Chapter 03: The History of the Department of Scientific Publications
Files
Description
In this Chapter, Mr. Pagel explains that he returned to MD Anderson’s Department of Scientific Publications as an Associate Editor in 1976. He notes that he had the reputation of working well with faculty. He managed several projects in his new role, including the Research Report and the General Report.
He then briefly sketches the history of the Department of Scientific Publications, created by R. Lee Clark to provide centralized editorial services on the model of the Mayo Clinic’s in-house services, founded at the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century. Mr. Pagel also recounts how Dr. Russell Cumley came to be the first chair of the Department because of a personal connection with Dr. Clark. Dr. Cumley influenced Mr. Pagel’s leadership style by showing respect for his staff’s abilities.
Mr. Pagel next provides an overview of the people and projects in Scientific Publications. He begins by characterizing his leadership style as more collaborative than authoritarian, a style he learned from Dorothy Beane (the former director), for example, while Melissa Burkett (Associate Director) has taught him how to plan. (He mentions in passing that the Administrative leadership at MD Anderson tends to “admire its own decisiveness” rather than relying on collaboration to make decisions.)
Identifier
PagelW_01_20120801_C03
Publication Date
8-1-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Walter Pagel, ELS (D), Oral History Interview, August 01, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - An Institutional UnitMD Anderson History MD Anderson Snapshot Leadership Mentoring Critical Perspectives on MD Anderson
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What brought you back to MD Anderson then?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The person who I left for was about to be fired.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Tell me about the process of coming back to MD Anderson.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The elevators at HMB [Houston Main Building] still smelled the same. It was a shock to me that everything smelled exactly the same.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m sorry. HMB stands for—?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The old Prudential—it was called the Houston Main Building until they suddenly decided we needed two main buildings.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What did it smell of? Just out of curiosity.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It didn’t have a bad smell, but it just had a certain smell, and it smelled the same way. I still remember the smell. Proust says you remember the smell forever, and that’s really pretty much true.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was just going to mention Proust. Memories of MD Anderson past.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
What was it like? I got a lot of—evidently I had some reputation when I left of working well with faculty. I don’t know why, because I was a very junior person who had hardly any opportunity to do that, but I guess when I did do it people were impressed. When I came back I got the job of doing several fairly difficult projects.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were they?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Like The Research Report and The General Report where you have to get reports from faculty who resent greatly the need to write these things because they have other, more important things to do. I can hardly blame them. Basically I learned how to keep a project for which there are many, many, many contributors, and it only takes five or six to screw it up. I think those were my first assignments. I guess I learned how to edit again. I don’t remember that well. See, that’s another reason I didn’t think you should be interviewing me. I don’t remember that well.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I think it may be hard sometimes to remember the simple things in your career when you’ve gone on to stuff that’s a lot more complex. I’ve had that experience myself explaining things in a classroom when all of a sudden I think—when I see glazed faces I think, all right, I forgot what it was like to be hearing this for the first time.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yeah, I’m sure that’s true.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When you came back did you have the same—you were again an assistant editor? Or you know, you were an associate editor.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No, I came back as an associate.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Associate editor. Was that a substantial change in responsibility?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I suppose. It must have been. I know that I had—I don’t know if this should be in the history, but you can put it in. I don’t care really. I had the ear of Dorothy. She’s the one who let me know that the other person was leaving, so she must have respected my abilities, and I know that I was resented by some people who were here. Somehow or other I got put in the favorite category, and I’m not in a position to judge whether I deserve to be.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s the way institutions often work. Now work.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I did my best to just keep my head down and pretend I didn’t notice that I was in the category of somebody to be resented.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wonder if we could maybe just take a little break and talk about the department in general—just a little about the history of the department. I know it was started by R. Lee Clark, and didn’t he found it on the model—I was going to—on the model of the Mayo Clinic Department? Why was that? I know he used the Mayo Clinic as a model for an awful lot of things, but what was it about the workings of the Department of Scientific Publications there that tantalized him?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I wouldn’t say it was the working as much as it was the existence of a centralized editorial department where physicians who may or may not be skilled at writing would have to work less hard at making it into something that could be accepted by a journal if they had the help of editors who did that every day, day in and day out. And my understanding is—this was the way the story was told to me and I never interviewed Dr. Clark about it—was that he admired the way the Mayo Clinic managed to provide centralized services in all kinds of areas for the physicians there so that they could devote their primary energies to their jobs, which was to treat patients—to diagnose and treat diseases. I think that’s how. Mayo Clinic did have the very first—that I know of—centralized editorial department which probably formed at the end of the 19th or the beginning of the 20th century. So it may simply have been this department—a similar department up there that caused him to build this one, but I like to think that it was the result of a broader vision than that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And was Dorothy Beane—she was the director at the time? Or who was the director at the time of the department—the chair of the department?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
At the beginning?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When you were here.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
When I was here, Russell Cumley was still the chief but he was not involved in day-to-day activities. Russell Cumley—you have to read the history to this, but I can remind you that he was—that he responded to an ad. Did you get my little history of the department?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I did, but it’d be nice to have it on record.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
He responded to an ad for a—I don’t know—a medical writer probably at MD Anderson that Dr. Clark had sent out, and he came. And when he arrived they discovered that they had been boyhood friends in some small west Texas town. I don’t remember the name of it anymore. That probably sealed the deal. I don’t know if Dr. Cumley was the best applicant, but he was the best friend who applied. Dr. Cumley was a PhD in Zoology from UT Austin. He was for—I think he learned his career as a writer or editor for Bayer, no [ ], Chicago. It was a big medical pharmaceutical company. Abbott. And he actually had a tremendous influence on me as a leader. I don’t know that I succeeded in the way he did, but I made a couple of mistakes and my boss at the time just didn’t know how to deal with those kinds of things. Maybe with men or maybe she knew she’d—I don’t know what the reason was. I had to go to talk to him. One of the times was I had just ignored the rule that I was supposed to wear a tie every day. I thought it was stupid and so I didn’t. I didn’t think anything would happen. Then finally they sent me in to see Dr. Cumley, and he said, “You know, I don’t care whether you think you’re a better editor or not when you wear a tie. I want you to wear a tie.” So I appreciated the honesty and the straightforward way he did that. And then another time he gave me a job that I had never done in my life, which was to do an index for a big book. And he said, “I want you to do this index. I know you’re a smart person. I know you can figure it out. I want you to do the best job you know how.” So I had to go away and read about how to do it and then do it. And again, the same sort of respect for my ability to figure out what and how to do it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Were there other ways that you felt he was a model of a good leader?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No. I saw him very little. Those were it really.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Uh-hunh (affirmative). And so the next question, of course, has to be how do you see yourself as a leader? What’s your style when you have to deal with similar things?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I try to think about that. I try to make it straightforward but people want—I’m a different kind of person than people are today. I think people want explanations. They don’t want to just know that I say you must wear a tie, and therefore they [ ] have to wear a tie. I don’t know what my style is. Very not authoritarian. I try to be collaborative. I don’t know. Better to ask others than me what my style is.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Fair enough. Fair enough.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I’ve got good people who have been here a long time who like working with me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How does that work? I mean what makes it a good team?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I have ideas and they execute them.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s the best kind of collaboration.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I’m exaggerating of course. They have ideas also, and sometimes I have to help them figure out how to execute them, but that’s closer to the truth than we might want to say or admit. It’s not that I don’t participate in the execution. I very much do and guide it. But if not for them these ideas would be nothing more than that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Two followup questions on that. One is who are some of the other significant people that you worked with when you came back from Chicago?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Other than Dorothy? Well, there were people in the department. None of these people would be known by anybody but me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Were there others who were influential on you? Or even outside the department? It’s a big place.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Excellent question. It makes me think about it and to realize that mainly I just looked to Dorothy and to myself.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And what did Dorothy provide as a model or guide?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
She did two things. She let me know when I screwed up. As my career advanced, she mostly let me know in a way that said that it was her fault she didn’t let me know these kinds of hurdles were in the way, and I didn’t surmount them quite as well as I should have. I’m not proud of the fact, but the truth is that mostly I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do on my own. And I’m not sure that—other than Dorothy—that I got help as a leader until the last ten or twenty years when people around me—Melissa Burkett who’s on the staff here, a man named John Phelps who used to work here, Jim Bowen who was once a VP for Academic Affairs. They influenced me in different ways—in the ways of—well, from Melissa I learned maybe not how to plan but what it took to plan. Thank God that she was a planner. And from Jim Bowen and—I forgot who else I mentioned just now.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Burkett. John. John Phelps. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I learned that not because he told me that, but because I noticed that when he had a business communication, it began in a very friendly way. I learned that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why do you say that collaboration is not MD Anderson’s middle name? Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t mean that about scientists collaborating with other scientists. I mean that about the leadership, the institutional indecisiveness over almost any other characteristic
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Hmm. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
So if you have an idea, you execute it, even if you’ve already involved somebody else in the execution of it. If you get an idea that you think is great, you just execute it. You don’t even think about this other person ostensibly involved within the object. When it’s all done, you show it to them, maybe.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Hmm. Interesting. Mr.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
It’s so much cleaner to do it yourself than involve other people in it. At least that’s my impression.
Recommended Citation
Pagel, Walter ELS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 03: The History of the Department of Scientific Publications" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1272.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1272
Conditions Governing Access
Open
