Edwin Lee Miller MD, my paternal grandfather was a most remarkable man. Though I knew him only briefly, he had a profound influence on the man I was to become. Intimates called him Lee, everyone called him Chief.
E. Lee Miller was born in Norborne, Missouri (Carroll County), just north of the Missouri River and not far from a new Kansas City. Like many others along the Missouri river, his family had migrated west from Virginia with a stop in Kentucky. His father, Stonewall Miller, was a prosperous farmer. From just west of St. Louis to the Kansas Border, Missouri was settled by immigrants from former slave holding states, while the northern part of the state was settled by "free state" immigrants. The rugged Ozarks to the south was settled by people who simply wanted to be left alone.
Lee went to the University of Missouri, where he joined the Beta Theta Pi social fraternity. He played football in those distant days when padding was minimal and the players wore neither numbers, nor, it seems, helmets. He was twice captain of the team, the only man in the history of the school to have been so honored. His interest in football and the university never waned and he made what was then the long drive to Columbia from Kansas City to see his team play football until the end of his life.
At the University he met and married Faith Pearse, a Kansas Citian and member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. It was a match made in heaven. Lee Miller was admitted to Harvard Medical School in the exciting days after the Flexner Report, when medicine turned from a trade to a true profession. The two of them soaked up Boston's very different culture, and he used to say that "it took him twenty years to get over having gone to Harvard". While there he purchased, for the grand sum of six dollars, a walnut desk; not a roll-top but a fold-down top with cubbies for everything, and a "secret chamber" for his microscope. I had that desk for medical school and many years after, and now it resides with my son John.
(much more to come)
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Where to start?
I've obsessed about where to start my story. James Michner might start with pre-history and the separation of tectonic plates that led to the formation of North America, then how the seas covered what is now the central United States for eons. Then on to my ancestors , and finally to me. In this blog, I will cover my own history, observation of the many changes I've seen, and what makes the Midwest unique, but I'll trust you to look up the seas and rocks elsewhere. It is time to stop dithering and take the plunge.
Each of us has unforgettable moments; the shooting of John F. Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and things more private. I've experienced many such events in my sixty-seven years, from the overhead flight of hundreds and hundreds of aircraft headed for World War II, to the morning of September 11, 2001. I think, however, that I will start with a week in December of 1982, that changed my life forever.
I had been in Washington, D.C. for a few days, attending a meeting of the US. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Committee of Blood and Blood Products, of which I was a member. We met three or four times a year to advise FDA on questions they had on the effectiveness and safety of the American Blood Supply. I had arrived on a Wednesday, and on Thursday the meeting of the Committee began in earnest. I, however was constantly interrupted by telephone calls from St. Louis all that first day.
A year of so previously, I had been appointed CEO of the Missouri-Illinois Blood Services Region, manager of the Bi-State Chapter of the American Red Cross, and Division manager of a large area that included the eastern half of Missouri and the sounthern third of Illinois. My responsibilities had expanded from Blood Services to Disaster Relief, Safety Services, Aid to Military Families, and a variety of other Red Cross activities. It seemed that not only was it raining very hard, but unseasonal tornadoes had been spawned by an Arctic cold front colliding with warm moisture-laden air from the Gulf of Mexico. It was not a frequent occurrence in the Midwest in December, but neither was it unknown.
The tornado had skipped along south of St. Louis, but did its greatest damage in the Illinois community of New Baden, which had apparently been flattened. I had about decided to leave the conference and jump on the next plane to St. Louis, when calm heads there said that they felt things were under control. They only hoped it would stop raining so they could better provide services to the families whose homes and business had been destroyed. I decided to stay and return the next afternoon, Friday, in part because I'd been advised that there would be an extremely important private gathering of the Committee the next day. And important it was.
A number of FDA officials, the Committee, and a few invited guests, adjourned to a private room for lunch, where we heard Dr. XXXX, head of a group from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) monitoring a growing number of cases of a disease that had not been recognized before. The presentation was long and had graphic details; and when it was over, I believed, despite the absence of totally convincing evidence, that the new disease was probably somehow transmissible. The disease was uniformly fatal, it was associated with an unusual form of pneumonia (which had triggered the investigation), and with a rare form of blood vessel cancer called Kaposi's Sarcoma. They had decided to call the new illness Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or AIDS for short. CDC raised the possibility that it could be spread by blood products, though no one was sure how, and that it seemed to be spreading fairly rapidly.
Six hours later, my plane touched down on a rainy Lambert Field field in St. Louis, and when I checked for messages on my answering machine, the situation in St. Louis was deteriorating fast. In addition to Tornado relief, the Meramec River which runs through the southwestern St. Louis suburbs was rising rapidly, and the weather forecast was for more rain.
Things went from bad to worse. Despite vigorous sandbagging by hundreds of volunteers, many of them teenagers, the Meramec spilled out of its banks at Pacific, Missouri, floating dozens of trailers of their pads, ripping down buildings, and forcing the evacuation of the entire population to a nearby school, where Red Cross and the Salvation Army had set up a shelter. Later in the week, Tuesday or Wednesday, I got a call from an official of the State of Missouri indicating that the flooded trailer park had been under surveillance because a waste oil collector had dumped hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of waste oil on its gravel road to "keep the dust down", and it seemed the oil was contaminated by high levels of PCBs, a powerful carcinogen. We had hundreds of people, including many youngsters standing in the water during the sand bagging operation. And it continued to rain. Hard.
I was 42 years old, only moderately experienced for a major flood disaster, I knew little about PCBs, and one of the most devastating events in medical history was unfolding with me in the middle. My life would be forever changed.
Each of us has unforgettable moments; the shooting of John F. Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and things more private. I've experienced many such events in my sixty-seven years, from the overhead flight of hundreds and hundreds of aircraft headed for World War II, to the morning of September 11, 2001. I think, however, that I will start with a week in December of 1982, that changed my life forever.
I had been in Washington, D.C. for a few days, attending a meeting of the US. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Committee of Blood and Blood Products, of which I was a member. We met three or four times a year to advise FDA on questions they had on the effectiveness and safety of the American Blood Supply. I had arrived on a Wednesday, and on Thursday the meeting of the Committee began in earnest. I, however was constantly interrupted by telephone calls from St. Louis all that first day.
A year of so previously, I had been appointed CEO of the Missouri-Illinois Blood Services Region, manager of the Bi-State Chapter of the American Red Cross, and Division manager of a large area that included the eastern half of Missouri and the sounthern third of Illinois. My responsibilities had expanded from Blood Services to Disaster Relief, Safety Services, Aid to Military Families, and a variety of other Red Cross activities. It seemed that not only was it raining very hard, but unseasonal tornadoes had been spawned by an Arctic cold front colliding with warm moisture-laden air from the Gulf of Mexico. It was not a frequent occurrence in the Midwest in December, but neither was it unknown.
The tornado had skipped along south of St. Louis, but did its greatest damage in the Illinois community of New Baden, which had apparently been flattened. I had about decided to leave the conference and jump on the next plane to St. Louis, when calm heads there said that they felt things were under control. They only hoped it would stop raining so they could better provide services to the families whose homes and business had been destroyed. I decided to stay and return the next afternoon, Friday, in part because I'd been advised that there would be an extremely important private gathering of the Committee the next day. And important it was.
A number of FDA officials, the Committee, and a few invited guests, adjourned to a private room for lunch, where we heard Dr. XXXX, head of a group from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) monitoring a growing number of cases of a disease that had not been recognized before. The presentation was long and had graphic details; and when it was over, I believed, despite the absence of totally convincing evidence, that the new disease was probably somehow transmissible. The disease was uniformly fatal, it was associated with an unusual form of pneumonia (which had triggered the investigation), and with a rare form of blood vessel cancer called Kaposi's Sarcoma. They had decided to call the new illness Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or AIDS for short. CDC raised the possibility that it could be spread by blood products, though no one was sure how, and that it seemed to be spreading fairly rapidly.
Six hours later, my plane touched down on a rainy Lambert Field field in St. Louis, and when I checked for messages on my answering machine, the situation in St. Louis was deteriorating fast. In addition to Tornado relief, the Meramec River which runs through the southwestern St. Louis suburbs was rising rapidly, and the weather forecast was for more rain.
Things went from bad to worse. Despite vigorous sandbagging by hundreds of volunteers, many of them teenagers, the Meramec spilled out of its banks at Pacific, Missouri, floating dozens of trailers of their pads, ripping down buildings, and forcing the evacuation of the entire population to a nearby school, where Red Cross and the Salvation Army had set up a shelter. Later in the week, Tuesday or Wednesday, I got a call from an official of the State of Missouri indicating that the flooded trailer park had been under surveillance because a waste oil collector had dumped hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of waste oil on its gravel road to "keep the dust down", and it seemed the oil was contaminated by high levels of PCBs, a powerful carcinogen. We had hundreds of people, including many youngsters standing in the water during the sand bagging operation. And it continued to rain. Hard.
I was 42 years old, only moderately experienced for a major flood disaster, I knew little about PCBs, and one of the most devastating events in medical history was unfolding with me in the middle. My life would be forever changed.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Introduction
For a while now, I've been thinking of writing. Writing about the sunrise, water, the music in my head and heart, the joys and the sadness of a man in late middle age.
I considered yet another autobiography or memoir, and decided that the world already has too many. Besides, I'm not sure I have the discipline to write a book; but who knows, perhaps this will become one in time.
It is my intention to share this with my family and friends, but I suppose others will find it. Perhaps a few will find it interesting, but I do not write for others, I write for myself.
As I understand it, blogs are interactive to a degree, and I welcome comments and questions, though I may not respond to them all. I've learned that while the Internet is a wonderful way to make friends, it can be distracting in the extreme.
So in the days to come I will try to write an hour a day, at least when I can. Initially, there will be some order, but I suspect that will not last long, and readers will have to endure flights of ideas and recollections, provoked by the obvious and the unconscious.
So, welcome to my Midwestern life.
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