, served on the Board for a few years. [Microphone is in choppy quality] And then Ted Capp, who interestingly, talk about coincidence, had been my chairman of pediatrics in El Paso in 1958 and wrote one of my letters of recommendation to Pennsylvania. When he got out of the Army few years later, he went to Las Vegas and when I arrived in Las Vegas in 1966, which is now eight years later, he's in private practice there. He subsequently retired.
EB: But you were enticed there by Ted Jacobs, more or less.
TS: Absolutely, Ted and Parvin. We went out there and they put on a big shindig, had a wonderful meal at a nice, fancy restaurant and invited all the other members of the Spanish mafia. And all of them were encouraging us to come and all we heard from them was 'Look, this is a wide-open city for doctors, it's growing. Come!' and Tony and I got along fine. Celia and I went on to Modesto and visited with our friend there, but we didn't want to practice there. So, we made the decision we were going to go to Las Vegas and enter private practice. It turned out to be a, in a way, one-year diversion and yet in the long run, given the rest of my career it turned out to be one of the most important one year's we spent. Number one, I learned what private practice was like and why I didn't want to do it, but I also understood what the private practitioner was going through to some degree. Also, coming out later and helping start the medical school all of my friends down there helped us and I immediately had entry to that community. So when George Smith wanted me to get started getting people in Las Vegas to support, I went down there frequently and we sent students there the very first year the school opened. We sent students there as preceptors. So, subsequently because I knew people, some of the legislators were my patients at that time; I had cared for children of a number of people in legislator and government and had a nice private practice for the year I was there. So all of those, ultimately, became important connections.
EB: So important, politically, yeah.
TS: Never thought of it at the time. Because there was no discussion in 1966 about a medical school, that started in '67.
EB: What was it that you didn't like about private practice? Was it charging patients? [TS: Yes.] You had never done that before.
TS: Yeah, I think you're right on, you're very perceptive. Part of it was you now had to charge patients and you had to charge them some money in order to pay the rent and your nurse and take home a decent salary and pay your malpractice and I was very uncomfortable with that. And I knew looking at the books that you bought immunizations for 25¢ a shot and gave them for $3. Somehow the business part of medicine was the most difficult for me. I practiced good medicine; Keely Smith brought her child to see me. You remember Keely Smith, used to be married to Louis Prima and one night I took care of Judy London's child when she got sick. Forgotten what the details were and I wouldn't say in the public anyway it would be violating their privacy. And I also saw a lot of the young children of single mothers many of who danced topless in the shows in downtown. And what I always remember and told many people the story many times they didn't want a bill and they didn't want a record and they didn't want checks and you'd see their child and they'd reach someplace in their underwear and bring out a wad of dollars [EB: (chuckles)] pay you $20 or $30 or whatever it was.
EB: This must have been a shock to your [inaudible] conscious. What a switch.
TS: Well, it was. It was totally different and it was the first place I ever heard about women having silicone injected into their breasts or their legs. 'Course in those days it wasn't implants, they would actually take liquid silicone warm it up and inject it in a big needle and of course what would happen is it would migrate all over the body. It didn't stay. And I remember one of the surgeons that I mentioned earlier got so furious because dancers would come to his office and the silicone would be all down around their ankles and it had been injected in the calves to give them nice rounded legs, but if they warmed up and danced for a couple of hours, by the end of the evening the silicone had worked its way down to their ankles and they'd want him to get it out.
EB: Wouldn't it be dangerous?
TS: Of course. He said 'Go back to the person who put it in' and as a matter of fact, one of the guys, I don't remember his name, and I wouldn't mention if I did, ultimately lost his license, Ken McClain, I think. I wasn't on the Board at the time, this would be in the mid-'60s. Ken and others on the Board took away his license and ran him out of town and he was a thief and he would set up a clinic and inject showgirls with silicone. 'Course eventually it was outlawed and then it came back years later encased in some sort of package for breast implants. But I mean, these were things I'd never even heard of and [EB: How many people in Las Vegas?] a lot of cash and carry. I could look it up, but it was around 300,000.
EB: It was that much?
TS: Yeah. Maybe 250-300,000 in 1966. That's a figure I could easily look up; maybe 250-300, I'm not sure. That would be maybe Clark County, all of Clark County which was Boulder and Henderson.
EB: Well then you were really right in the thick of it in Las Vegas. You were no longer isolated by a military institution.
TS: Oh gosh no.
EB: You were in the city, practically.
TS: And I then was confronted…
EB: What about well-fare?
TS: That's what I was going to say. I was then confronted with 'What do we do about those who can't pay?' I think Tony was a very good person, he is still a good person; he's still there, as a matter of fact, he works in one of the big HMO's. But what we did is, and this is how I met Otto Ravenholt, who has been the Health Officer there for 30 some years. What we did was go over to the hospital clinic, well it was the Health Department's clinic and see indigent patients there.
EB: What hospital?
TS: At the time it was Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital; it's now the University Medical Center. And so, we and others did do a lot of free service and the other people I mentioned, almost all of the other four or five pediatricians in town went to Sunrise.
EB: That was the private hospital.
TS: Yes, it is; still is. They didn't do very much work, so really Tony and I were the only pediatricians and a bunch of family physicians who took care of patients at Southern Nevada. It was the old county hospital and if you were on the staff you had to take care of indigents. Well, for a while, it was just Tony and me and we were on every other night. I worked harder there in private practice then I ever did.
EB: So there was an emergency room service back then.
TS: Oh yes. But not full-time people, there were no residencies at the time.
EB: So you just took your…
TS: Right, you just took your turn and they'd call you and there was this kid in the emergency room having a convulsion or something and you were called; it was your night on and you went over there.
EB: It was your rotation even though you were in private practice.
TS: You were in private practice, but in order to maintain your staff privileges at the hospital… And they had started an obstetrical residency with St. Mary's in San Francisco. So, I think they had a few obstetric residents in '66, '67. But other than that, there were no residents, no students, there was no teaching. I'm not even sure there were Grand Rounds because I think Ted Jacobs and Harry Knudson, the radiologist, started having rounds and began to get some of the education programs going.
EB: But there wasn't a joint commission on the accreditation of hospitals.
TS: Ahh no. No one paid attention to it. Ahh no one paid attention to it. You had to have a death conference and you had to have a tumor board and so you discussed death.
EB: [inaudible] medical records committee [inaudible].
TS: But I'm talking about medical education. I'm talking about Grand Rounds where you talked about patients and patient care. Sure, all the formalities were there.
EB: But if you had a Department of Surgery meeting for instance. You were required to have one once a month, [TS: Sure.] as I recall through JCAH, they had to be educational as well. Did you talk about certain cases and surgeries?
TS: Mostly death.
EB: Yeah, mostly. There was the same thing with internal medicine and OB.
TS: Heck, in pediatrics there was just a couple of us. Sure, we would meet and there were some family physicians that took care of patients; and every time they got into trouble or had a problem, they'd call me or Tony, we took care of the sick ones. And we took care of the sick ones in the nursery there were no neonatologists then. Neonatology was just getting started in this country, we're talking about 1966, a lot of the subspecialties were not even started. So general pediatricians took care of the sick ones in the nursery; now, they don't even let you in a nursery if you're not fully trained in neonatology. And of course in the hospital now a lot of the really sick kids are taken care of by intensivists, we didn't know what that was 35 years ago. So, Tony and I took care of whatever came along and we did take care of the indigents. Although, in the daytime when we went to our offices we saw our private patients there and we'd see the indigents in a county clinic and that's when I made friends with Otto Ravenholt. So, nine months go by and Tony has a personal crisis which is really no business of this record, but he and I decided to part; but not over professional reasons, personal and economic reasons. And so I called Otto Ravenholt and I remember it because it's this week, Celia always remembers it; she remembers it as our holy week, it was Good Friday. I was an employee, he said 'Well, I really can't continue you by next Monday morning.' So I called Otto on the phone and Otto says 'Fine. Come on over on Monday morning to the Health Department, I need some help. I'll hire you as an assistant health officer and deputy coroner. [EB: (chuckles)] And I go over, get out of private pediatric practice. And Tony and I left amicably and we've been friends ever since. But he just wasn't the kind of fellow at the time that wanted me as a partner or anybody as a partner, I guess. Started out alright, so I went over to see Otto and he gave me this job. So Monday morning, two days after Tony says 'I don't have a job' and Celia and I are wondering on Holy Thursday and Good Friday was my passion and crucifixion. What are we going to do? I have five kids to feed and I have no salary coming in. And I could've gone into private practice, I could've opened an office and several people encouraged me 'Open an office and you'll do fine. People will send you patients.' But I knew down in my heart of hearts that…
EB: You didn't really like it.
TS: I didn't want to continue in private practice. Patient care is fine and there was no teaching; there was literally no teaching, notwithstanding JCAH, but there was no teaching and nobody to teach. So, I went over and for the next couple of months, I learned a lot about the state. There was an episode at a state-sanctioned or state-run boy's camp of two pedophiles and this is public, so I'm not talking about a school, allegedly molesting boys, many of whom were orphan kids and that sort of thing. So, Paul Laxalt, who was the governor at the time he'd just been elected, called Otto on the phone and said 'Would you and Dr. Scully go and investigate this and give me a report?' He also asked Otto and I to come up to Reno and do an inspection of the state hospital the conditions of the mentally retarded were in. He thought were appalling and that old [cotone?] was terrible; Michael O'Callaghan followed through with that later. And so we wrote a report for that, I then to the Caliente Girl's School with Otto and we did a report on the medical care there.
EB: And who was paying you all this time.
TS: Otto is now. I'm now a county employee; I'm now the assistant health officer.
EB: So, you're getting a county salary.
TS: Getting a county salary. It was about what I was making in private practice, maybe less. So, I started writing up these reports on the health care of some of the state institutions which were not terribly… Otto actually wrote the reports, or he put his name on them, but I did a lot of the work. And I remember that was the first time I'd ever been in a governor's office; walked in and sat down with Governor Laxalt and gave my report and he said 'Well, we're going to do something about that in the next legislature.'
EB: I thought he was a great governor.
TS: He was and I think Mike was a good governor too. We did that and as far as I know at the time the pedophilic thing was taken care of. And that was another thing, because I subsequently became very involved in child abuse as you know here in Reno and that was the first time I really remember hearing much about child sexual abuse. And that wasn't something we talked about in medical school, it wasn't something we talked about publicly.
EB: I don't think people ever even thought it existed really, you had to think about it.
TS: In the Bible or maybe it existed in some literature in some place, but it wasn't something that was in people's consciousness; so, to talk to these young kids and to listen to their stories. So, I got a little education, which I've always been grateful for from Otto Ravenholt, who was a marvelous health officer, gave me a great education. The coroner, 'course has to go out, so I can remember being called in the middle of the night, we didn't have beepers in those days. As the deputy coroner I was home in bed and he said 'Would you go.' And I'd go to hotels and motels around the town where they'd find a body and died of a heart attack or maybe there was some foul play. There had to be somebody who came and looked at the scene and kept a report and the police and the autopsy would be done and all that sort. So, that's what a coroner does especially if it's an unattended death, there were a fair number of those that I remember going to where people would overdose or die; how they died, I don't know, in motels and hotels in Las Vegas there were still thousands of tourists in those days. So, I did a little of that; I also remember having to go with him and the public health nurses and do inspections of a food outbreak at a food line in one of the hotels, where there'd been an outbreak of food poisoning.
EB: Apparently a Friday night where they had a seafood buffets.
TS: Poor Otto, he'd give health cards and get all these people, many of them couldn't speak English, had to wash their hands and here I am in there with a public health nurse doing rectal swabs on all of these kitchen employees and waiters and waitresses trying to figure out who's got contamination, who didn't wash their hands and who had salmonella. So, low and behold, I get a phone call from my friend in New Jersey who two years earlier had tried to get me to come back to the New Jersey College of Medicine to run this pediatric program. And it was pure serendipitous and I don't know why he called me except that he needed someone to run their pediatric program at St. Michael's Hospital which is an affiliated hospital to the New Jersey College of Medicine in Newark. So, I knew public health wasn't my field, I talked to Otto about maybe going to Berkeley and getting an M.P.H., but I knew I belonged in medical education. So I flew back, this is now about May or early June, Otto said 'Sure, do whatever you want. I'll keep you on here for as long as you want, I can make the job permanent because you can do all sorts of things for me. You can run my pediatrics clinic, help my public health nurses and all that.' And it was there that I really gained an appreciation of public health, nurses particularly, as a specialty and what a wonderful job they did. I went to homes in poor parts, I went to the Indian colony which was really poor in Las Vegas at the time with the public health nurses and walked into rooms where people were quite ill and were getting no medical care; and right down the street to the strip all this glitter and gulch. Be that as it may, Jim Hogan back in New Jersey encouraged me. So I flew back, I met the administrator and the chief of pediatrics and staff and I said 'Fine. I'll take the job.' They'd offered me a job.
EB: You were only in Las Vegas…
TS: One year.
EB: One year.
TS: June of 1967.
EB: So, you were with Otto Ravenholt…
TS: Three months.
EB: About three months.
TS: And I was only with Tony Carter about nine months. It was a wonderful experience, I learned a lot.
EB: So, before we get to New Jersey.
TS: It's 1967.
EB: I'd like to hear a little more about the private practice you had, your impressions of Las Vegas. Any other ideas, any other thoughts that you have? Recollections of coroner's duties.
TS: Well, the coroner's duties were interesting. I had never been to a hotel to inspect a dead body and file a police [inaudible] moved it down to the autopsy room, I did that.
EB: You didn't have to do any of that. [TS: No.] You were just assigned this had to be done.
TS: Yeah, I mean sure. And most of the time you had to do an autopsy, unless the wife was standing there and said 'We came here on vacation. And he had just had a coronary bypass.' And he was on vacation and I get on the phone and his doctor and said 'Oh yeah, we thought he might die and we said don't go to Las Vegas' and he did.
EB: Stay up all night gamble and drink.
TS: When George Smith came to Reno originally, one of his first papers that he wrote about was pulmonary embolus in overweight women and men, mostly women who would be sitting on those high stools at the slot machines and they'd throw a big embolus from their leg have a pulmonary [inaudible] and keel over dead. And he wrote a paper on it, I don't know, five or six or seven of those that he autopsied when he used to work for Sal over at Washoe Medical Center. But most of the time it would be pro forma, but a lot of the times it was simply well we'll do the autopsy and fill out the report particularly if it was somebody who had nobody and they were alone. And there were a lot.
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