Chapter 15: Remembering MD Anderson Presidents and Dr. Eleanor MacDonald
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Description
Dr. Hill begins this chapter by noting that Dr. Clark supported any change that would improve efficiency and positive effects for patients. He then goes on Eleanor MacDonald [Oral History Interview], an epidemiology specialist with a visionary sense of records organization: she established a system of data and records-keeping for MD Anderson that influenced the entire medical system in Texas. Dr. Hill notes that Miss MacDonald’s work guaranteed the quality of MD Anderson research. He then offers additional observations about Dr. Clark, comparing his leadership style to Dr. Charles LeMaistre’s [Oral History Interview] and discussing the transition as Dr. Clark stayed at MD Anderson during the beginning of Dr. LeMaistre’s presidency of the institution. He recalls working with Roman Arnoldy, an engineer who organized the building of Rotary House (built on the model of a hotel attached to the Cleveland Clinic), which provides convenient and medically appropriate accommodations for patients. He also evaluates Dr. Mendelsohn’s [Oral History Interview] leadership style with the previous presidents, praising his science as well as his administrative and fundraising skills.
Identifier
HillCS_03_20120220_C015
Publication Date
2-20-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
C. Stratton Hill, MD, Oral History Interview, February 20, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Key MD Anderson Figures; Portraits; MD Anderson Impact; MD Anderson History; On Texas and Texans; Leadership
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting. You’ve mentioned a number of instances where Dr. Clark had questions about what you were doing— Female You want to come in here now?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I think we’re good. Thanks. But it seems like he was a real proof-in-the-pudding kind of person. If it worked it worked, and he was—
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Absolutely, he was. He said to everybody, “You get a niche here. If you’ve got a project, if that’s a valid project, we’ll see to it that it gets done,” and that’s what he did, the way he organized the clinic. That’s the way the Mayo Clinic is organized. If you’ve got a project that looks like it has merit, they’re going to give you full support, and that’s the way Clark was. That’s the reason we had the dictating of all notes, and they were typed. They were transcribed into the record, typed by the next day. We had a whole bunch of those things, and that evolved over the years with different systems, where every telephone was a dictating—still is. You just go in and put in your number, and then you get a tone, and then you put who you are. You put your number, and then you identify yourself and say, “I’m dictating a note on this patient.” You put the patient’s number in there. Dr. Clark was a guy that was always looking to make your time efficient. He definitely wanted to do that by the people that he hired. Another person that is dead—and I don’t know if anybody had ever mentioned her—was Eleanor MacDonald. Have you heard of her?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, she was interviewed and did one of the very early interviews many years ago.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Oh, yeah. She would have. She lived to be 101 or 102 years old.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Because she was the one who did all the records, isn’t that correct?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
She was the epidemiologist. Well, basically she was not an epidemiologist, but she’d done epidemiology at Memorial New York along with her sister. You’re talking about a patrician family. She was a Massachusetts Catholic, and she never married. She and I were great friends because I was one that was doing a lot of work in the thyroid, and I used them a lot.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It was really enlightening to read her interview because I came of age when it was just normal that people had your records, and then to read about how there kind of were no records and it was really difficult to coordinate information collected by different doctors in different offices or different departments, and she coordinated all that.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Not only that, but her vision. She numbered every laboratory test that was done long before there was any way of doing anything with those numbers. Every test at MD Anderson has a number.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
She foresaw all of that.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
She foresaw all that, and when we first started doing this, and I started working with the thyroid data—and of course, she was sensitive to the fact that I had to have Dr. Clark’s okay to do that. I guess that’s one reason why Dr. Clark knew me talking about—deciding to have somebody run the clinic, because we worked together a lot. I have some pictures of Dr. Clark on my 60th birthday, so that’s 24 years ago. He came to my birthday party [Redacted]. But we worked together, and so he knew me a little bit more than some of the rest of them. But he saw that quality in Eleanor MacDonald. I remember when the School of Public Health started here in Houston. I was associate director for the clinics at the time, so I did a lot of representing MD Anderson in the School of Public Health and then starting a medical school. The medical school didn’t start until 1970.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
In’73, I think it was.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Okay. I was head of the clinic at that time, so I was on a bunch of committees over there at the medical school, getting it accredited and all that kind of stuff. The guy who came as dean of the School of Public Health, now I think the school is named for him—[Reuel] Stallones. He didn’t like it because we called that department the Department of Epidemiology because epidemiology basically is to do prospective studies about causes of diseases, and basically what Eleanor did was retrospective follow-up studies, although she did do—and we didn’t have a biomathematics department either. You might have seen that in the paper, where these people from Anderson discovered this flaw in this work that they did at Duke and so forth. See, we didn’t have anything like that when Eleanor was there, and I used to tease them. I said, “I designed this thing, and then I get all of this data, and you all run it.” And then we had those sorting machines. Those cards ran through the sorting machines, and then they’d come up and say, “This doesn’t work.” And I said, “You’ve got to tell me that before I do all this stuff.” That’s when [Stuart] Zimmerman’s department came in there. Zimmerman’s department would have never let that thing happen that happened at Duke.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Which department is this?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
That was Biostatistics. If you were going to do a study, you had to run that through the Department of Biostatistics because they told you whether or not what you thought you were going to find out you actually were going to find out, had you designed it well enough to control all the variables so that that one variable that you’re going to measure is actually what you’re measuring, not that variable for this variable. You come out, and you’ve got three variables, and you do all this stuff, and you say, “What about this, this, and this? Why didn’t you tell me that beforehand?” And so Stallones didn’t— He said, “You can’t call that the Department of Epidemiology.” Then the guy that I was telling you about, one of the students from Cornell that became—Vincent Guinee became head of that department because he went on to Harvard or to Hopkins and got a master’s in Public Health. He was an epidemiologist, a real epidemiologist. But Eleanor was solid as a rock. She was really solid. I’ll tell you a little story, one of the most tragic things I’ve ever known of in my life, about her. She was a renaissance woman extraordinaire. She played the cello, and she had friends, two of whom were a couple who became drug addicts, and they had a child. And I don’t know whether the courts got into this or not, but Eleanor adopted that child. They took that child away, either that or the parents gave her up, the child. Eleanor worshipped that child, and she took her everywhere. She was probably a preteen at the time that she became involved with her. She would tell me about taking her to Europe, and that was before we had children. And when our children came up, she said, “Oh, you’ve got to enroll them at the Catholic school over there on Travis.” I think it’s called Holy Name or something like that, and we did. He wasn’t potty trained at the time, so they said, “We’ll take him, and if he’s a problem, we’ll have to send him back,” And they did send him back to us. Anyway, she was big on things like that. And so she raised that girl, and she was going to the University of St. Thomas. One evening, apparently they’d had too much to drink. She lived over there on University, which is that street that goes right by Rice. And so she had a date with this guy, and they realized that they should pull over and stop, so they pulled over and stopped and parked on a street that was just one street over from University, in that neighborhood in there. The police came along, and the police woke them up, said, “You’ve got to leave here, but you’re in no condition to drive.” And somebody said, “Where do you live?” And the guy said, so one said, “I’ll take him home.” This one says to Eleanor’s daughter, “Where do you live?” “I just live around the corner.” “I’ll take you over there.” Never heard from her ever, ever. Eleanor was—God, she was devastated.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, I can’t even imagine having to go through something like that.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
And for years after that she would tell me, “I’m sure that”—whatever her name was—I’ve forgotten—Caroline or something like that. “Caroline was talking to me last night. She’s in Thailand,” or something, but I mean, disappeared from the face of the earth.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And the young man got home okay?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Amazing, and a terrible story.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Well, anyway, that sort of gives you some idea about how Dr. Clark was loyal to people and he got into this bond of being—this loyalty to the people that had helped him to start this. Then this new group moved in, and so after he’d been there 25 years—I can’t remember what year that was—but we began to have each year— As our finances improved, we would give ourselves a party. And this guy Klaffiken, who was one of the guys that Dr. Clark—spelled with a K—brought down from the Mayo Clinic, who was sort of one of the assistant administrators— His name was Art Klaffiken. He began to have these parties, and we’d have them at— At that time, it was the original Warwick Hotel, and that was the first one we had. And so it turned out to be a big— We had fine foods and wine and so forth. When Dr. Clark’s anniversary came along, they decided that we wanted to give him his portrait. Dr. Clark knew some cowboy artist out in west Texas, and I had a good friend who was—among other things, he did the Eisenhower portrait in the White House that’s in the White House now, and then he did all the big industrialists of the large corporations like General Electric, General Motors, all of those. He was practically doing all of those, and his studio was over here in— Would you like some more?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No, I’m good. Thanks.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
And so I said, “Dr. Clark, let me take you over there to Jim Wills’s studio, and you can see what he’s working on and see photographs of all the things he’s done.” We all went over there. Frances Goff was in on the deal. We all went over to the studio and made arrangements for him And went over there, and he saw Charles Wilson, head of General Electric. I think his name was Charles Wilson that was head of General Motors or something. They both had the same name. Then he had all of the presidents of big corporations. He was doing one guy that was some industrialist over in Alabama that had a big paper empire where they grew the trees and all that kind of stuff, and he was a big horseman and in the building— I never saw the building, but I saw Jim working on this. It was about as high as this wall almost.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, my gosh. It’s like 10 and a half feet.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah, and he would get on his belly and paint the hoofs of the horse and all this stuff. He went over to the studio, and he decided this is the guy that’s going to do it, and that’s who did all of those portraits that are hanging in there. Senator Aiken and—it wasn’t Preston. It was the other governor from Texas, Allan Shivers. They were hanging in the lobby of the clinic, the Clark Clinic Building, and also the couple who gave money for the Lutheran Pavilion. Jim Wills did portraits of all of those people after he did Dr. Clark.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What a great anniversary present. When Dr. LeMaistre came in, how was he different in his style and as an administrator? How was he different from Dr. Clark?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
He was totally different. Dr. Clark announced that he was going to retire, and there was a search committee that was appointed. Dr. [Charles] LeMaistre was chancellor of the whole university at that time, and he was an ex officio member of the search committee, but then along about—I don’t know at what point in time; it was after the search committee had been meeting for some time—Dr. LeMaistre decided that he would give up the chancellorship, and he wanted to submit his name as one of the considerations. Well, you might say he had the inside track and they selected him, so Dr. Clark then— But about that time, they thought— It was while I was running the clinic that we acquired the old Prudential Building that you just tore down. We paid a dollar for that, and I never will forget the time that we went over there to meet with the Prudential people. The guy who was head of Medical Breast at the time was named George Blumenschein. Have you heard of him? His son is out there now at Anderson, and his name is George Blumenschein, Jr. But George was head of Medical Breast at that time, and he was married to the daughter of a former dean of the Cornell Medical School who also was on the Board of Directors of the Prudential Insurance Company, and he was in town visiting his daughter. George invited him to come along with us up there, unbeknownst to the guys at Prudential, and when he walked in, and we all walked in together, those guys shot up to attention. Oh, boy. Well, they solicited— But we had gotten— That was the way Dr. Clark was. He swung that whole deal, and then he moved to his office over there. They had a palatial office, and so he decided he’d move over there. He then was planning this colloquium that we had in 1981, and he wanted me to be the coordinator for that. He was doing that, and he called me over there one day, and we were discussing the whole thing. He said, “Let me show you. I’m making a little office down the hallway here because,” he said, “I’m sure that Mickey is going to want to be talking to me a lot, and I’m just going to make myself a little office down here.” Well, it didn’t turn out that way. When LeMaistre took over, he kicked Dr. Clark completely out of the place. Dr. Clark had the Cancer Bulletin, and he was publishing a little heart journal too, and that printing office was over on Crawford Street, I think, so he had to move his office over there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What do you think was up with that with Dr. LeMaistre?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Dr. LeMaistre’s personality was such that there’s no room for anybody else but LeMaistre in terms of any kind of credit for anything. His ego is pretty good, and I just decided earlier on—that’s when I decided I wanted to go back into clinical medicine, because he was trying to—rather than making an effort to sort of figure out how he could move into the thing gracefully, he was doing all kinds of funny things that were not bad necessarily, but they were just kind of stupid. I mean, why would you do that? He was saying, “I’m going to put a light over there for parking,” or something like that. Well, is that all you’ve got to do? And things like that in an effort I guess to establish that he was the boss, so I then requested that they get somebody else to take over.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What do you think Dr. LeMaistre’s impact on the institution was?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
It was considerable. It was considerable. He has tremendous connections. He did not— He knew— Well, first of all, he knew that he had to be more competitive salary-wise than Dr. Clark was. People came to work for Dr. Clark because they wanted to work for Dr. Clark. LeMaistre didn’t have that. He had to pay competitive prices, and he should have paid competitive prices. Dr. Clark was kind of stuck in what he knew about salaries and so forth, and back in the mid—well, post-World War II, I remember him telling me that when he came to work for Anderson they were going to pay him the salary of a full professor, which was $9,000 a year. And he said, “Well, wait a minute. A full professor in an academic setting only works nine months. I’ll be working 12 months, so why don’t you give me $1,000 a month. Give me $12,000.” And they said okay. They gave him $12,000, so he was kind of stuck in that category. I remember he developed a guy there that was kind of an anatomist that got interested in physical medicine. I’ll get this.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Sure, I’ll just pause it for a sec while Dr. Hill is answering the door. (audio pauses )
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
About the time that LeMaistre came, Dr. Clark was getting that 1981 colloquium together. I’m the one that used that word. So we met with Dr. LeMaistre, and you could tell Dr. LeMaistre, shall we say, his heart was not in it. I mean, it wasn’t his idea. It was just okay, and he hardly participated in the thing. I’m sure he’d probably give you a different story about it and so forth. It just wasn’t his, and so he didn’t really—(talking in the background) You all go in the other room, Charlotte, and talk. Can you go in the other room and talk? Female I’m getting ready to leave. She’s going to be here and be quiet.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
He then was not enthusiastic about anything like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did that influence your work with the pain clinic and other pain related issues after you left the directorship of ambulatory care?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Not really. At that time, see, we were beginning again to run out of space, so we were beginning to look to expand the clinic even more, so it was just things have got to go on in that regard. That kind of distracted everything. And another thing, though, that happened about that time was that there was a guy that was interested in building the Rotary House, and his name was Roman Arnoldy. His son is still here. Rome died. He was in my breakfast club, or maybe I was in his breakfast club. He was quite a guy. He was an engineer and a graduate of the University of Minnesota. I mean, had a lot of patents and everything, and he was a real go-getter. I don’t know who appointed me to work with him on that. Maybe it was in the interim. And there was a guy named Elmer Gilley who was kind of the financial officer. Have you ever heard of his name?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yes, Dr. Becker mentions him.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah. He was kind of— The guy before him was Joe Boyd. Have you heard of him? Well, he was the administrator, and he’d been sent down from the University of Texas at Austin for this job. He was a bachelor, smoked like a chimney—I mean—all the time. Elmer Gilley was the financial officer, so it could have been— And about that time, Joe Boyd died, I believe. He had lung cancer, and Elmer Gilley was, I think, appointed as interim. He may be the one that put me to work with this guy.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was the mission to be of Rotary House?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
To be what it is now. So we got that thing going, and LeMaistre apparently didn’t like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why not?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
He took it over. He took it over because it was successful. I mean, it was going to be built.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And just for the record, the mission of Rotary House is to provide—
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Convenient and appropriate housing for patients at Anderson. There are several models that you can go by. The Cleveland Clinic is one, and that is they have a hotel that’s connected to the—well, the Mayo Clinic too, but actually there’s not a hotel connected right to the clinic. But the Cleveland Clinic, they even would take people out of there, out of the hospital, and put them in the hotel after a day or two, and that cut down on the expense. Although, they made a pot of money because these DRGs came in where the government paid on the Medicare for, let’s say, a coronary bypass, and you got, let’s say, $250,000 for that. Well, if you didn’t spend $250,000, that was just that much profit. So they’d take those people out of the hospital and put them over there in the hotel, and the doctors would make rounds in the hotel. They just charged them the rate for the hotel, which is a lot cheaper than the rate in the hospital.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How was it for the patients being there?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Oh, they loved it. It was great, because just like the Rotary House, it’s set up for toilets in certain ways, and they were designed to handle people who have some type of infirmity.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When you were planning all this, you were looking at the models like at the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
We never got that far with it. We were taken off of it. When it got to be that the money was coming forth and so forth, then LeMaistre took it over.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, John Mendelsohn came in just around the time you retired, isn’t that correct?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Same year.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Same year, that’s what I thought. And in your observation, how did he compare with Dr. LeMaistre? What were some similarities and differences between him and Dr. LeMaistre and Dr. Clark?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Dr. Clark was the visionary person who was able to execute his visionary plan, and he got it to a certain point. He became interested in international affairs and was distracted towards the operational functions of the clinic as it had developed. He then did not keep up academically with the latest developments in the fields. The fields became too diffuse and different. Cancer was a surgical disease for a long time. Everybody up in Memorial was a surgeon, and surgery was the method of choice. You took the thing out. When it got beyond that, then it kind of got out of Dr. Clark’s league. I never will forget the time that I went with him— I’m a member of the Society of Surgical Oncology, which is kind of strange, since I’m not a surgeon, but that grew out of actually the alumni association of Memorial Hospital. It was called the James Ewing Society for a long time, and then it was probably in the late ‘70s or maybe early ‘80s—I think probably late ‘70s—that the surgeons said, “Wait a minute. We’re losing out on this,” because there’s an American Society of Clinical Oncology, and it’s huge now. I’m one of the early members of that, and so because I was an alumnus of Memorial Hospital, Bill McComb, who was head of Head and Neck at Anderson—who came from Memorial—he came there because he was about the same age as Hayes Martin, who was probably the father of head and neck surgery in the United States. He knew Hayes Martin was going to be there as long as he was, so he came down here. Bill McComb, I was the only Memorial alumni besides him, and so we hit it off real well. He was a great guy, and he got me into the James Ewing Society. Then when they changed the name to the Society of Surgical Oncology, I just got in as a member. Anyway, I remember I went to a meeting where Dr. Clark gave a paper, and somebody else had written it for him because he wanted to try to keep up with everything, and it was pitiful. It was bad. So he got out just about the right time because he was interested in this other stuff. Things were changing. LeMaistre came in. LeMaistre was more of a facilitator. He knew that— He’d been in administration of a large university, so he knew about different departments and how they develop and what it takes to move them along, so he was good at that. Science-wise, he was just there. But I don’t think he pretended to. Then when he got into—well, John Mendelsohn came. That brings up a whole other political stuff that was going on when LeMaistre decided to retire. I retired in the same class that LeMaistre retired in.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It was 1996.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah, ’96, and then they made us an offer that you couldn’t refuse, probably because LeMaistre was in that group. But anyway, I think there was some infighting about who it was going to be, and it ended up being with John Mendelsohn. At the time, I thought that’s just kind of a compromise, but it turned out to be fabulous. John is a good administrator, and he’s a scientist, so you’ve got the whole ball of wax with John. But I was retiring, so they had a little party for me, and I met him. They didn’t know anybody, so I introduced him to some of the— He’s big in music, so we went to the opera and ballet and some musical groups and things of that sort. I guided him in that direction, and then they took off. They became interested in all kinds of civic affairs and did just everything. I remember one time I crossed paths with him in Cincinnati. I’d been invited to speak to the Rotary Club in Cincinnati, and I had finished and was coming back to Houston, and he’d just come to Cincinnati; he was getting off the plane, coming. We crossed in the airport. John is a solid scientist, and I think he did a magnificent job, and I think he is a fund raiser. Everybody likes him, magnetic personality. We’ve had a real good relationship with both he and Anne. I think he’s taken Anderson soaring and will continue to. I mean, the Bush’s, on two occasions that I know of, where they were fund raisers for us—and then Bob Mosbacher, my friend—all of them are friends. He was the fund raiser for that, and I think the first one was $10.1 million. The other one was $10.2 million, each time that they were in on the deal, and that was for this new program of tailoring treatment to specific cancers and so forth.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Individualized care.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Right, and this new building that this sheik is giving is all about that, and so that’s really three distinct, you might say, personalities. Dr. Clark had to start with scratch, and he was able to convince— And as I see it, he worked more at the state level, because it’s a state institution. It was the Texas Cancer Hospital. It started in 1941. He realized that his strength lied in the state effort as opposed in contrast to Baylor, which is Houston’s now. LeMaistre then began to hit the Houston scene a lot and continued to do that and did very well at it. Mendelsohn has done the local, state, and national level now. I remember when I was running the clinic our budget was $300 million a year. Now it’s $3.5 billion a year. It’s come a long, long way.
Recommended Citation
Hill, C. Stratton Jr. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 15: Remembering MD Anderson Presidents and Dr. Eleanor MacDonald" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1054.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1054
Conditions Governing Access
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