One of my somewhat questionable mental habits, when I am sitting somewhere without anything to read, is to make lists of some of the things I have done over the many years of my adult careers. I used to be able to make a list of all the airlines I had ever flown on. But now, the airlines that have merged or crashed in our country make up a longer list than those that survive. And those that are satellites of the big ones change and swap and often never admit their names to paying passengers. And I used to keep a mental list of the different types of aircraft in which I was a passenger. But I cannot remember all of those, and now even the small ones are jets, rather than the herd of propeller aircraft.
I undertook the same kind of exercise in remembering all the countries I have visited. They number 35 and include some on every continent except Antarctica. Many of these have involved meetings for the International Society of Radiology, which I have been managing since 1995. But I am certain that I never will need to get a passport with dozens of extra pages, like I see among some of my international colleagues. Another portion of my foreign travels stems from the several ocean cruises my wife and I have been taking in the past few years. By the time this is published, we will have almost 2 months aboard two ships in the same company. Some of the people we have met aboard have 2 years and more at sea. We will never pretend to that. But if left it to my wife, we might sign up for a cruise around the world. Somehow, I do not think so.
But then, I can count on my triumphant list: all of the states of the United States, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Most of my travel to the 50 states came from my employment with two national societies, which had state chapters, regional organizations, specialty gatherings, workshops, summit sessions, and local meetings. My first 4 years were with the American Osteopathic Association, where I ran press rooms, and after a couple of years, I was sent out to state meetings to represent the national staff.
Then I moved across town in Chicago to the American College of Radiology (ACR) and logged 35 years before retiring and tapering off my frequent flier mileage records. I started out organizing annual convention press rooms for the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological Society of North America, the American Radium Society, and the Canadian Association of Radiologists. When the Canadian meetings were in Quebec, I even tried to work in French, as well as in English. I got involved with some of the International College of Radiology sessions and was loaned to the International Cancer Conference the year it was managed at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Not all of the meetings had press rooms, but I began attending regularly the meetings of the Society of Pediatric Radiology, the Association of University Radiologists, and the American Society of Radiation Oncology.
About the time the ACR got involved in the preservation of radiology as a medical discipline, with the enactment of Medicare in 1965, I moved into the politics of radiology and away from peddling stories about new science in radiology. By the time I came to open an ACR office in Washington, I was writing and speaking about the efforts of the College to relate to federal government agencies, to Congress, to state governments, to the major producers of x-ray products, and occasionally to state and local medical societies. I attended all of the meetings of the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates, as well as a lot of other AMA sessions. I was never invited to speak to the House of Delegates. But I spent quite a bit of effort working with radiologist delegates to defend radiology interests in AMA politics.
There was one year when I made 50 speeches to radiology groups. In all candor, they were not 50 different speeches. But the general topics covered the triumphs and struggles of radiology with the government, with major corporations, with other specialty societies. I remember speaking to health insurance companies, to Medicare panels, to a few groups of health lawyers, to x-ray technology societies, to radiology business managers, and on a few instances to Rotary clubs. The most tricky part was polishing the jokes to tell and remembering which ones I had already told to the same audiences.