Several years ago, it occurred to me that I should organize things I had written. My adult offsprings suggested that I should write about my personal history. They insisted that I had never told them about my ancestors, my childhood, my college, my military time, or my early jobs before they grew enough to remember our family life. My wife insisted that with things organized, I could discard several dozen boxes of meaningless materials and make room for her to store things.
I countered that we should do something about the 50 boxes of slides that she had photographed over our first decades of marriage. We have the projector and the screen, but we have not looked at any of those slides or, for that matter, any of the photo prints that occupy a half-dozen shelves and racks. She continues to take photographs with a camera that uses rolls of film and nothing digitized. Some time ago, I proposed that we set up the projector and the screen and look through all of the slides. We could save the important ones and dump the others. Some were faded, some were unclear, some were repeated. But we never did what I suggested and the slide boxes and albums remain unchallenged.
When I first became involved with radiologists, I recognized that most of you had walls full of catalogs with sets of slides. Those of you who lectured and taught had boxes of slides that covered your topics. But then digitization came along and only the senior folks still have the slides. But they do nothing more with them than my wife and I do with our home photos.
In the last couple of years, I have begun sorting my writing career. I cannot place a precise volume, but in my 60 plus years, I have written many millions of words. This all started when I was in high school and began writing for the two local newspapers in my home town. I also contributed occasional freelance articles to city newspapers in our region. None of those articles is saved. In journalism school at the University of Missouri, I was required to save and paste all of the articles I wrote for the daily newspaper. I saved the freelance texts I was able to sell to city papers and occasionally to magazines. I never saved any of the scripts I had written for my radio broadcasting. Not long after graduation, I dumped my lecture notes and even the compulsory term papers. I saved my master’s thesis. In my army service, I wrote reports about the investigations I made for security clearances.
After that, my jobs were in public relations. I wrote and edited news bulletins. I wrote a quarterly publication for the American College of Radiology (ACR). I began to write speeches for ACR officers, including the presidents. I prepared press kits for the annual meetings of the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological Society of North America, the American Radium Society, and the Canadian Association of Radiology. I was transferred to Washington and wrote ACR testimony on congressional hearings and on comments from the Public Health Service, from Medicare, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and any other agency. I even ghosted inserts about radiology for their insertion into the Congressional Record by members who were willing to help us out. On many of the same topics, I contributed several hundred words for articles for the ACR NewsBulletin . Now and then, I would get an opportunity to sell an article to some publication and get paid for my effort. I contributed much of the manuscripts we gathered for the radiology centennial celebration in 1995.
When I parted with the ACR at age 65, I began writing a history of the college. That was followed by other radiology histories, most of them about academic departments. By the time this Chronicle is published, I will have 14 history books published and others in preparation. My ACR history ended with 1995. Now I am preparing an updated manuscript for the subsequent 16 years. I have prepared an update on the Boston University history. A few years ago, I contributed a history of the American Board of Radiology. So the books are all on a shelf and some of the files are in boxes in the garage.