I am not a pedigreed pedagogue. In college, I took no courses in education psychology or technology. I did not aspire to make a career as a teacher. My intention was to be a very energetic, efficient, and insightful journalist. I would, so I dreamed, be a reporter who could explore, investigate, and write penetrating prose that would be part of news in newspapers and magazines, on radio stations, and even on that new medium, television.
By the time I made it to junior high school, I was contributing small news articles to the daily newspaper in my home town. I was also working in the back end of the newspaper office, helping set type, writing headlines, putting the paper together, and moving the metal type onto the press to print each daily edition. In the same years, I was assigned to write essays in many of my high school courses, and I pounded them out on the same typewriter I used to write news articles.
I took a portable typewriter with me to college. Small computers were not yet in existence (such as the one on which this is being composed). So I typed my notes and used the gadget to produce essays and term papers. And in all of my college years, I worked in college public relations, contributed to yearbooks, and wrote freelance articles for regional newspapers and sometimes magazines.
When I finished graduate school and completed my 2 years of active duty in the Army, I got my first job in medical public relations. What did I know about medicine? Darned little. So I had to learn about what I was assigned to describe and explain. The medical dictionary helped with both words and illustrations. Whenever I could, I would talk with cooperative doctors and ask for simple explanations. I would wriggle myself into offices and hospitals and even watched baby snatching and minor surgery. When I got involved with radiology, I had no skill for interpreting images. But I would watch someone plowing through a stack of films, stand behind someone fluoroscoping, stand in the control room and watch interventional procedures, look at people setting up radiation therapy, gaze attentively at ultrasound, and in later years watch the manipulation and products of computed tomographic scanners. And even later, empty my pockets and look at the activity of magnetic resonance imaging devices.
In my first years with the American College of Radiology (ACR), I managed press rooms for the annual meetings of the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological Society of North America, the American Radium Society, the Canadian Association of Radiology, and even a few international radiology congresses. So I produced press kits with articles I wrote after obtaining the drafts of papers presented by speakers in the meetings. I distributed the press kits to science reporters all over the country. We attracted reporters for local newspapers, news wire services, medical publications, and local radio and television outlets. We arranged interviews with participants on topics such as angiography, mammography, megavoltage treatment, pediatric radiology, and new developments into neuroradiology, interventional procedures, and even the waning use of chest x-rays for the detection and diagnosis of tuberculosis.
In all of these exercises, I relied upon volunteer radiologists, who helped me select newsworthy topics, explain what the presenters meant, and discuss any of the topics with attending reporters. During the Radiological Society of North America meetings in Chicago in the 1960s, one of the assigned medical reporters had grown a bit fuzzy in his later life, and I would rewrite my press releases, give the drafts to him, and then send them to his city editor via a messenger. They would be published in the next edition. Occasionally, I would ghostwrite an article for my friend to appear in the newspaper’s weekly magazine.