{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/nk3610xt2w/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. William H. Coleman"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine.  Disclaimer:  The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker’s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice. \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2014-10-20 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History","Interview"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Don Ivey (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["audio file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["American Academy of Family Physicians","family medicine","family physician","William H. Coleman, MD"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Dr. William Coleman (personal name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}}],"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine. \u0026nbsp;Disclaimer: \u0026nbsp;The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker\u0026rsquo;s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150977/file/278417","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 3 - Coleman_William_Pt1_04_a.wav"]},"duration":3763.5308,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150977/file/278417/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150977/file/278417/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/278/417/original/Coleman_William_Pt1_04_a.wav?1750876955","type":"Audio","format":"audio/wav","duration":3763.5308,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150977/file/278417","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150977/file/278417/transcript/81414","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. William Coleman interview transcript  [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150977/file/278417/transcript/81414/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Today is Monday, October 20, 2014. My name is Don Ivey. I’m Manager of the Center for the History of Family Medicine. Today I’m speaking with Dr. William Coleman, former President of the AAFP and AAFP Foundation. Dr. Coleman, thanks for talking with us today. And you did give us your written permission, but I do also want to confirm on the tape that we do have your permission to tape this interview today. Is that correct?\n\nYes, sir, I agree.\n\nLet’s get started. Could you give us your name in full, please?\n\nMy name is William H. Coleman.\n\nWhere and when were you born?\n\nI actually was born in Birmingham, Alabama, 1940 at West End Baptist Hospital.\n\nCan you tell us a little bit about your parents and what did your family do for a living and where did you grow up?\n\nWell, I actually started off there in Birmingham, Alabama. My father actually went to work before he graduated from high school and he went back and got, at that time, I guess, what is referred to as a GED. And, actually, in those early days, actually, when I was born, when I was born he worked for what was the Birmingham Electric Company. The Birmingham Electric Company actually became Alabama Power in later years. He actually made his living climbing telephone poles. And the things that I remember from that young history was that we lived in a part of Birmingham that was a working class neighborhood near Ensley. We lived in a home that had been my mother’s parent’s home for some 20 years and my mother’s mother lived with us. I can remember we called her Mu (?) for whatever reason. And we lived there. My dad I think a lot of. Did then and still do. He was a hard worker. He was at the Birmingham Electric Company at the time that unions just started and he became the treasurer of the first union in the state of Alabama. Back in those days things were not handled quite as gently as they’re handled today. My father rode a motorcycle back and forth to work and he had someone throw a power tool into his motorcycle wheel and wrecked because he was forming a union. A lot of stories around those early formative years, but we got through that. My mother was a homemaker at that time. And we started…I guess by the second grade…my father came from a family that were farmers down in central Alabama in a little place called Ohatchee. They actually moved to Birmingham because his father worked on the train as a conductor on a train that hauled metal out of TCI Steel Plants in Birmingham. But he always wanted to go back to his roots of farming. So, when I was in the second grade we moved to central Alabama, to a small town, or actually near a small town called Jemison, Alabama. The only thing I remember about that was in Birmingham you got promoted every half year and in the county you only got promoted every year. And I remember that I was in the second and one-half grade, so when I went down to the rural community, they put me in the third grade. We moved to Jemison. Jemison was a town of about 300 people. When we moved there, the hitch and rails were still up on the main street. People still came into town with their wagons pulled by their mules. They tied their mules up while they got their hair cut and went to the grocery store. You left Jemison and you drove seven miles on a paved road. You then turned and drove a mile on a dirt road and you turned left and drove a half a mile down the lane to our house. And my dad bought 47 acres between two large swamps in which we were the only house there. So that’s where I think that my rural roots come from. We lived there while I went to the third grade and the fourth grade. My father was not successful at farming. Actually lost everything that he had put into the farm and he was not able to make a living. So we went back and moved north of Birmingham to a little town called Gardendale and my father had a friend who got him a job delivering papers. I always thought a paper boy is the kid that came around with a bicycle and threw your paper. Well, my dad drove four cars. He picked up the newspaper, the Birmingham News in Birmingham, and he delivered 3,500 papers every day. He did most of them by rolling the papers, throwing them out as he went by the road, and some he dropped off to paper boys who delivered them. But that was his business, delivering the Birmingham newspaper. And we lived there in Gardendale until I graduated from junior high school in the ninth grade. And he had never forgotten farming and we never sold the farm. So, when I graduated from the ninth grade, he moved us back to the farm. He bought another 40 acres on the end of that road. So, from then until well after I graduated from college, I know I finished my master’s, my mother and father lived there on that farm. I finished high school at Jemison High School. Was relatively active in football and basketball. Made decent grades but nothing great. Was determined that I was going to go to Auburn University and I was going to major in animal husbandry and I was going to come back and I was going to turn our, almost like a sharecropper little farm down there, into this cattle ranch. But as things happened, my father trained as an electrician. When we went back to Jemison, he initially had a paper route there, but, again, could not sustain. We could not make a living at farming, even with him working. So, he went back to school and learned fairly detailed electronics and how to read electrical plans and got a job at a place called Brake Shoe (?) in -- which manufactured train wheels. And he did all the electric currents for running the fires and molding the wheels and was very successful at it. But this was an era, in Alabama, at least, when the unions and the companies fought tooth and nail. And the unions felt like the only way that they could gain what they wanted was by striking. So, during that period when I was in high school, the tenth through the twelfth grade, my father was on strike, according to what Mother has told me, about 35%, 40% of the time, so I was not able to go to Auburn. Instead I attended Montevallo University which was a small liberal arts school located really only about 30 miles from us as the crow flies. And once I got started…the thing I remember was that Dad bought me an old Chevrolet car, would get me back and forth to school. One of the concessions that they made, even though there was very little money, was that I could live on campus and stay in school. So, I had my car, I came home on the weekends, I went back to school during the week. I had $10 a month that I had to spend just any way I wanted. I didn’t get a whole lot of hamburgers and Cokes. Bought some toothpaste. But the liberal arts school I went to, you paid your tuition, you had your room and board. And we had the old table seating for lunches and dinners. The school actually had its own dairy. We actually had fields where we could grow our own vegetables. And they had family dining. So, once I was at school, all my meals and my room and board and everything was taken care of, so we were able to do it. The good thing I remember about being at Montevallo was it was a small school, I had a lot of individual attention from my professors. At the time that I went to Montevallo, for years had been an all girls liberal arts school with emphasis on physical education and music. So, when I went to Montevallo, I was in the second class of males. There were 22 of us and there was one male for every 1300 females. I know that may seem unusual, that that’s what I remember, but at that age, that was a pretty important fact. Went through the liberal arts. Didn’t quite know what I wanted to do going to college. Started off in accounting and business. Realized quickly that…I had friends that were accountants and I used to look at (of course, back then everything was done by hand)…I used to look at their beautiful little printing on those account sheets and I finally decided I could never do that. So, changed over to a major in biology because biology seemed to have a lot of hands-on and seemed to be something that I enjoyed. And at the time, even as young as I was, I realized that I learned better by doing things and by having hands-on. So, I did really well in the labs and enjoyed that. At this point in my life, I’m now a junior in college. I don’t have any idea of what I’m going to do with myself. I was dating a young lady and her brother worked for the Alabama Power Company and he ran a group that worked through the mountains and they pulled the chain and did surveying and measured the land. I was told that if I drop out of college and we got married, that he would get me a job on that chain gang. And I’ve forgotten what it was, but it was probably something like $1 an hour, which was really great back then. And I don’t know, for some reason I just decided not to do that. And so we actually broke up because I would not drop out of college and get married, so we quit dating. During my freshman year, I met a young lady there at college that I was just infatuated with. She was a senior. I actually met her, I was taking a freshman biology lab and she was a lab instructor. And there has been a lot of talk over the years that I met her as she cut up my worm in the zoology lab. But we just casually began to talk and we began to date a little bit. And we were pretty much an item except for the fact that I was a freshman and she was a senior. So, by the time I finished my sophomore year, she graduated. She went to Birmingham and went to technology school, a medical technologist. I really didn’t see her much for a year. And then she was back on campus visiting and one of my friends said, Johnnie Francis is down here visiting with some of her old friends, she was asking about you. And there was a gathering place on that campus, like all campus. So, went over there and, sure enough, she was there and we talked. And the first thing you know, we were dating again. It was kind of unusual. She was in Birmingham, I’m in Montevallo. That’s 35 miles away. I still just have my own car, I still just have $10. Let me correct myself, that’s when I was a junior. So, my dad was working again, so I went from $10 a month to $10 a week – and that was just unreal. So, I would not spend any of my $10 that week. On Friday or Saturday morning, I would put enough gas in my car to get me to Birmingham and back and take the rest of my $10 and drive to Birmingham and we would date. Wherever we went, we usually went in her car because she had money for gas. And we didn’t go to a lot of fancy places because there wasn’t much money. But we dated until, I guess, the February of my junior year. And she was talking about other people she was dating, and being the masculine male who didn’t have anything, just decided that I wanted this person for my wife and I just needed to ask her to marry me. So, I said I don’t have anything, just an old car, and I need to finish school, but will you marry me? And August 28, my junior year in college, we were married. I had saved enough money working that summer for a honeymoon. I moved to Birmingham. She had finished her medical technology training and she was now a medical technologist. So, for all practical purposes, my wife sent me to my last year of college. My father had always said that he wanted to see me get an education. I was the first Coleman to ever be admitted to college. I was the first Coleman to ever graduate from college. But my father was a wonderful man but he did not want me to get married at 21 years of age. So, he said if you get married, I’m not supporting you in college. So, my wife did, she sent me through my last year of college.\n\nI’m now in college. I have a major in biology and I’m about to graduate from the liberal arts school with a major in biology. I’m married, my wife is supporting us, and I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do. I’d been told, you can teach or you can teach. So, we started looking around and I found this program where I could go into the military through the Army Reserve and become a second lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps. So, I thought this is exactly what we’re going to do. And it’s very interesting, Don, because Johnnie and I talked about it and said well, if this is really what you want to do, then we’ll do it, so we researched it. And I had two options; I could either go into a training program that trained me to be a hospital administrator or a sanitation officer. So, if you’re going to go into hospital administration…and I actually considered to get this training as a sanitation officer. You could come out and start your own business with a sanitation company. But we had pretty much decided that’s what we would do and she was ready to go with me wherever I was sent for Basic [Training] and whatever I did for the three-year commitment. They reviewed my history, they did all the paperwork. And when I was 18 years old, my esophagus actually closed up. It turns out, I have esophageal atresia and I have had a problem I’ve had since birth with the esophagus. The lower part of it just kept growing bigger and bigger and tighter and closed up. So, I went to Johns Hopkins and had one of the first endoscopies that they had done with a metal tube down your throat and they told me that this will just be a problem, that you have acid reflux enough that it will burn your esophagus and by the time you’re 60 you will have to have an artificial esophagus. Well, I didn’t think anything about that. So, I told these people that I had esophogeal atresia and it was treated and I was okay. They put me through a series of tests at Fort McClellan, Alabama, and I never will forget, the medical officer came out and sat down and said, young man, the problem that you have will not allow you to be admitted in the military. This was at the time when Korea was going on and a lot of young men were getting drafted. And he told me, “You are now going to be classified a 1Y.” And I said, “What is a 1Y?” And he said, “Well, if there’s nobody left in the United States to put in the military, they’ll come get you.” So, I asked why, I’m doing okay, I’m not having any trouble. And he told me the same thing the doctors had told me previously. He said, “If we take you in the military, we anticipate you’re going to have some serious problems with this esophageal thing over your lifetime. And the military says they’ll end up spending more money on you for your medical care than having you in three years, so you’re out.” We were devastated. This is what I was going to do with a biology career. I didn’t think I wanted to teach high school and I knew I had to have an advanced degree if I were going to teach in college, so that was my other option. In this interim, while this was going on, I had gotten a job at Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Alabama and I literally went in at 8:00 in the morning and went into this big room with cages of rats and went from cage to cage opening the rats, injecting them with cancer cells and put them back in – and that was my job day in, day out. Obviously, I wasn’t very happy. So, my wife worked at the hospital with a female pathologist whose husband taught at the University of Alabama, at that time, years ago, at the extension center in Birmingham. The University of Alabama is in Tuscaloosa, they have an extension center in Birmingham and they teach nursing students and have a few students who come to nighttime classes. So, she said that she thought if I talked to him, that they would hire me as what turned out to be what we now call a lab assistant, so the chance to get out of Southern research. So, I was hired at UAB. I worked under him. He taught the courses and I was the lab instructor and set them up and taught the labs. So, if we were having a CAT lab for nursing students, I got everything out, set it up, then I helped teach the nursing students. Then I did nighttime classes because it was nighttime. So, we started talking and he said, “Well, you know, if you ever want to do anything with your biology degree, you absolutely need to go to graduate school.” He said, “I have a friend, his name is Dr. E. Carl Sinsny (?) and he is the Chairman of the Department of Anatomy, and said, I will ask him about talking to you. So, I went over and I met with Dr. Sinsny (?) and he said your grades aren’t too good but…and this is just another one of those things that leads us down this path: In Montevallo we took a senior exam our senior year of college. And I can’t tell you other than it was some kind of qualifying exam for graduation from college. Dr. Sinsny looked at that and said, “We will accept this in place of a GRE and we will accept you here, into graduate school in anatomy, if you will take Organic Chemistry 1 and 2 at night (while I was working) and you make an A in both courses.” And I had to take Histology. So, that year I took those two courses. The first year I made an A in organic and an A in histology. The second semester I had my A in histology. And in organic 2, my final exam, my final grade was 89.7 and the professor refused to give me an A, he gave me a B. So, I hung my head down and I went over and met with Dr. Sinsny (?) and I said, I didn’t make the A in the second semester. And he said, “Well, then we’ll just have to take you in graduate school on probation.” And I said, “What’s the probation?” He said, “Well, pass all our courses the first year.” So, from college to not going to the military to getting out of a research lab to getting some experience in teaching and beginning to think that I like this teaching thing. So, the people in anatomy told me you will be here for six years. You will have two years working on your master’s. You will have four years working on your PhD and you will be through. I didn’t understand that at the time. But what they meant was, the whole six years you’re here, once you get your basic courses down, you’re going to be teaching in the labs for medical students and dental students. You’re going to be a teacher for us. And this is just the way they trained in anatomy; you did that for six years. So, basically we did that. I did my masters on “The Evaluation of the Cranial Remains of the Mountainville Indian in the Alabama River System.” Dr. Sinsny was one of the very few physical anthropologists in the United States. At that time, there were only about 18. And so I didn’t want to sit in a lab looking in a microscope doing anatomy research, so I did research under him, physical anthropology. I did my master’s, I did my four years of my PhD. Had decided this is really what I want to do in life, I want to be a teacher. I actually have a degree in anatomy from the University of Alabama School of Medicine-Birmingham. But if you look on my graduate work, on my master’s of PhD thesis, I’m classified as a physical anthropologist. So, I’m a physical anthropologist/anatomist. I’ve been now teaching in gross anatomy for five years. The professor of gross anatomy says I want you to be my understudy and I want you to take over gross anatomy, so our life was set. I was going to be teaching not just in college; I’m teaching in a medical school. I’m teaching medical-dental students. My primary course obligation was human gross anatomy and then I was also to be the assistant instructor in neuroanatomy. And we had two children, they were, at this point, in one of our church kindergartens. My wife had her job as a medical technologist. We started out buying a little house in not a real nice part of Birmingham. But a friend of hers at the hospital was finishing his degree in engineering at Auburn and they lived in this little house while he went to school and co-oped. And so he made my wife a deal, he said we’ll sell you this house for $1. So, we bought a two-bedroom, shingle house, with a fenced-in yard for $1 and actually got $1300 equity with it. So, we built that up a little bit and bought a tri-level over in a nice part of Birmingham. Everything was working out fine. Thought life was great. I want to be a teacher, this is what I’m going to do the rest of my life. \n\nI finished my degree and I was in the first year where I was an assistant teacher in gross anatomy and the next year I was to take it. And the Director of Admissions at the School of Medicine was also the histology teacher in anatomy. So, he came to myself and another, John Foshad (?), who had just graduated with his PhD in anatomy and said, “We’re changing the curriculum here at the medical school. We want two young men who have PhD backgrounds in basic science.” Mine was anatomy, his was physiology. “And we want you to sit through all of the courses that this class goes through. You will still be employed by the school, you’ll still get paid by the school.” And, actually, we still lectured to that class. I’d literally lecture on head and neck and then go sit down in the back of the room and take notes. And he said, “We want you to take all the tests and then we want you to develop a report on how this curriculum works.” At that time, the University of Tennessee ran two classes a year through. So, the new dean from Tennessee, he thought that’s what he was going to do in Alabama. So, we agreed and we both did. It worked fairly well, but they were trying to take a two-year curriculum and reduce it to 13 months. So, we got through with that and John and I both wrote up reports saying you just can’t do it this fast. It turned out they had 40% of that class fail Boards, so it wasn’t a good experience. But anyway, we went through that. Dr. Hoffman, who was the Director of Admissions and actually was the man that I was taking his course of gross anatomy, came to us one day and said, “This class has lost a number of students.” And you can imagine, it was really tough and a bunch of them dropped out. He said, “How would you two like to go to med school?” I mean, just out of the clear blue sky. So, I went home and I talked to Johnnie about it and we talked about it and said gee, I’ve got my career, you’ve got your career. If I go through med school, then I have to go somewhere for residency, we’re going to have to move. Then people at the medical school started talking to me. And they did go to that kind of curriculum, but they changed the curriculum to where they put it in an organ system basis. So, if I was going to be the professor teaching gross anatomy, I wouldn’t have my gross anatomy course. I would just teach a piece here and a piece here and a piece here and a piece here. So, if I wanted to be an organ system manager then they said you can’t do that with your PhD; you’ll have to have an MD, PhD. So, Johnnie and I talked about it and I said okay, I’ll take your offer and I’ll go through med school, then I’ll be an MD, PhD and then I’ll continue teaching, but now I can advance up through the systems. So, we took on the task. They came to us and said that you have now what’s equivalent to two years of medical school, you’re ready to start the clinical years. If you will do this, we will accept you in med school and we will give you six months of your fourth-year electives credit for your PhD. So, we’re sitting here looking at a year and a half and we will finish med school. So, we prayed about it and talked about it and we decided to do it. The roughest year and a half in our entire marriage. Johnnie was working full-time, two kids in kindergarten. I was down there at night. This was the old days when you didn’t have hours for residents or students. You were there as long as they needed you – and just constant. We survived, our marriage survived and everything worked. So, in a year and a half I finished med school. I now had an MD and a PhD, so I was ready to go back to teaching. And a friend of mine sat me down one day and said, you know, I know what you’re doing, I know what you want to do. If you don’t do a residency and if you don’t have the ability that you can go out and practice medicine then you’re not going to have any leverage over the school. Well, a couple of things happened while I was in that clinical part of med school. About the first month or two I was on VA medicine and I had a man in congestive heart failure. And back then the nurses couldn’t inject like Lasik. They called a medical student to inject Lasik. And then we had to sit at the bedside and monitor patients. I watched that man go from not being able to breathe to sit up and being talkative. And I thought, this is great. This is absolutely wonderful to be able to bring somebody back. So, I was beginning to waiver a little bit and said okay, I’ll do a residency. Well, I’m at UAB and I have a PhD in anatomy. Head and neck surgeons want me in residency, the neurologists wanted me in residency, the radiologists wanted me in residency. I had all these people. And I delivered babies as a student and loved it. OB/Gyn offered me a residency slot. But I had this inkling in the back of my head that I want to do more, I want to do all of this. So, I decided that I wanted to look at family medicine. And back then there weren’t many family medicine residencies. So, I found a family medicine residency in Tampa and I went down and interviewed. I was offered an interview in Kansas, maybe Wichita, they had one there. I didn’t want to get that far away from home. \n\nSo, during this process of finishing, get this through, interviewing for residencies, my father became very ill. In retrospect, he had cancer of the pancreas with metastasis. But I’m in the process of deciding this and he’s sick and I’m concerned about going off to Tampa or somewhere. And Gayle Stephens moved from Wichita and became the dean and principal of the regional campus and came with another professor and started the first family medicine residency in the state of Alabama. So, I thought wow, they said they’re going to be doing this. They’re going to be taking the first class when you graduate. So, I went up and talked to them. And this wasn’t having to go through The Match like you do now. This is just we want you to come here for residency. So, I thought well, my dad’s sick. It would be a lot better to be here. Now, my wife is from Scottsboro, Alabama. So this moves us from Birmingham to Scottsboro is 100 miles. This moves us to Huntsville where we’re only 40 miles from where she grew up. So I took it. As of today, I am the only living person who was never admitted to the University of Alabama School of Medicine but graduated with an MD from the school. I probably am very pleased to say, I never had to take the MCAT and I never went through the admissions process. Now, the reason I say I’m the only living person is the other fellow who did it with me died several years ago. So, that’s kind of the thing that hangs around the medical school. If you go down there and talk to someone about it – yeah, he’s the only person who was never admitted here but graduated from here. So, I went on to residency and by now I loved teaching, so my thoughts are still okay, I’m going to do this residency and when I get through with this residency, I’m just going to stay and teach at the residency level instead of medical school level. We moved to Huntsville, moved the kids up there. A lot of things happened along the way. We had gotten our house in Birmingham for very little, but it was in a very nice part of town. So, we actually sold it for enough money to buy another house in Huntsville and had several thousand dollars left over to get us started. We got started in the residency. I went through the residency and ended up as chief resident my third year. \n\nI was in my internship year and a letter came through the mail to the residents. It was a letter, I think at that time, was sent by Tom Stern. And it said that we are starting a resident’s section in the Academy and we are looking for residents who would be interested in serving on committees and here are the list of committees that we have. And one of those committees was the Committee on Research. So, I’m reading up and down this and I’m thinking well, I have a PhD, I’ve done a little research, why don’t I just fill this thing out, send it in and see what happens. Now, remember, Gayle Stephens is my dean. My program director was a young man who had just graduated from family medicine in Oklahoma and the department chair, the big one was Gayle Stephens. Gayle said, “Sure, you should do this. You should get involved. You’re going to be in teaching, you should get involved in the AAFP.” So, I sent in my application and sure enough I got appointed to the Research Committee. And I got out of my first meeting with the Research Committee and said gee, thank you for appointing me to this. I really appreciate this. And they said, we don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the only person that sent in an application that did any background in research. They said, you were a no-brainer. You were the person to take. So, I went from being on the Research Committee to then coming back to, I think it was our very first national meeting of what we called then the national resident association. I’ve forgotten our title now. But it was the first AAFP national residency association. And I can tell you exactly where the meeting was held. Bob Graham was the director and Dan Ostergaard was the associate director of this new residency organization. If you’re at the main intersection that goes into the Plaza and you go up the hill back towards downtown… \n\nThis is in Kansas City… \n\nIn Kansas City. Right at the top of that hill, at that time, was a Holiday Inn. Now, it wasn’t anything like the Plaza or the fancy hotels. It was a Holiday Inn and they had a little meeting room and that’s where we had our first resident board session. So, we met and I met a couple of other people there. Folks like Bruce Bagley. And we had meetings – and that year was the year, I think, they said that, because I’m in my second year and they said that they were going to put resident delegates in the Congress of Delegates. So, I ran among that group to be a delegate and I was elected a delegate. And in the next year, which was now my senior year, we came back. And again, this is one of those small stories. I ran to be chair of the resident organization and I ran against a young man from Texas. I can see him today, black curly hair. I can’t remember his name, but he was running from Texas, I was running from Alabama. They took a vote and the vote was tied. And Bruce was president, Bruce was the first chair of the organization. No, I think there was a guy ahead of Bruce who was a professor at Kentucky and Bruce was the current chair. I was running to be the chair for next year. So, he’s running the meeting and the vote comes up tied. So he said we should vote again, everybody think about who you voted for, think what you want to do and vote again. Well, they voted again and it was tied. So, Bruce got back up, made a little talk about both, what you want to do, etc. Voted a third time, it was tied. So, Bob and Dan Ostergaard and Bruce got off in a corner and looked at the bylaws that they had just written for this organization. It was only, I guess, by now, two and a half, three years old. And Bruce came back and announced that in the event of a tie that the chair of the resident organization would cast the vote – and Bruce cast his vote for me. And the only way I was ever elected chair of that resident organization was by Bruce Bagley casting a vote that made me chair of the organization. \n\nThat would have been the National Conference of Family Practice Residents. Is that correct?\n\nThe National Conference of Family Practice Residents. I’m glad I sent you the CV because I thought I needed to bring it. But, you know, those are the kinds of things that stick in your memory, the kind of things I remember. Because I remember that I would never have probably gone anywhere in this organization if Bruce had not cast that vote and made me chair. Now, again, I don’t know why things happen in life the way they happen, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that I’m destined for something because things just keep happening to keep moving me in a direction. There’s some power somewhere that’s guiding it. That young man, bless his heart, six months after that election passed away.\n\nThe gentleman from Texas?\n\nThe guy from Texas was found dead in his bed one morning when he didn’t show up for residency. Natural causes, no drugs or anything like that. Just natural causes. You look back and you say, if it had gone that way, he would have been there six months and if he would have passed away, then I would have inherited the position. So, I served that year as chair. You can already see that it’s in my blood. I’ve been on the Research Committee, I was a delegate to the Congress and I’ve now served as chair of the residency organization, finished my residency and took a teaching position there in Huntsville that I felt like this is what I wanted to do. Don, I’d probably been in that teaching position four months and I just did not feel comfortable. Every professor in our department but one had, in the resident department, including Gayle Stephens, at least 15 years practice experience before they came back to teach. And here are all these people teaching and here I am teaching the residents that I was their Chief Resident last year. I don’t know that I did a bad job, but I just didn’t feel comfortable. I felt like that if I was going to teach family medicine residents, I had to have experience in practice. I’m 40 miles away from Scottsboro. Scottsboro desperately needs family physicians. It’s my wife’s hometown. A resident that was one year behind me was from Scottsboro and he was going back to Scottsboro to practice. So, I taught that year in the residency, then next year left the residency and went to Scottsboro with a young man named Brad Bradford and our intent was to practice family medicine together. My intent, at this point in my life – I always set my goals at five-year intervals. And my intent was to practice five years, then go back into teaching. During that five years, we started out with another physician working with him. It wasn’t working well, so we bought our own land, built our own building, opened our own practice. We delivered babies. We \n\ndid a lot of minor surgeries. It was back in the old days, you worked five days and my partner took one weekend on call and I took the next weekend on call. When you worked emergency room, you had to go stay in the emergency room at night and you had to cover it all during the day. So, it was just a lot of work, a lot of care, and just did a lot of wonderful things – other than getting tired. \n\nWe got started in and all of a sudden I realized we have a house to be paid for. I now have children that are now ready to go to college. Both of them wanted to go to the University of Alabama, so we had kids in college. It was going to take us at least ten years to pay for the building and our land, so when the five years hit, I didn’t feel like I could go back. I still love the teaching. So, somewhere there I became active in the Alabama Academy of Family Physicians, began to serve on committees on the Alabama Academy, I began to work my way up through that. I kept going to Huntsville every Wednesday and teaching the residency, so I kept my teaching up. I began to take residents in my practice, so I sort of had the balance – I’m practicing, I’m teaching residents, I’m going down to the school and teaching. And by now I had incorporated a lot of education in my patients. It was part of my practice, to explain everything to patients. So, I seemed to be doing alright with that, so I just didn’t go back. Our daughter went through college. Got a master’s in social work. Ended up teaching three year olds in a Christian church school in Jacksonville, Florida. My son went through college, ended up going through medical school. So, I had him for another four years in medical school. So, we just kept doing what we were doing, but during that period I kept being more and more active in the state Academy. So, about ten years after I was chair of the family medicine resident group, I became president of the Alabama state academy. And then from being Alabama state academy, went on to then serve on national committees. Became a delegate from the Alabama Academy. And there’s a little story there: Back in those days, you became a delegate from a state chapter, you might stay in that position for 15 years. Once these people got in, they just stayed there, no one challenged them – we were a small Academy. And so one day the delegate, bless his heart, I can’t remember his name, he was from Athens, Alabama, called me at the office on the telephone and he said, “Bill, I think you need to go and you need to get involved at the national Academy. And to do that, you need to be our delegate. So, we’ve got our state meeting next week. I’m going to resign as delegate and I’m going to request that you be. Like, we didn’t even have elections to be appointed delegate – and he had been the delegate for 17 years. So, he did that and I became a delegate. Some interesting things that I remember, I don’t at this point remember the exact details. Alabama was not a chapter for turning in resolutions. But at that time, the American Board of Family Practice, our Board… \n\nABFP… \n\nABFP was run by the guy that the scholarship is named after. \n\nDr. Pisacano. \n\nNicholas Pisacano. And when you went to the Congress of Delegates, Nick was there, you did what Nick said – and Nick ran it. Well, I don’t know why, I don’t know whether it was me or somebody else, but back then Nick had board members and people who wrote the exams for our board who were not family physicians, they were internists or surgeons. And they were people that he sort of liaisoned with, with the other boards. And we got it in our heads that why did we have people that were internists and general surgeons and pathologists on the board that was testing and writing exams for family physicians, that it should be family physicians. So, we put up a resolution…the Academy can’t tell the Board what to do. We put a resolution in the Congress that requested that the Academy ask the Board to change their policies to have family physicians on the Board, or something to that effect. And Alabama’s seat was on the front row and I can remember Nick coming through a side door and calling me over there and telling me to leave that alone, that he didn’t want that to happen. He did not want that resolution passed. You can go back to the archives and see exactly what the resolution was because at this point my\n\nmemory is not that sharp. But it changed something major about the Board and Nick didn’t want it. And he said, if you push this through and you pass this, you’ll never go anywhere else in this Academy. And I went back and sat down and talked with my other delegate and he said, it’s your resolution; whatever you want to do. And this was back – you know, the Congress now runs pretty streamlined. This is back, we might spend half the day debating issues before. And that issue went back and forth. He got up to the microphone, everybody that were board members that were there got up to the microphone. And as I remember, there was myself and maybe two others that were debating against them. But that resolution passed. And I don’t think, if I can remember back, from then as long as Nick was leading that organization, I don’t believe he ever spoke to me. \n\nHe never spoke to you again? \n\nI don’t remember him ever speaking to me again. But that resolution passed. \n\nEven after you became President of the Academy, he never spoke to you again? \n\nYou know how you would go to meetings and somebody would be there and they will answer questions but they don’t really speak to you? Well, there was never a relationship between the two of us unless it was right at the end. But I never remember having any kind of personal relationship with the man. He was a wonderful man, a great man. Did wonderful things for the Academy. But from that time on, I was not, we just didn’t have a relationship. And I wish you would look back and see exactly what that resolution was and remind me about it sometime. Because I remember, it was a big deal and I was young and I just thought that was something great. But that’s just one of the things that I remember from being a delegate in that time. We dealt with a lot of issues. But I remember that the EVP of our state chapter, her name was Joyce Ferlong (?), she said, “Bill, it’s time for you to run for the board.” And I said, “I can’t do that. I have a full practice, I’ve got two children in college, it’s just not time for me to run for the board.” \n\nSo, the Board of Directors for the AAFP? \n\nThe Board of Directors for the AAFP. So, someone else in our Academy said he wanted to run, so I said fine, and he ran and he was defeated. You know, I’m not necessarily a politician, but just the way these things worked. We ran a candidate from Alabama, the candidate was defeated. All the officers in the state, and especially Joyce, were all upset that we lost an election. And so they just came to me and said, you’ve just got to run next year. You’ve just got to run. We want a candidate to win; you’ve just got to run next year. So, that was 1989 and I finally agreed to run. And I never will forget, our slogan was “It’s Coleman Time In ’89.” And there’s some other materials there at the house that kind of represent things that went on then. We had more of our members that year (I think that was in, I’ve forgotten where it was now)…but we had more of our members volunteer to come out to the meeting and they worked as hard as they could. The other thing I remember was back then you gave a lot of gifts, you gave a lot of things. And I had tennis shoe shoelaces about that long (demonstrating) and they had “Coleman Time In ‘89” printed on them. And we gave out shoelaces to everybody that said, “Remember we’re running.” And we also, back then the band Alabama was in their heyday. Scottsboro is here and Fort Payne is over the mountain 38 miles. Well, Fort Payne is where the band Alabama is from. All the band members live in Fort Payne, Alabama. So they had a big fan store and we went over there and we struck a deal with them. So, we bought Alabama albums at a discounted rate and we gave every delegate and alternate delegate an Alabama album. I can’t even remember now how much that cost the Academy. But I remember that because everybody thought that was great. And the other thing that, of course, being naïve…this little store in our town served these little cans. I know you’ve seen little cans of potted meat. Well, they were little cans and there was nothing in them but sand. But on the outside it said, “Possum Meat” and it had a little slogan about road kill in Alabama. Well, I just thought those were the cutest things in the world. I said, I’m going to give one of those to everybody. So, I went to the store that had them there in Scottsboro and I bought enough to give every delegate and alternate delegate. Put them in cases, brought them down to the Academy, so proud of myself. And Joyce and the other people on the committee took one look at them and said, you can’t give those to people. You don’t want to advertise Alabama as road kill, possums on the road in Alabama. So, we had what, two delegates from every state? So, about 102 delegates or so. I had 102 cans of this possum meat that I kept in my office and gave away to patients for probably two years because they wouldn’t let me use them. So, we got through that. I was very fortunate, I was elected to the Board of Directors. \n\nThis might be a good place to stop and take a break. Then we can pick up your getting into national office. So, why don’t we take a quick break and we’ll be right back.\n\nThis is side 2 of our interview with Dr. Bill Coleman. Today is October 20, 2014. And Dr. Coleman, we were just talking about, you had just been elected to the Academy Board of Directors. So, take it from there, you had just been elected.\n\nWell, I wish my memory was better, I’m trying to remember if it was Los Angeles where I was elected to the Board and it was San Diego where I was elected President-Elect. I get those two meetings sometimes tangled up. But I think it was the latter, the former (?). You know, elected to the Board was one of the highlights of, if you wanted to say, my career. It’s interesting that from the time I served as chair of the national family practice residents organization to being President of the state Academy was ten years. From the time of being President of the state Academy to becoming President of the AAFP was ten years. So, it seems that I sort of progressed along in ten-year increments. I guess it just demonstrates how slow I am to learn because it took me ten years to learn how to do the next job. But the Board was something exciting for Johnnie and I. I won’t play the country boy, country doctor thing, but obviously both my wife and I grew up in Alabama, we never lived outside of Alabama. The largest city we lived in was Birmingham to Huntsville, then right back to Scottsboro, which at that time was a town of 13,000. I practiced there for 26 years. At the time that I was elected to the Board, I’d been in practice there since 1978 to 1989. Had served on a lot of committees. Service through that time on committees, and obviously what we were about to start on the Board, pretty much took up all the spare time I had when I wasn’t in practice. So, my wife, rightly so, said, we’ve never taken a vacation to just go where we wanted to go. We’ve always taken vacations that were dictated, for the time off, to go do something for the Academy. And we tried to balance that by, if there was a cluster meeting and it was in Seattle or if there was a Board of Directors meeting. But prior to the Board of Directors, if there was a cluster meeting or a commission meeting, that we would try to go in a day early and we would go sightseeing. So, one of the wonderful things about our side issues of working with the Academy is not only being able to serve those people that we’re representing and being able to be a part of great things that were happening, but we were able to see parts of the country and sometimes have our children see parts of the country that we would never had been able to travel and do if we had not been with the Academy. We would go in a day early, I could manage to take off two or three days from the practice instead of taking off a week, and we would travel – and that was wonderful. Once we were elected to the Board…of course, back then the Board met more often. We met more often in places away from Kansas City. So, there were some wonderful trips along with, a lot of times, dealing with some tough issues. I don’t remember right offhand a lot of individual issues that we dealt with. You know, the kind of things I remember is that we elected people to the Board in threes like we do now. And I was elected to the Board in ’89 and at the same time Earl Hill was elected to the Board, so we were in the class together. We had known one another as delegates. We had known one another as we went through the couple of years of getting ready, campaigning. Our wives had gotten to know one another, Tink Hill and my wife Johnnie. So, we talked to one another and said, we’re going to having our very first Board meeting in Vancouver, Kansas. \n\nVancouver, Canada? \n\nYeah, I’m sorry, I said Kansas. Vancouver, Canada, yes, please. So, we were almost before email now and we got together by telephone and we met in Seattle, Washington about four days before the meeting started. And we rented a van and we drove, I’m trying to remember the island there off of Vancouver. It has Busch Gardens. We rented a van and we drove up the island, to the end of it, and we got on a ferry and we rode that ferry to, I think the name was Prince George, which is the last town in Canada before you enter Alaska. And then we headed cross country. And in about two days we went all the way across to almost Calgary. We turned south, we stopped and walked the glaciers. We turned south and dropped out of the upper plateau of Canada into a desert, which just amazed all of us – that we were driving in a desert with cactus and we were 100 miles out of Vancouver. But we made this circuit and got back in Vancouver the night before the meeting started. And from that point on, the Hills were our best friends throughout that Board. The other mentor that I can remember having, starting out on the Board, was Joe Czarsty and his wife. And Johnnie became good friends with them and we just thoroughly enjoyed the fact that besides working hard for the Academy, we developed friendships that were maintained for many years after our service at the Academy was completed. And that group of people have met since around 1995, maybe 1996, 1997, every year for an annual meeting. And we call ourselves the HUNTS, the Has-beens, I’m blanking… \n\nIt was an anagram though for… \n\nH was the Has-beens. I can’t remember what U was. But N was the Never was. So, we put together this group and we’ve maintained that friendship through all these years. And, in fact, Johnnie and I drove up and spent the night with the Hills Saturday night before coming over here for this meeting. And that’s just an example of how friendships develop when you work together and spend a lot of time together, as leaders and officers are required to do with the Academy. \n\nThe next thing that sort of pops into my mind is skipping forward to running for President-Elect. The decision was made, and at that time, was before the Academy changed its protocol and you served two years on the Board of Directors and then you ran for Chairman of the Board. And your third year that you were Director for your term, you were elected within the Board to become Chairman of the Board. And then the other two people served out their third year. Then often you were then running against some of those people when you ran for President-Elect. So, I served as Chairman of the Board and just had a wonderful support from the staff here at the Academy. Really appreciated Bob Graham. I had a couple of things that sort of came up during that period. One of the staff members – gosh, darn, the fellow that was on the Academy staff and passed away. \n\nMike Miller, Deputy EVP. \n\nMike Miller. Mike Miller came up to me after I was elected Chairman of the Board and he said, “Coleman, you don’t have it in you. You’re not going to be able to control this group.” So, I sat down and thought about that and I thought, you know, herding this bunch is like herding a bunch of cats because everybody knows what they want to do and they all want to get things in there. So, we sat down at the first Board meeting, and I’ll never forget, we all dressed in our suits and what-have-you, and I took my coat off, hung it on the back of the chair and sat there just in my shirt and tie. Bob Graham is sitting on the right and the recording secretary on the left and we called the meeting to order. And I said, okay, everybody sitting around this board table are going \n\nto get their say and we’re going to give everybody around the table the chance to get their say. So, I will identify speakers and you will raise your hand and you will wait for me to identify you. Well, that first day we got challenged several times. And one of the things that was really bad was, I was getting challenged by, at that time, the current President-Elect, John Tudor. And I said, “John, it’s not your turn. I’ve got a list. I’m making of list of who holds their hands up first. We’re going by the list.” By the time that first Board meeting was over, we had control of the Board. And from that point on everybody knew they were going to get their turn, they knew that they could wait, they knew that everybody got to speak first, that wanted to, before they had a second round. That was our protocol the rest of that year. And I never will forget Mike coming up to me and saying, “I didn’t think you had it in you, but we’ve never had a Board Chair that ever controlled the Board better than you did.” And that’s just the one the greatest compliments I’ve ever had. I also remember when Mike passed away and we flew out here for his funeral. And I have to admit, that was the first time that I ever went to a funeral in a church, left the church and went to a bar and had a celebration. And that was the bar that he always went to on Saturdays to watch football games and basketball games when he couldn’t be there in the coliseum or the stadium. And it was just really an emotional thing. Mike was dearly loved. He was a wonderful, wonderful guy. I’m not quite sure when it occurred, but I have another story I remember about Mike. I do remember we were in Orlando. It was the national meeting in Orlando. And I think Orlando is the meeting that John Tudor was President and I was President-Elect. And we were getting lined up to march into, I think it was to start maybe the Fellowship session. It was something we were being lined up to march in and go on the stage. And everybody is standing there with their little walkie-talkies and we’re all in line. And it seems like maybe Bob Graham is one and John Tudor was two and I was the third in line. And the little guy is standing there with his walkie-talkie and he’s saying…and you hear Mike Miller’s voice coming through the walkie-talkie and says, “Okay, we’re ready – send in the clowns!” And we never let him forget that. We never let him forget that. That was also a meeting that was held in conjunction with the WONCA and WONCA was there. And you always had a receiving line where the President and the President-Elect and I think the Board Chair were in a receiving line and everybody got to walk through, at some point during the meeting, and shake hands and all. Well, we didn’t anticipate that all of these people that had come from around the world understood that they were all to go and congratulate the President and give him or her a gift. So, we stood in that line for five hours. They finally brought us all stools. Several of us actually had ankles swollen out over our shoes. And as I remember, very late at night they were going to stop the line. And John said no, all these people came from around the world, let them come through. So, there’s no telling how many…several hundred people came through that line. And I can just remember going back to the room just being exhausted. But I can also remember all these people bringing little trinkets and they all had to give the President a trinket. But I also remember, I think it was that same Orlando meeting that we went to Disneyland, somewhere there for our annual party. And I got drafted to be the one to go behind the screen to do the scene of one of the fright movies, of stabbing someone, and wasn’t told what I was doing. So, there were just a lot of things that happened that were really great those meetings. But we got through that and as I said, it was a wonderful time. I think we dealt with a lot of tough issues. \n\nThat was a time when President Clinton had put his wife in charge of a new healthcare system for the nation and that was just cranking up. \n\nThe move for healthcare reform? \n\nRight. And John was going out as President, I was coming in as President. So, as President-Elect I had to start dealing with some of those issues. We had some really, really tough Board meetings - actually, the Board meetings that I had to chair where we were trying to settle on issues and directions and set up resolutions and what direction to go. Our membership were just absolutely against the Clinton reforms, so it was a pretty intense time. Bob Graham, our EVP, and as President-Elect, then moving into the President year, I was called on to do a lot of trips to Washington. During my presidential year, out of the 365 days, I was out of the office 201 days. I went to hearings. I guess it could have been a wonderful time. I had meetings with the President himself in the Oval Office. Probably more impressive, I had meetings with Hillary Clinton sitting around the table and watching her manipulating the group. We made presentations. I really learned to use sound bites.  But I got hate mail. \n\nFrom the membership? \n\nFrom the membership. I got death threats because I was the President. And I remember Bob Graham one time saying, “Some of those slip through when they’re sent directly to you, but I get most of them here and I make sure that you don’t see them.” And I just thought, you know, he was really trying to protect me from some of that. It was a period of being President that Johnnie and I tried to go, as President-Elect, President, to all the states that invited us. We loved going to the states, Johnnie knew a lot of the women that were delegates and all and we really got involved with the states when we were at their meetings. I was trying to remember – at one time during that period there was this big thing about COLA and getting the labs and having proper site visits and the Academy was setting up a group to do site visits on our labs and there were a lot of issues. And I went out to visit with the Oklahoma delegation, the Oklahoma state chapter, and I remember taking scrub suits and gowns from the lab and face masks and putting them all on. Then when I was introduced to come in and install their officers, I came in from the back of the room wearing all this gear. We had hoods, we had plastic face masks and gloves and everybody just laughing forever and ever and ever. And then getting up on the stage and trying to get the hood up and in about five minutes being so hot in that thing with the lights, that we finally just had to come out of it. But those kinds of things just popping in my head right now that went on with the state chapters. It was absolutely one of those phenomenal things you can do as an officer of the Academy, is go visit the state chapters. We just had so much fun. Also, in dealing with the healthcare reform, it was just a very, very stressful, traumatic year that I would never have been able to get through if it had not of been for the support of people like Joe Czarsty, Ken Evans, [Ken] Whittington and Bob Graham. \n\nMaybe now we can switch gears and talk about…you’re one of the few people that was President of both the Academy and the Foundation. Do you want to address that now?\n\nYeah, that’s good. \n\nHow did you get involved in the Foundation? Did you get involved from the Academy into the Foundation, the leadership of that organization?\n\nWell, as you and I had talked a little bit earlier, not on tape, that as the Foundation evolved, the Foundation evolved into a membership where there were corporate members, there were state members, then there were members-at-large. Also, as part of that reorganization, there were members that were on the Foundation Board who represented the AAFP Board. And so as I went through my Past President year, I had had the experience of serving on the Foundation Board as a state representative back actually when we first started putting state representatives on the Foundation Board, which was back, I think, in the early ‘90s, but I’m not sure. So, I thought it was a natural thing. I had experience with the Board. I really appreciated what the Foundation was doing. I saw the Foundation changing directions and being much more representative of the membership and using funds to benefit student interests and issues that the membership needed to deal with and becoming a major philanthropic organization. I can remember that one of our first goals in looking at our monies was, and I’m not positive about the amount but I’m going to say we were worth, our endowment was $300,000. And I remember one of the corporate members telling us, if you don’t have an endowment of $1 million, you’re not ever going to be considered a significant foundation. So, we started a project and within about three years we had an endowment and $1 million. So, I think that’s one of the early success stories. But just because I had an interest in the Foundation, I asked to be appointed one of the members-at-large (that was at the time when I left) and then went on to serve as a Board member and then served as President-Elect and President of the Foundation. I think we did some good things during that period. But our biggest challenge and our success was, I think at the time I left the Foundation we were somewhere around $3 million to $3.5 million endowment. I may not be correct, don’t know my numbers, but I would just say we had at least doubled, tripled the endowment we started with. I think we’ve gone well beyond that now, which is wonderful. I had the opportunity during that time to work with Sandy Panther as EVP and certainly had wonderful support from her and her staff. \n\nFollowing up on that a little bit, what do you feel both the Academy and the Foundation are doing better nowadays than it was doing when you first started there and why?\n\nThe Academy or the Foundation? \n\nLet’s do both, one at a time. \n\nIf we think about the Foundation, as I said, my original service on the Foundation was as a state member. And at the time when that was going on, our Foundation really was doing very little other than having a small amount of money that we gave out as grants to our residencies and family physicians who were attending to research. We had very little support from national industrial organizations, pharmaceutical companies, non-pharmaceutical. But if anything we were predominantly supported nationally, other than our membership, by pharmaceutical companies. So, I think that the things that I saw during that period was one, when we started, our Foundation was near bankruptcy. And I credit Bob Graham and Jerry Keller in reversing that and honored to have part in finishing that project of reversing and making the Foundation more of a business organization and a true philanthropic organization. As I said, our goal, starting with Jerry Keller, was to create a Foundation with a $1 million endowment. I do not know what the endowment is today, some 20 years later, but I know that it’s extremely successful. Also, another thing that was started at that time was broadening the base of professional or industrial donors. And if you look at the donor list today, you see that while there are still significant pharmaceutical companies that are on that donor list, there are many more companies on the donor list that deal with electronic medical records and actually food, health foods and otherwise. So, I think what I’ve seen change with the Foundation is I’ve seen it have a broader base of support, I’ve seen increased support from members, and I’ve seen it take a more aggressive stance and set up programs such as our programs that are supporting clinical care in the Dominican Republic [he means Haiti], care for the homeless and underserved and by broadening its approach, I think it has become a significant healthcare foundation. \n\nWhen I first started with the Academy, I guess we were probably in our heyday, we were just at the point that everybody thought the government was going to go over to a gatekeeper concept. We had students interested in family medicine. We had some of the highest match rates we’d ever had. And for about a five- or six-year period, we were on the tip of the wave and it was a wonderful time to be a family physician and to be with the Academy. I saw that wave crest. I actually ended up…one of the tasks that I took on as I was Past President was to establish a Student Interest Task Force along with Julea Garner as my liaison with the Academy. We had a couple of successes. We were able to get formal organization and support for the Family Medicine Interest Groups. I would like to say that we really birthed the Family Medicine Interest Group program. But yet we still kept seeing these red flags that interest in family medicine was waning. We have now gone through that deep trough. I think a part of it was that medical schools were going after the brightest students and they were taking people into med school who were engineering majors and people that were really interested in high tech things. And the medical schools lost the interest in the doctor and recruiting people that had good people skills, that were able to work with people, educate people and they lost their way. I think the Academy, through all of the family medicine organizations, have been able to steer medical schools back toward accepting the type of medical student that actually makes a good family doctor, more interested in caring for people, more mission-oriented, than the type of students that we were getting. As a result of that, especially from where I’ve been for the last 11 years, I’m seeing a new student admitted into medical school. I’m seeing people that do value family medicine and patient relationships and I’m seeing more and more matches by American graduates in our residencies and I’m seeing more student membership in our AAFP. I am a firm believer in the national resident/student conference each year. The particular program that I manage now in Alabama, the Rural Medicine Program, we fund every one of our students in their first summer of med school to come to that meeting. I think it’s a valuable recruiting tool for the residents, so I applaud the Academy for continuing that program. And I’m guessing that it’s still the second highest attendance of a meeting that the Academy runs. At least in the past I know it has been. I think our leadership under Doug Henley has been really strong. And obviously programs that I’m hearing about today, such as putting $20 million into educating the public about family medicine and several different projects, are just extraordinary – when I remember early on we had an education project in which we put $2 million into. So things are changing. I think the Academy represents the family physicians of today and I realize that that doesn’t necessarily mean a solo rural doctor like I was. It means that there’s a new family physician. The younger physicians are technically better trained. I think they’re probably maybe not smarter than we were but they’re more intelligent than we were relative to dealing with modern day approaches to medicine. But yet I don’t think we continue to maintain the doctor as a person and the doctor that has a doctor/patient relationship. I have to admit that I haven’t kept up as much in the last ten years. It was hard for me to believe, as I was looking at the fact that I’m invited here to the AAFP meeting in Washington to receive the… \n\nJohn G. Walsh Award. \n\nJohn G. Walsh Award. Don has to remind me that that’s a G in there. John G. Walsh Award. And knowing that that award was tentatively set up for one of the first family physicians to ever serve all three of the major family medicine organizations – the Academy, the Foundation and the Board. But I was really interested, when I received my letter about the award from our current president, Reid Blackwelder, that he noted that this was for national service, service to the Academy. And then he noted that for activities and contributions that continue to reach out beyond the state of Alabama. But then he went on to say, “And also your efforts within Alabama to continue in student interests, to develop rural students into medical students in family medicine and future family doctors.” So, I looked at that and read it a couple of times and I really thought, you know, there’s something that we used to talk about in 1994 and 1993. After you have been on the Board for three years, you then have been President-Elect, President and Past President. You’ve got six years of your life involved in which you are deeply embedded in all the activities of the Academy. And when you stop that service, in my case, thankfully it was another several years with the Foundation Board. But when all of that comes to an end, you go home. And we used to talk about life after the Academy. And in 1994 when I made my last comments from the podium to the Congress of Delegates, I can remember a couple of things that…well, I can remember the one thing that I did then, was I commented on the fact that there’s life after the Academy and that I was returning to Alabama and I was going to continue to serve the Academy in my Alabama chapter and continue to work for all those things that we’ve been working for, for the last 18 years. And then I challenged every member of the Congress of Delegates, whether you serve as a delegate, you serve on committees and commissions, you serve as an officer, that you are the most valuable asset that your state chapters can have to follow in family medicine. So I challenge you that when your time comes, like me, go home and serve your state. And whatever it was, three or four years later, I remember going up to that podium as the retiring President of the Foundation and I remember saying something similar to the fact that we must, as members, continue to support our Foundation. That our Foundation can do wonderful things but only if we can continue to support it. And that I pledge $1,000 a year for the next ten years to the Foundation and I would ask every retiring officer and every retiring delegate to match that pledge. I think it was 2011 or 2012, I completed my pledge, so I think that some other people did that too. But the thing is that once you’ve left that very concentrated environment of knowing what’s going on, being a part of it and doing things on a national level, there is just no way that people that love the Academy and love family medicine as much as we do, at the state level they just don’t have that experience base. My dean of the medical school a couple of years ago said that he had been teaching internal medicine for 17 years, but he didn’t become an expert at it until probably after ten years. And the way you become an expert is you do something so long that you do it well and you don’t have to think about it or look up how to do it, you just know how to do it. You know what a symptom means. And I think that those are the kind of things that we learn when we go through the whole process of serving the Academy and serving our physicians. So, I just think that it’s a valuable, valuable resource and that one of the things that we should work on for the Academy in the future is getting those resources and keeping them in the system. \n\nI went back to Scottsboro…and by the way, the President-Elect, and especially the President’s year, I kept my practice going. I had a nurse, her name was Betty --. And if I had not had that nurse, after spending all that time in Washington and all the things that we had to do during that presidential year, being gone 201 days out of that year, I would not have had a practice to come back to. She was the most wonderful asset. She kept people in line. She kept taking care of things. She kept things stacked up so that when I was in town, I could get things done. There would have been no practice. But she managed to keep that practice together and I never, ever, ever will forget that. One of the other things is that up until I think it was either when I became President or the President before me, was the first time that the Academy ever paid a stipend to officers to offset what they lost in their practice. I’ve heard stories, I don’t know how true they are, that there were people who served as President of the Academy before that and went bankrupt in their practices. I know that the trend has always been, go through the Academy, serve your offices and then you will become medical director of an insurance company or you go to a teaching program, but you don’t go back into your practice. Dr. Weber went back in his practice and a couple of others. Jerry Keller went back after being on the Board. But one thing that I was determined to do was to go back into my practice and continue to have a practice. If it had not been for Betty, I would not have been successful at that. So, I went back. At the time, and Jim Weber was one of the influences that was leading us, as solo physicians, to say that if we were going to do the very best in our practice, we needed to have a way to balance our lives with our families and do the service that we do to patients. And I have to admit that the first 16, 17 years in practice, I practiced under the old philosophy of you took the Hippocratic Oath, your patients come first. There’s nobody to take care of them but you; you’ve got to take care of them. And probably back in that day that was true because there weren’t many of us in rural areas and we did work long hours. But in hindsight, I think even though we took off time for vacation and I would make rounds in the morning, go to the office, I’d leave the office, go to my son’s Little League baseball practice, be the assistant coach, get them through, run him home, go back to the office and see patients again that night, then come back home, still I think that my family suffered because I didn’t have time with them. So, I was determined then to go back to practice and put together a group of family physicians in Scottsboro, Alabama, a town who never had a family medicine group before. I tried to hire physicians in the past to come in with me. I hired a couple who had not been successful either financially or rewarding wise or sharing the load. But about that time, my son was in his fourth year of med school and he called me one day and said, “Dad, I need to talk to you. Can you and Mom come down to Huntsville and have dinner with me tonight?” He was married, had no children. It was interesting – he started out in med school because he wanted to be a psychologist. But then I talked him into trying to go to med school to be a psychiatrist. So, he went into med school. One thing I didn’t know at that time, but he was admitted, he ended up the top 5% of his class. He loved to do things with his hands, so he thought he would be a surgeon – and that’s what I thought he was going to do. I thought he’s going to go off and be a surgeon. When he called us, we went down and sat down with him and did dinner and had a little small talk. And he had come up to my office and done a month’s elective with me. He had asked the Director of Student Services if it was okay to do an elective with his father and they told him it was okay. So, he had done this month and I thought we had a great time. I let him kind of take the lead. And I thought it was okay. Anyway, we were sitting there at dinner and he said, “I’ve decided that I don’t want to be a surgeon because surgeons don’t talk to people. I want to go into family medicine but I only want to go into family medicine if I have the option of returning to Scottsboro and practicing with you.” So, obviously I said yes and he came to Scottsboro. We are 15 years apart in our training, so we were working through that quite well. I promised him that I would stay in practice with him for five years, but then I wanted to do some other things. So we started the practice. I had quit delivering babies years ago because there were only two of us in Scottsboro who delivered babies at the time and my partner quit and I couldn’t carry the load by myself. But Hardin had trained and wanted to deliver. So, he said I’m going to need some help. So, I said okay, let’s form a group and you put the group together. I’m going to be here, I’m going to leave shortly, you put the group together. So, he got another one of his friends that did deliveries to join and then he got another one to join, so we ended up with a group of four. So, I began to make plans to wind down and step out of the group. As it turns out, about the time that I was winding down and stepping out of the group, the group fell apart for multiple reasons. One of the doctors just could not produce at the same level the other three could, so it could never get up to balancing out income and cost. One of the doctors just really decided he didn’t want group practice. He wanted control of his nurse, he wanted to do everything himself. So the group fell apart. My son ended up with some hip problems and had two hip surgeries, so I ended up practicing with him for seven years instead of five. But the bottom line is that I always worried about, I knew that there were things that I wanted to do relative to family medicine than just patient care. I loved seeing patients. I could probably still be seeing patients today. It really hurt me to give up OB. But more than anything else, I just love the patient contact. I’m still a teacher at heart. I still love to sit down with those patients and explain to them what they need to do and then see them do that and see them get better. I could do that day in and day out. But I just felt there were some other things that I might have a chance to do to help and all that. So, we sort of broke the practice apart. But I now had my son to my practice, something I am extremely proud of. But the main was, as he began to build the practice, he began to bring people in that were younger, that had children, because he was doing deliveries at first till he had his hip surgery and he couldn’t deliver anymore. So my older patients didn’t have a doctor, so, to me, I was able to leave practice because I knew that I had a physician taking care of my patients the same way I would take care of them and that he was going to be there a while. He’s now been there 15 years. And not many of my old folks left, but he’s still taking care of them. So, what is it that I wanted to do? Except for when I was an officer for the Academy, I had always taught residents and medical students and had gone down to Birmingham a day a week to teach. The dean asked me if I would come down and be interviewed and considered to be chairman of the Department of Family Medicine. And there was probably a time in my life where part of my five-year goals was to become a department chair and ultimately be a family physician dean. But at this point in my life, I’m past that. I don’t want those responsibilities. So, we struck a deal that I would come down and be an assistant to the dean. My goals were to do what I could do to improve rural healthcare, support the family medicine residency at the school, support the school in general for getting students in to become family physicians in rural Alabama and support just family medicine in Alabama. I was on a salary, I had no hours. I could come and go as I wanted, just present whatever – you know, here’s your project, you get it done, that’s what you need. So I had an opportunity to work for family medicine, to work for rural healthcare, to do all these things and ideas that I thought I had that I wanted to do and I was going to get paid for it. Obviously, not getting paid what you got paid as a practicing physician, but I had my retirement set up, so I was just looking for money to live on. So, I took the job. The dean that I took the job with, as it turned out, was manic depressive. Really had a problem with delegating. After I’d been there a few months, we had to sign a contract. I had to meet with him once every week and I had to explain what I was doing. No one had ever gotten a grant there. I got a $450,000 grant. I’m not a researcher, so I went out and got a grant to do education. I got one of the pharmaceutical companies to give us a grant to develop a lecture series for cardiovascular risk factors and management of cholesterol. And the idea was that I would develop a teaching group and we would go to every state chapter in the United States and make our presentation at state chapters. Of course, while we were doing that, we would come to the national meeting and present those lectures. I was quite honored and surprised that we got a $450,000 grant to do this and the grant was put in my name. Well, they had some problems and the dean needed some more money and he wanted some of that grant money and I said you can’t have it, this is strictly for education. Well, once the money is here at the school, I can do what I want to with it. I said no, you can’t. So, I contacted people and they wrote a letter to the dean saying if any of this grant money is used for anything other than what Dr. Coleman applied for it for, we will retract the grant and take the money back. So he became very upset. Now we’ve had probably two years or so of a great relationship that’s now deteriorating. He walked in and told me that I had two weeks to determine what I was going to do and maybe I wanted to get back in practice in Scottsboro because this was my two week’s notice to be fired. He was also having trouble with other people including the residency director of the department of family medicine and he was also being pushed out. So, he had a meeting with the dean and tape recorded the meeting. The dean said some things in the meeting that violated not only ethics but university hiring codes for employees. The tape was shown to the major dean in Birmingham and the following Monday morning the dean in Birmingham walked in and fired our dean, locked his door and sent him home. One week later a new dean was hired in Birmingham and sent up to the campus and he was meeting with all of us. We met with him and I said I’m fired. He said no, I need you and I need family medicine. You’re not fired, you’re rehired, if you were ever fired. So then that was about the third year in. So seven years later, I’m still there. We’ve got a lot of things going on in the state. We’ve got a rural medicine program for identifying, locating, mentoring rural students to get them into med school, get in the -- program, get them to our program, get them into family medicine residency. We’ve got a summer institute that brings in med students. I’m right now managing programs that have funding for about $550,000 a year. I get to go out to colleges and recruit rural students. I get to work with the students that I’ve been working with now. We try to train leadership, we try to train them for family practice and we try to keep them in med school, in family practice. One of my greatest achievements is one of my students is now the student member of the Board of Directors of the AAFP, Tate Hinkle, who I started working with six years ago. So, we’ve done all these things back in the state and that’s the message I have, that once you have finished your formal service with the Academy, there’s life after the Academy. There’s so much that we can do back in our states because we just have the expertise. We are the experts because we know family medicine in and out. We’ve gotten some really good things. We’ve been able to restart Tar Wars in our state using a program of using high school seniors to actually make presentations and be the peer mentors for the fifth graders. The lady that we started that with won the Star Award through the Tar Wars program because no one had ever used high school students before, they’d used doctors and other people. Just a number of things like that, that over several years we’ve seen to get going. I’ve had to learn some new tasks. I’ve had to learn how to lobby legislators because the Rural Medicine Program, which I manage, is not funded by the school. It’s funded by the state legislator as an independent item. So, I’ve had to learn how to lobby and get that done. You know the story I told you about the difficulty I have in writing and spelling and dealing with those issues, so writing is not my forte. But I’ve had to learn to write. I’m not really good at it, but I’m better than I was. I remember the dean that was fired told me one day, he said, “When you started here, you couldn’t write worth a damn, but you’ve gotten pretty good.” One of those things is a spellchecker that works beautifully for me. I just punch in what I want and I watch the little cursor jump to the right spelling. But we now have been able to manage medical students with their scholarly activities. We’ve established research at our regional campus which didn’t exist. I’m in the process of writing two papers now. So, one of my final goals before retirement is to publish the six research papers that we have from our medical students. And if we get those done, get our staple funding done for our program and continue our summer internship and get one more staff, then my general intent is to, especially since having the honor of being here to accept the Walsh Award, retire again August the 1st of 2015.\n\nLet me ask you this following up on that: What advice would you give to new students or residents and physicians entering the specialty? What do they need to know in order to be successful in their careers as family physicians?\n\nWell, the whole basis of our summer internship is an eight-week program. And I’ve coined a new term and it’s educational-based, rural medicine student recruitment program. We bring them in for education but we teach them and expose them to family docs. And it’s an education based but we’re really recruiting. So, I guess the first thing that I tell these students is if you love people and you love taking care of people then you probably have the personality of a family doctor. If you have that personality of a family doctor, you’re going to make …\n\nWe’re continuing our conversation and we were talking about the advice you would give to new students, residents entering the specialty so that they might be successful as family docs.\n\nWhat I tell students is if you want to be a physician, if you want to be a family doc, you should not let money and cost keep you from it because there’s always a way to get it before - loans, etc. We will never, ever lose the need for the family physician. We may have nurse practitioners, we may have PAs, we may have other types of practice arrangements, but we will always need family physicians. There’s always a job and you’re always going to make a good living. So, if you really have the personality of being a family physician, I want to talk to you. Let’s talk about it. And if you don’t, then at least listen. That’s sort of what I tell them. The other thing that I think is the most dramatic thing for young students who are in pre-med, who are trying to get started in our direction is role modeling the family physicians and telling our story. I have sort of meandered through a story today in talking to you. Kind of a summary of that story – and I sit down and when I talk to students and these summer students, we’ll sit down in a circle and I’ll tell them my story. And a summary of that story is I started out on a farm that was 14 miles to the closest town, in a house buried between two swamps. My first job was crawling on my hands and knees picking strawberries. I moved up from that to working in the peach sheds in -- County. I hoped I’d go to college, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t go to Auburn, I ended up going to Montevallo. I ended up meeting my wife. I ended up majoring in biology. I ended up getting a job at the medical school. And then I go through the story about anatomy and getting into medical school and how that happened. And I was going to go to Tampa but ended up in Huntsville in family medicine residency. How I ended up in Scottsboro. And then how this thing rolled through. I don’t believe you can have that many coincidences. I’m not trying to impose my personal beliefs on anyone, but some power greater than coincidence has guided my whole life to put me where I am today. I never meant to be a physician. I never set a goal to be a physician. I didn’t say, when I was 12 years old, I was going to one day be a physician. I was just like any other young person that year, I went to college and didn’t know what I wanted to be and I discovered that I wanted to be a teacher, but still never wanted to be a physician. But some power put me where I was. Put me in Scottsboro when I needed to be there. Put me in the right place when I needed to do something else. Put me back for 11 more years in Huntsville.  I don’t know, but I can sit down and share that story with these students and it seems to stimulate a mission feeling, a feeling that I, too, can do that. And that seems the last eleven years to be the greatest recruitment tool for getting young people to start thinking about family medicine, is to tell your story. Right now I’m running a project in Alabama where I take these RMP students, my rural students that I manage, and halfway through their second year they have a special project. They must produce a PowerPoint presentation and they must go back to their high school and they must give that presentation to health education students, to biology students, to whoever the high school wants to. And the title of their presentation is “My Path to Medical School.” And we have them talk about what medicine is about and how you serve people, etc. But we make them intertwine that PowerPoint with their personal story of how they get to medical school. And we have them do this when they’re halfway through their second year. We have them do it before they get in their clinical years and they’re starting to talk about all this fancy medical terminology. We just want them to tell their story. And we’ve had about 12 students do that now. They’ve reached about 1500 rural high school students. If we’re going to have family physicians we need in the future, we have got to have students, as many as we can get, that start thinking about medicine, one, and family medicine, two, way before they’re applying to a school. And if I’m a proponent of something, it’s timing. You get them interested in medicine in high school, you capture them in their first year of college. We’re starting rural health clubs in the colleges in Alabama. We’re not going to get all those kids into medical school. Some of them will go into nursing and other things. But in their freshman year, we start introducing them to medicine and then we will carry some of those through to our rural programs. But when you say advice that you give to young people, when people are juniors and sophomores and pre-med in college or even coming into college, the biggest thing that I see, that you see in Alabama related to rural students, because all of my work has been with rural, is they don’t really think that they can become doctors. They don’t think they have the tools or the intelligence to get there. So, the biggest thing we can do with these young people is to convince them that you can do it. Let them see role models, tell our story. And I think that’s the best advice we can give these kids.\n\nAny last thoughts you would like to add? This is your opportunity to share your thoughts with any future generations listening to this tape. So, to set the record straight on anything or press anything you think is important.\n\nActually, I’ve gotten to the point that I’m just a little bit weary. It’s like hey, can we have time out and can we think about this a little bit and finish this off at a later date? You know, Don, I never, ever, ever, when I entered college (I guess college is a good level to say it) did I ever think that I would be a physician. I certainly never thought that I would be involved with an organization like the American Academy of Family Physicians. I never thought that I would even consider being Chairman of the Board or President. I mean it was just not there. I wasn’t like a lot of people who say, you know, I was driven to do this. I wasn’t there. I don’t believe in predestination, but I didn’t plan any of these major things in my life. I tried to keep five-year plans that dealt with whatever door opened. The only thing I can say is, if the door opened I was fortunate enough to step through it. Some rough times, good times. I will never, ever regret becoming a family physician. If I had to do it all over again and knew now what I know, I’d set my goal to be a family physician and do it all over again. I’d go to a small community. I’d be a physician in a small community. Would I spend the last 11 years of my life basically going to work every day instead of being retired? For the opportunity that I’ve had, that I’ve been blessed to have, to be able to work with these young people and to see not all of them, but some of them, and know that probably after I’m in my wheelchair or even in my grave, they’re going to be the leaders of this Academy. If I had to do it over again, I would do it all over again. If I wasn’t 74 years old, I might even turn around and go back into practice again. As Jim Jones used to say when he was campaigning for office for this Academy, I love family medicine, I love this Academy. It got that man elected to four offices in this Academy. Then you could allow four, so he went up that ladder. And I would say amen to that. We have got to have family physicians to take care of the people in this country, but they’ve got to be people that have the family physician personality. And that’s love and caring for people, being able to talk to people and being able to persevere and to have initiative and to make an example. We’re not the youngest specialty now because I think first-year residents and physicians and other people are there, but we are a younger specialty. And the older specialties spent the first 20-something years of our existence trying to make go away, but we didn’t go away. We’re not going away. We’ll be here. And as long as we’re here, there are going to be very young people out there who want to do what family physicians do and we’re going to continue to be successful. We’re going to continue to grow. Again, I’m not positive of the numbers. What are we now, 100,000-something? \n\nProbably 110,000. \n\nIt seems like to me, at one time, when I was first starting out, we were at 60,000. You know, we’re there. And an interesting thing, I always have had the philosophy, and we used to talk about this years ago. On the Board, we would be talking about something and we would be dealing with it, we would be discussing it and we would always come down to the final things: Whatever this is we’re talking about, if it’s good for my patients, it’s good for me. And I think as long as you keep that approach, we will be doing what we need to do, we’ll be great. And by the grace of God we’ll continue to do that. \n\nThank you very much, Dr. Coleman. Thank you for your time. And it was great to listen to all your words.\n\nLike I say, I will go up to the room, sit down and I’ll think of a dozen things I wish I would have told you. But I appreciate you. Thank you so much for spending a long, boring afternoon just listening. \n\nNot at all. \n\nYou’re a good listener. \n\nAnd we can always follow up on this any time. 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