A few days after this is drafted and a few months before it is published, I celebrated my 80th birthday with intentions to carry on for another decade and perhaps more. Along with that many years since I was born, I also acknowledge 51 years since I was employed by the American College of Radiology (ACR) in 1961. I have written in these Chronicles about some of my early experiences learning about radiology and some of the growth of the ACR, and all the rest of radiology, in which I took part in the efforts of politics and public relations. As I have asserted, I was not trained in medicine and was not experienced in the specialty education of radiology. I looked over the shoulders of radiologists thousands of times and asked questions abut their perceptions of findings. But my task was to support and explain radiology—diagnosis and therapy as well as physics—not to claim to practice the discipline I was learning to explain.
I was hired at the ACR headquarters in Chicago by Bill Stronach, who had been the second ACR executive director, with 15 years of experience when I became his second public relations director. Bill was trained in law and had spent much of his time and energy counseling radiologists about their contracts with hospitals. One of my first requirements when I came aboard was to read all of the letters to him and his responses to members. Also, for the first few years, he read all my correspondence and often corrected my statements. If I had a question he could not answer, he could point me to someone in radiology who could and would. One of the lasting relationships, to this time, was with Bob Gorson, then a physicist at Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, who taught me a lot about how physics was applied.
My first responsibilities were to take over the ACR’s monthly newsletter and write everything, including the chairman’s monthly memo, to write and/or edit all other publications, to establish relationships with medical and science writers all over the country, and to organize press rooms for the annual conventions of the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological Society of North America, the American Radium Society, and the Canadian Association of Radiology. I was also assigned to assist the Canadian society in planning the 10th International Congress of Radiology in the summer of 1962 in Montreal. Some months before each meeting, I would get a copy of the program. I would send a letter to the designated speakers, explaining my role and asking for copies of their text. I would grind my way through the manuscripts I received, try to understand what they meant, and select a dozen or more to use in writing a news article and mailing out a press kit with articles and radio and television suggestions. I would then travel to the convention city to make contacts with the newspapers and try to arrange for interviews on local radio and television programs. One year at the Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago, I took Ben Felson, the radiology chief from Cincinnati, for 5 days of morning interviews on a television station. They liked it so much that we repeated the interviews for several consecutive years.
But Bill Stronach got me into many other projects, because in those years, he needed help in education, in recruitment, in politics, and in liaison with other medical organizations. We got through a successful struggle to gain radiology’s recognition as a medical service in Medicare in 1965, when the ACR hired its own lobbyist, Slick Rutherford, a former Texas congressman. And 4 years later, it was obvious to the College’s leadership that it was practical to have someone in Washington full-time. I was picked and accepted the move in 1969. The Washington office expanded very rapidly. We obtained some contracts from US Public Health Service agencies, dealt regularly with other government agencies such as the Atomic Energy Commission and the Medicare authority, and, with the help of Slick Rutherford, maintained a steady relationship with key members of Congress.
By that time, I was making dozens of speeches to radiology organizations each year to describe our triumphs and occasional disasters.
When I reached the age of 65 in 1997, I was urged to resign from the College staff. I was not ready to stop working and resolved to find some new projects. For several years, I was a lobbyist for the Conference of State Radiation Control Programs. Before I left the ACR, I had managed the 1995 radiology centennial celebration. And I got much involved in the history of radiology. In 1997, I finished a history of the College. Thereafter came a dozen histories of academic radiology departments and the American Board of Radiology. I am still writing history books. I took on the management of the International Society of Radiology and I still have that task. It has involved my dealing with an organization of some 80 national societies and the major regional societies.