Now that I am aged 81 years and I am 14 years retired from the senior staff of the American College of Radiology, I am trying to stay busy by writing and often publishing about radiology. While I was on the ACR Washington political dynamic, I frequently made 25 to 30 political speeches a year to radiology societies and frequently to sessions for residents to tell them what their career future was likely to happen in radiology.
Some of my friends and acquaintances and a fair batch of radiologists have announced their intent to retire from their professions, and they will move away from the working area. That has mostly been true of many of my federal acquaintances and a batch of leaders in health care politics and literature. After all these years, I am quiet and happy to look at certificates for my activities hanging on the wall of my den at home.
When I got old enough for the fifth grade, I reached a conclusion that I wanted my career to be in writing and speaking. So I managed to get involved with the production of two small newspapers in my home town. I helped with the mechanics of producing the issues of the papers, including the casting and printing of the daily papers and any other pamphlets and copies for customers. I also managed to subscribe a daily newspaper route to deliver afternoon publications of the Memphis Press-Scimitar , which I did for several years into high school. And, in that same time, I began to write news items for the local papers. Our high school organized a debate team which a few of us joined and competed with school teams in other towns near ours. The other bit of my excitement was to attend the professional baseball teams and occasionally sit in the press box to report for the newspaper and also to be sitting next to a broadcaster who described the games in other cities in the team’s league. And a lot of these writing and speaking opportunities were part of my college activities. My ambition to become a journalist led me to transfer to the school of journalism at the University of Missouri and then to get a graduate degree and public relations job at the University of Wisconsin. Three years later, when I got out of my Army induction in Chicago, I was convinced to look for a job in a major newspaper or a public relations organization. And my employment was as a responsible activity as a writer about medicine.
After 4 years in my first job with the American Osteopathic Association, I moved to the ACR in 1961 as the second person hired as director of public relations. Bill Stronach, the ACR chairman and general manager, accepted my talent and he also helped me to mingle with Chicago radiologists so that I could learn diagnostic and therapeutic practice, plus a bit of nuclear medicine and the politics of x-rays with doctors in all other specialists. One of my assignments was to manage press operations at the conventions of the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Radiological Society of North America, the American Radium Society, and the Canadian Society of Radiology. At that beginning year, the ACR had started a “My Radiology” quarterly magazine for the general public. And I was assigned to write or collect articles and get the publications out for 3 years. The ACR also published a monthly newsletter for its members, and that was another responsibility to collect and handle information. By the first couple of years, I had begun to write speeches for ACR officers. And in those early 1960s, the ACR was struggling to rescue radiology in the Congress enactment of Medicare. So I wrote a lot more. About in the same early years, I was assigned to work with the ACR education commission. That led to the production of activities for teachers to use as residents or medical school instructions. One large batch was a series of half-hour motion movies showing radiology anatomy. And the films were sold to hundreds of anatomy instructors and to radiologists and x-ray technology teachers.
In 1969, with much complications about Medicare raging for radiology and hospitals, the ACR proposed to open a regular Washington office plus our lobbyist, who helped us get the approval of radiology in Medicare. So I came to Washington and the new office grew. One of our activities was working with the Armed Force Instrument of Pathology. This helped to expand the development of radiology resident courses to attend short courses at the AFIP and soon most of them were sent from their instructions and also hundreds of foreign radiology trainees also came to those courses.
In most of those years, the ACR had opportunities to testify before congressional hearings and to communicate with national medical organizations such as the Public Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health.
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