{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/vh5cc0wq72/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. James Arrington"]},"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":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Black family physicians","family medicine"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["James Arrington (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/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/260/250/small/JamesArringtonM.D.DVD.mp4_1736960383.jpg?1736960387","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - James_Arrington_M.D._DVD.mp4"]},"duration":9530.78793,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/260/250/small/JamesArringtonM.D.DVD.mp4_1736960383.jpg?1736960387","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/260/250/original/James_Arrington_M.D._DVD.mp4?1736960357","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":9530.78793,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250/transcript/74391","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["James Arrington [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250/transcript/74391/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Interview with Dr. James Arrington          \n\nGood evening; my name is Sam Taggart and this is 5/23/17.  We are here in the home of Dr. James and Claudine Arrington from Hope, Arkansas.   Dr. Arrington practices in Lewisville, Arkansas and we thank you for inviting us into your home.  I told you this earlier, but I really want you to understand; this interview is a fun interview.  This is not supposed to be serious and we talk about a lot of serious things, but it is also your interview.  If I ask you something that you don’t want to talk about, just say, “I don’t want to talk about that” and we will go off record with it.  But, if there are things that you want to talk about that I don’t bring up because I don’t know your life, feel free to do so.  The best place for us to start is with you Dr. Arrington and then move to Claudine.   Let’s start at the very first: \n\nTell us about when and where you were born, the circumstances of your birth, talk about your mother and father a little bit; their names, where they were from, how did they come to be where they were.  \n\n“I was born in Montgomery, Alabama; the sea of the south.  I was born December 26, 1951 and I was a child of James Arrington, my father, and Dorothy Curly-Arrington.  I often tell people the story of why I became James Arrington.  My mother was courting two guys in Montgomery, Alabama.  Her daddy was a minister and I’m told, I never met him, but I was told he was a man of few words.  I was fortunate enough; it was 567 Greyhound Street, Montgomery, Alabama and I can see the house because we would go down and visit during the summer time and we’d go at Christmas time, but I can see him sitting on the porch and a young lady, my mother, sitting on the stoop.  She said what happened that day was the her father said to her out of the blue, “Now Dorothy, you can do what you want to; but I think that boy James would make you a better husband” and she listened to her father because my parents were married 40+years and had 2 boys and a girl.  When my father died, he died here….”\n\n“In this house.”\n\n“And I don’t think, but I never asked him his level of education; so, I don’t really think he finished high school.  I know that he did go to work at an early age, saved $500.00, and moved his parents out of a share cropper’s shack to 908 Eriksson Street, Montgomery, Alabama.  He paid $500.00 for a gunshot house or a shotgun house”\n\n“Shotgun house.”     \n\n“A shotgun house; three rooms, a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and an outhouse or whatever the case.  He was down visiting with mother and my son had been accepted to Hendrix College, my oldest named James Christopher Arrington, and at that time I was practicing as an obstetrician, so I used to go to bed fairly early.  My father had my daughter on his lap and they were carrying on a conversation and I said, “Dad, I’m going to go to bed” and he was bald, \n\n\npretty much like me, and I rubbed my hand across his head, gave him a kiss, and went to bed.  Claudine woke me up about 1:00 o’clock in the morning and said, “Papa is on the floor in the quest bedroom.”  He had gone on to glory and the fortunate thing is that he got to see our success.  When you come from a share cropper’s family, where you can see stars at night through the roof and pick up chickens through the floorboard.  The story they would tell me during the depression; they had about six kids and they would say, “Momma, aren’t you going to eat” and she would say, “Well, I’m not hungry right now.”  It was tough times, but that was how I started out.”           \n\n“My story is much like his.  I was born and raised in Cotton Plant, Arkansas in 1953, so I’m like a year and a half younger than he is.  I was raised by grandparents.  We had a small farm; we were very poor, but I didn’t know it.  We had an outhouse and people are surprised to hear that I, myself, actually chopped and picked cotton.  I was in between an uncle who was a year and a half older and one that was a year and a half younger; so, I was pretty rough and tough.  I had to measure up to them personally; that’s what I wanted to do.  So, before I left Cotton Plant at the age of 10, I actually picked 100 pounds of cotton as a 9 year old and that was a personal goal of mine.  I slopped hogs, you know, and just did all those kinds of things.”\n\nI think most of the people reading this interview wouldn’t understand the significance of picking 100 pounds of cotton; did you pick 100 lbs of cotton all in one day?\n\n“I did; yes, all in one day.”\n\nThat’s the significance of that; that’s a lot of cotton.\n\n“That is a lot of cotton for a 9 year old.”\n\nRight.\n\n“For a nine year old girl.”\n\nEspecially if you don’t put any dirt in the sack.\n\n“That’s exactly right and there was no dirt in my sack believe me; so, that was a proud moment for me.  I think being raised as I was having those humble beginnings and eating from the land, which I now have a great appreciation for the land, I think that made me who I am.  I am very happy that the good Lord put me in the hands of my grandparents.  \n\n\nBecause my parents at that point, 16 years old, we’re ill equip to raise me.”  \n\nDid you live in Cotton Plant or out in the country?\n\n“I actually lived out in the country; on a farm out in the country.”\n\nTowards  Brinkley, towards DesArc, or …….\n\n“Towards DesArc in fact.”\n\nClose to Dixie?\n\n“Yes, very close to Dixie; about 6 ½ miles from Dixie.”\n\nAnd Dr. Arrington; you obviously were not raised in the country?\n\n“No.”\n\nBut you had a similar kind of background.\n\n“Yeah.”\n\nDid you consider your family poor or did you think of yourself as being poor?\n\n“No, I would say that we were middle class; you know not higher middle class maybe lower middle class, but working individuals.  My parents moved to Maywood, Illinois and initially they were in a town called Melrose Park, which has some significance if you watch “The Untouchables” and if you know who Al Capone was and the Italian community.  There were a few black people who lived in the Italian community and my mother started out working at a factory and my father was a waiter.  We lived in a converted garage with a kitchenette, bedroom, and small living room; that converted garage that was an apartment is still in existence.  Now they have converted it back into a garage for cars.  But that was my earliest remembrance of my existence in fact.  They saved their money, which a lot of Americans did in that time; the early ‘50s.”\n\nI was going to say this must be the mid ‘50’s.\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“They bought a two flat home, 239 South 13th in Maywood, Illinois.  We were raised there and went to grammar school.  In those days, you could walk to grammar school; but my mother dropped me off at grammar school in 1956.   I have never seen the lady since I had finished school, but her name was Ms. Davis; she was my kindergarten teacher and she told my mother, according to my mom,”That boy will either be a doctor or a dentist.”  So, she was right about \n\n\nthat.  At that point in time, I don’t know if she or where the seed was planted that I wanted to be a physician; but early in my life I decided that I wanted to be a physician, I wanted a good wife, and I wanted three children; two boys and a girl.”\n\nYou were very specific.\n\n“I was very specific.”\n\n“He got what he wanted.”\n\n“And I got what I wanted.  Claudine and I have been married now 38 years and in my day, you had kind of long courtships; so, we courted and were engaged for about 7 years before we got married.  That goes full circle too, because my mother was going to a junior college some years later and I’m at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb; where I went to school, which is famous for a number of reasons, but the number one reason it’s famous is the gentleman who invented barbed wire so that the west could be tamed and farmers could do what they needed to do was from DeKalb, Illinois.  Whatever the case, my mother came home one day and it was about 60 miles away from my home in Maywood and she said, “You know, I’m going to school out here at the junior college to get some courses and there’s a girl that I want you to meet.”  I said, “No, I don’t want to meet her” and she said, “Well, she has beautiful hair.”  At that time, you had afros and I said, “You know mother, trolls have hair and live under bridges; I’m not interested.”  But she was persistent, ok, and I eventually went over to this girl’s house.  I think I was going to turn 21 and I knocked on the door, went down the stairs, and saw these children who were lip singing to Michael Jackson’s “ABC.”  I often say to people that you just really don’t know when your life is going to change.  Walking down those stairs, I look back now retrospectively; my life changed.  I met her, my future brothers in law, mother in law, father in law; I didn’t know it at that time, but my life had changed at that point right there.”               \n\nLet’s go back a little bit.  We are going to ease our way through grade school, junior high, high school, and all these kinds of things; but tell me a little bit about your childhood growing up.  I get the impression after you left Alabama that you didn’t have an extended family around you.\n\n“No, we did not.”\n\nBut you had an extended family around you, Claudine?\n\n“Uh huh.”\n\nDid you spend a lot of time with your family?\n\n “Yeah, I did; here in Arkansas absolutely.  I mean all of my relatives are here; all the uncles…..  I mean, I remember we didn’t have a television; \n\n\nso, we would walk over to Uncle Roy’s house on a Sunday night to watch Ed Sullivan. You know what I mean?  All of my extended family was here and my mom and my father, both, were no longer in Arkansas.  My mom was up in Illinois and my father was out in California; they would periodically come in and see me to check me out and stuff like that.  When I was 10, I actually finally moved to Chicago in order to live with my mom and her new husband.  But yeah, my family is still all down here; in fact, I don’t know if I mentioned earlier, but my uncle is now mayor of Cotton Plant; Willard Ryan.  I have relatives all through here now; that’s the good part of being back in this area, the fact that my family is still here.”\n\nDid that have a big impact on you as a child; the big extended family?\n\n“Oh absolutely; absolutely it did.   Just very supportive, very loved; it was really where I was supposed to be.  You know, sometimes you think that you are supposed to be with your mom and your dad; I think I was actually supposed to be with my grandparents.  I’m just very pleased with how I turned out and the strength I have as a result of them living on the land.  Even though I was only on the land for about 10 years, it really just sort of made me who I am and just showed me a real appreciation for the land; I don’t know how to explain it.  The earth foods that you eat; the healthy foods that you eat.  It just taught me a whole lot; so, I know how to do a lot of things that probably a lot of women don’t know how to do or even want to do.  I just feel very happy about the fact that I’m just not afraid to do things; I’m not afraid to take on challenges.” \n\n Was there anybody in particular in either one of your families, as I feel that is true from both of you, but is there anybody in your particular families at a young age who instilled you with that?\n\n“I kind of just think it was my grandma; she was just a very strong woman.  She would get up at the crack of dawn; back then, we had like four meals during the day and I’d hear her in the kitchen cooking while everybody else was still sleeping or rousing and she’d have breakfast, give the call out, and we’d all have breakfast.  She would take care of the \n\n\nhousehold, go out in the fields, you know to help work in the fields, and then come back and fix lunch, supper, dinner; all of that.  She had to do it the old fashion ways; she didn’t have a washing machine at first, you know what I mean?  So, she just took care of her family and I think I’m sort of like that kind of woman in the sense that I have one foot in the 50s and one foot in the modern age, you know.  I had to have children; I have to take care of my family, and did those kinds of things.  It sort of was a little challenging as you’re a professional woman on one foot in the modern age and the old fashion mom like your grandma.  I would have to say it was my grandmother who was that person for me.”\n\n“You know, the thing is I look back at the fact that my parents worked together; I had aunts and uncles.  What happened was that I don’t know who first migrated to the area, but then my father’s brothers ended up in the area and his sister ended up in the area.  My aunt used to keep me as a child while mother went off to the factor to work.  My daddy worked at Oak Park Arms Hotel in Oak Park, Illinois; famous for Hemmingway and Frank Lloyd Wright.  Another gentleman worked in the radio station for a short period of time upstairs and he eventually became fairly famous himself, Ray Crock of McDonalds. So, I often say to patients that the one thing that I learned from my father, I never heard him say one day that he was too sick to go to work.  I never heard him say he was too tired to go to work.  He worked at Oak Park Arms for about 26 years until the hotel kind of faded out.  Then he became a custodian and then the head custodian; my dad had a work ethic.  He was a wonderful guy in the sense that he was a friendly person.  The church was fairly important; at that time in Melrose Park, there was one African-American Church and one black church.  It was near the railroad tracks and it was First Baptist Church of Melrose Park.  That was one of my first memories also; a little gray church made out of wood with folding chairs.  We advanced once we got some pews, ok.  But the work ethic was kind of instilled and just became in part of what you are supposed to do. My parents would say to me, or my mother would say to me, “Do the best that you can do.  If you do the best that you can do, we don’t have a problem with that.  But, if you do less than what you could accomplish, that’s where our problem is.”\n\n“That was the same message that we gave our kids as well.  You know James talks about his father and so, he emulates his dad and that’s the really great thing about him.  You know, I prayed for a good person who would be a good father, good provider, and someone that I could love and this is the guy to have.  Like he says, we have been married almost 40 years now.”           \n\n\n\nWere your families religious?\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Yes, his family more-so than mine.  In fact, his dad was a deacon in the church.”\n\n“He was a deacon in the church.  Often I joke with my patients that I’m not deacon material; I have to curse a little bit every once in a while.  The thing about that is when I met Claudine, my people were individuals that got up early and went to bed early.”\n\n“We were the exact opposite.”\n\n“I had made a date for us to go to church, so I went over to her house that Sunday morning and knocked on the back screen door.”\n\n“I’m living in Illinois then.”\n\n“And her mother came to the screen door and say’s, “Claudine is asleep.” \n\n“Asleep.”\n\n“So, I had made up my mind right there that I was done with Claudine.  I went to church and was sitting in the pews and now we got a big, huge church.  I go around giving my offering and then when I walked down the middle isle, there was Claudine sitting in the seat.  She might have kicked me to the curb, but the thing here showed to me that she was concerned, caring, and anybody can oversleep.”\n\n“See I had no idea that it was that important to him, you know.”\n\nSchool; talk about elementary school, junior, and high school.  Did you enjoy school?  Did you excel in school? \n\n“Yeah; I enjoyed school.  I finished the 5th grade here in Cotton Plant at Cotton Plant Elementary.  I enjoyed school; it’s just a family when you’re in a small southern town and go to school in a small southern town.  So, it was wonderful.  Then, I went to 6th grade up in Illinois.  I remember that was the year that King was killed; that was a traumatic thing for our school when we came in to the rotunda and stuff.  But, I enjoyed school and I went to John Marshall.  It seems like something has lead me; I now realize as I’m older that the decisions that I made really were not my decisions.  It was like I was lead and thankfully I followed.  So, I lived on the west side of Chicago and went to John Marshal.  I didn’t really \n\n\nfeel comfortable there and there was a new school called Weston House, so I went there.”\n\nJohn Marshall was a high school?\n\n“John Marshall, yeah, was a high school.  I transferred out of there and went to the brand new school, Weston House still on the west side; it was a brand new school so it was kind of interesting.  That was the time when King got killed and there was just a lot of drama and a lot of stuff going on in the west side of Chicago.  I remember the next year and I don’t remember how I ended up making the decision to do that; but there was like these magnet schools in Chicago and so, one was downtown called Jones Commercial High School.  It was like an all white school” or just very few blacks went there.  So, here it is and I’m just making the decision to come out of the heart of the west side to go to a pretty much all white school downtown and these were decisions that I made that I had to have the gumption to do on my own  as my mother did not graduate high school.  I did not have anyone who had gone to college before me or who really was that concerned about education, so this was self motivated kind of stuff.  So, I ended up going there; I finished there and majored in, you know it was a business high school; that was the magnet aspect of that.  I was beginning an executive secretary and so I got out of school and I was working my way up.  I had great typing skills and still had great short hand skills; still do.  I just, not from an arrogant prospective but some of the people that I was working for, I was just like, “I can do this. Why am I assisting someone for?”  I just knew that I could do better and I remember that I had this marker; there was this girl named Shirley Smith and I remember like four years after I finished high school, “my friends are graduating college now; “what do I have?”  I have a new car, I have clothes; this is not enough.  This stuff can just wear out or break down and they have something real.”   That is what sort of motivated; well, that was the motivating factor for me to go away to school.  I didn’t know how to do things or what to do and I just knew we had this junior college.  So, I thought, “why don’t I just go to this junior college and see; just go take a chance” and that’s how I entered school.  I met his mom who handpicked me for \n\n\nhim; I didn’t know it.  Anyway, initially I was interested in becoming a physician and she said her son was going to become a physician; so, that is kind of how we connected.  I ultimately did not decide to become a doctor as I could not stand those little strange pictures in the books.  It made my skin crawl and then when he I went up to and he as in……”\n\n“New Orleans…”\n\n“No, actually when you had gone to medical school and I went up and saw some of the actual images of this, I just couldn’t tolerate it; it made my skin crawl.  So, I had to make a different decision.  I ultimately transferred down to New Orleans the same year that he was transferring up here.”\n\n“When I finished New Orleans, she went to New Orleans.” \n\n“Yeah, so I finished my last two years there and then worked on my Masters; public relations journalism at the undergraduate in Master’s level.  So, we were busy; we had things to do and that’s another reason why neither one of us were in such a rush to get married.  You now, I mean if we were for each other, we were going to be for each other; that was it.  So when he finished and I finished, almost 8 years later, we ended up getting married.”            \n\nWhat about your school experience?\n\n“I was at a neighborhood grammar school; George Washington Grammar School.  The people who I had started school with, I finished school with.  The one thing that I learned from grammar school was that I was athletic, but I wasn’t a great athlete; ok.  Of course in grammar school, the number one thing was to be on the basketball team, and I got nowhere near the basketball team.  I often joke with young people that I was somewhat of a nerd to say the least.  I was athletic, but I was a little nerdy; I wasn’t in the “in crowd” so to speak.   The thing that I learned from grammar school again was, and I did fairly well in grammar school.  I was on the honor roll and stuff like that; but, you know, I didn’t think that I was very special.  When I got to 8th grade, you know you have to have a president of the class and a vice president of the class; I was elected president of the class by my classmates.  Now, that to me was a great honor, but the night of graduation they had a special honor and it was the American Legion Award; it was supposed to be given to whoever we thought was the most outstanding girl and boy in the class.  I had no idea that I would win that.  What it taught me was to be a decent human being.  I \n\n\nalways treated folks decently and that was taught to me and Claudine by our parents.  Treat everybody well.”\n\n“Do onto others as you would have them do unto you” was what my grandmother said all the time.” Praise the Lord.  \n\n“Then I went off to high school and we had a principal, Ms. Becher; Ms. Becher was a white female and I had scored well on the science pre-high school test, but they didn’t want to let me into the,  for some reason, the biology class which was composed kind of an upper elite of students.  Ms. Becher went to battle for me and got me into that class; I will never forget that.  People; we make so much divisions among ourselves that relates to our religion, color, and stuff like that, but there are just decent human beings that don’t look at those aspects of life and so, I went on to  Proviso East High School, about 2800 students; a school that has produced some fairly well known people; Eugene Sherman the last man to walk on the moon graduated from there in 1952, I believe, Doc Rivers that is the coach in the MBA was two years behind me; I used to have breakfast with his daddy at the “Greasy Spoon” in the area.  The names just go on.  I went there and I did fairly well….”       \n\nLet’s go back while you are going through this; were there some people who had a big impact and pushed you in one direction?  You already talked about parents, but teachers and subjects that pushed you in one direction?  \n\n“There have always been kind teachers; so many that I can hardly name them.  Most of our teachers, which has somewhat changed, lived in the neighborhood; lived in the area and we were tied to them because of that.  They knew us well and of course when you were in grammar school and stayed in the same school for years, and years, and years, they came to know you as a human being and an individual. I was friends with some of my teacher’s children.  My teachers pushed me to do better and be better.  When I got to high school, they showed concern and was always there for us if you needed help and I think about several of them; there is so many I can’t really name them all.  There was always that underlying aspect, “Do the best that you can do” and school was an important aspect.  My parents made school an important aspect and the importance of it was that everybody in our household finish college.  That was an expectation.”       \n\nWhere nobody before that finished college?\n\n“No.”\n\n“Exactly.”\n\n“High school was just a transition, ok.  My senior year, I was vice president of my graduating class of 600 people and the reason I did it truthfully was that we had never had any African-Americans who were president, vice president, secretary, or treasure of our class.  I said, “Well, I’m going to run for the position.”  I calculated that I could probably win with certain numbers \n\n\nand I was a fairly friendly guy and at that time, I became fairly well known in the school.  so, I was vice president of my graduating class and from there, I went on the Northern Illinois University.  Again, the work esthetic of the fact of getting up, going, being where you are supposed to be, listening, and taking notes; things like that.”      \n\nI haven’t heard either one of you, and I’m not trying to pick at anything here; but, I have not heard either one of you mention anything that sounded like race was a dividing line in your life growing up.\n\n“Let’s see; you know growing up in the south here…”\n\nI guess that was the difference; being in the south.\n\n“In Illinois, I don’t think I paid any attention to any of that.  I just remember King when he came over to the west side of Chicago and I remember walking across the park to that community just to see and look at the building where he was at hoping that he would come out.  You know, I was caught up in some of the rioting that went on after his death.  The fires were burning in the neighborhood, you know, to the extent that my parents, my grandmother and stepfather, and my siblings; we actually packed up everything in the station wagon because the fires were burning in the neighborhood and had gotten too close to the gas station.  So, we were in the car and actually left.  We were in the midst of the upheaval and stuff and watching it as though it was like a movie than living it and experiencing it.  You know, I saw some of the violence; but I was still sort of removed from that in a sense.”\n\nHow old were you then?\n\n“14 or 15 maybe; so, I was still somewhat removed from that.  It didn’t; it sort of fell off my back and that sounds strange because I was dead in the middle of it.  Obviously it had affected me in some way because I lived and experienced it, but it didn’t beat me down, didn’t make me angry, didn’t stop me, didn’t kill me; you know what I’m saying?”\n\nYes mame.\n\n“I just was sort of always lead by something else and so as James was saying about him having teachers and people motivating him all the way, I was just lead by something.  I think it was the spirit of the \n\n\nheavenly father that was leading me as I never did really have, once I left the south, I didn’t really have parents who could lead me on to something higher and greater.  I was just sort of an insecure kid and read all the time.  I kept to myself and didn’t really have friends.  I didn’t really hang around people and didn’t go to others for help.  In fact; I remember in college when I took a photography class, one of the professors said, “If you would just come to me, I can help you solve this problem a little bit easier and faster.” So, I just sort of kept to myself and figured things out.  When I went to college, I didn’t even have a counselor that I would go to; I’m sure I must have had one that was assigned , but I just knew that I could just look at the school book for the year that I came in and that was by contract; that was the one that would tell me everything that I needed to know in order to finish the coursework that I was going to do.  So, I don’t know, it might have been that I didn’t trust the counselors; I’m not quite sure what it was back then, but I was like, “Here’s my book; let me figure out what I’m supposed to do.”\n\n“She approaches things in life like that; when she went to law school, the same story.”\n\nDo you do the same thing?\n\n“To a large degree, yes and the thing here and I don’t want to miss this story; when she talked about King, I happened to be in Montgomery, Alabama as a little boy of 12 years old maybe at that time and we were visiting in the summertime.  Normally, you would have taken the bus to go downtown and for some reason that I didn’t quite understand at that time which I do understand now, we walked to downtown.  Ok, I remember a conversation with my grandmother who was Alma Curly and lived to be about 95 years-old with her neighbor across the street, Ms, Monroe.  The conversation was something like this: Ms. Monroe said, “You know, Ms. Curley, these white folks were sure good until this man King came down here.” I didn’t know who King was.  My grandmother said to Ms. Monroe, “Well, I don’t know, Ms. Monroe.  I think if you work a number or hours, you should get the same pay and etc, etc, etc…” and I didn’t know that that was in the middle of the bus boycott at that point in time.  I think that some people are self motivated in the sense that what motivated me was my parents, the things that they taught me and the places that they sent me.  They were not overly religious people, but the fact here is that I eternalized that if I wanted something I could ask for it, I mean ask God for it, and if I worked hard enough I would probably be able to obtain it.  When I was in grammar school, the majority or almost all of my classmates were black, so there was never any self doubt.  You \n\n\nachieved well in grammar school; so when you went off to high school, there was no doubt in my mind that I would do well.  There was no doubt in my mind to a large extent that if I worked hard and did what I was supposed to, l would probably do fairly well in Northern Illinois University.  My classmate, my sleep mate; I went into the room and he hadn’t got there yet.  I saw records of the Temptations, the Spinners; ok, I thought “Oh, I got a black roommate.”  Well, no; I got a white guy from the south side of Chicago.  Joe, his name was Joe, and he said to me one day; he was a junior, no he was a senior, “Come with me.”  I said, “Where are we going?” and he said, “Just come with me.”  So, we put on our heavy coats and we went; Northern is cold in the winter time.”\n\nWhere was Northern Illinois University? \n\n“DeKalb.”\n\n“Dekalb.”\n\n“About 60 miles west of Chicago.  I mean, it was cold, cold, cold.”\n\n“Very cold.”\n\n“But whatever the case, we walked down the hill as we didn’t have busses in those days and he took me to the library.  We went into the library and he said, “Look to the left of you, look to the right; this is where the curves are made.  Being in that library, sitting down and studying, and taking your job as a student; your job as a student is a serious endeavor, and if you did that, you will do well.”  I haven’t seen Joe in umpteen years, ok.”\n\nBut he obviously had a big impact on you.\n\n“He did.”\n\n“Yeah, that was a wonderful thing he did.”\n\n“He made a great impact on me.”\n\nAnd you were a freshman?\n\n“I was a freshman and he was a senior.”\n\nThat’s excellent.\n\n“You know, again, people into your life and I have always said to many of my patients, “I treat everybody the same;” white, black, green, yellow; the one thing about high school and I loved about it was the diversity.  We had Italians, Jewish people, well to do upper middle class, and we had poor people.  I talk about greasers, climbers, penny loafers, and things like that; but you \n\n\nlearn to get along with everybody and you learn that everybody is to be approached as an individual and not necessarily lumped into one particular class of individuals.”\n\nIn school, did you have any particular interests; things that either one of you just really focused your attention like “Wow, that’s really interesting and something I really want to go into”?    \n\n“You know, this is what I always wanted to be. People don’t mention it, but I wanted to be a renaissance man.  I wanted to be a man of arts, of science, be involved in physical activities, and that is what I ended up doing.  I paint to some degree when I get an opportunity; I don’t get an opportunity very often.  I am very athletic still.  I knew I couldn’t be a football player; we had three squads; the “A” squad, the “B” squad, and the “C” squad.  I often joke with people that the “A” squad and the “B’ squad had grass and the “C” squad had dirt to play on.  I can remember the day that I was making a play on an individual; now, I tackled the individual.  I thought, “I’m going to tackle this guy” and after I got up off the ground, I said, “Ok, I’m not going to be a football player.”  I finished out the season and joined the tennis team.  I became a tennis player.  I said, “The reason is, I can play tennis when I grew old.”  So, I always wanted to be the renaissance kind of guy and I think I have kind of turned into that.  I was best actor my senior year in high school and one or two of my classmates are in the theater and have been in movies and things like that.  I often joke with them that I might have been able to do that myself.”          \n\nWhat about your interests in school?\n\n“Well my interests; I just did a lot of reading.  I read a lot of the classics.  Keep in mind that I was just to myself, right; so I was like insular.  It was almost as though there was something just right around the corner and I was always ready for whatever was right around the corner.  I didn’t necessarily know what that was, but I knew there would always be something right around the corner.  So, I just was; even in my own household, I kept to myself; you know and just did a lot of reading.  I remember in one of my classes, down at Jones Commercial, I remember a teacher had visited the classroom or had come in to say something to the other teacher and that teacher said, “Look at the book this kid has read.”  So, she started listing off all of these classics; I was just always interested in reading and that is just basically the only subject and I guess why I’m interested in writing.  I have written, though never published the books, but I’ve written a couple books just haven’t published them yet.  I guess at some point, I probably will when I get a moment or two.  But, I went into journalism; I edited a newspaper in Rockford, Illinois, and I \n\n\nactually created a newspaper.  While I was finishing up on my Masters, I looked in the back of the classroom and there were these two older black folk who were there.  They were from Rockford and somehow they had heard about me and asked if I would come up and create a newspaper for them.  I was like, “Ok, sure; yeah.”  So, I went up there and I did that; I created a newspaper.  My journalism professor, Mr. Walker who is now deceased, called me up one morning and asked me, “Claudine, would you like to work on a 25th anniversary project for McDonald’s Corporation?” and I was like, “ Well sure.”\n\nWow.\n\n“So, I went in there and worked on that project; I did archiving and a whole bunch of stuff; so, it was very interesting.  I am really interested in watching this “Ray Crock” movie that is going to be coming up because I was all up in that corporate headquarters there in Oakbrook.  So, I don’t know; I’ve just always been inside myself in a sense and that can be sort of off-putting to people, but it is very comfortable for me; very comfortable for me.  You know, you asked the question earlier about the impact maybe that racism had to do with and if we had run into that; you know, of course living here in the south I did.  I remember my grandmother saying, “Yes, Sir” to an 18 year old white kid and I ‘m going, “Ok, that’s not kind of right; is it?”   You know, I knew something was wrong with that.  I remember taking a bus up with my aunt, I guess it was, to visit my mom when I was still living in the south and some white guy getting on the bus, the greyhound, with a riffle saying, “Where are you taking these niggers?” you know and just feeling free to walk up and down the aisle.  Of course, the bus driver was afraid and I guess everybody on the bus was afraid.  I remember my grandfather being shot in the neck when he went into the back of a; in Cotton Plant, they had this great burgers, you know and you used to have to go into town on Saturday night as that was a big night because you had been in the fields all week.  So, we were in the back of the truck and we were like, “Dad; dad, will get us a burger? Can you get us a burger?”  We lived for those burgers; and so, I remember when I was living up in Illinois, I got the news.  I was a junior and daddy had been shot.  It was on a Saturday \n\n\nnight and he was out near this place, the burger place, and it wasn’t until then that I kind of figured out that he couldn’t go in the front door.  You know what I mean?  He had to buy these burgers at the back door. And if I had known that, I would never have gotten a burger.  But the various things that I have faced and witnessed are coming through that period of the King killing and the upheaval during that time.  You know, when I was a kid here growing up and watching the white school bus drive pass and not understanding why I could not get on that bus and those kinds of things; all that has an impact and I think the impact is this, it caused me to want to help people.  You know what I mean? I do not like the powerful taking advantage of the powerless.  So, you know, even before I became an attorney, I wanted to be able to stop power from abusing those who are powerless.  So, one of the key reasons I went to law school was so that I could help people at a higher level.  That is my main interest; I am very interested in helping people fight back against those who are taking advantage of them.  So certainly everybody wants to get paid, but I often don’t get paid for the work that I do; I just want to stop the abuse.  Or I will take on a situation and get paid far less than I should be getting paid just so I can say, “No, this is just abusive and I’m not going to tolerate this.  I’m going to help you through this.”  I think it had that kind of impact; you don’t have to be my husband, or my kids, you can be some stranger on the street; but if I see you being abused and I can be of some help, I’m going to do that.  I’m not the typical lawyer in the sense that I’m just taking on cases for money.  I’m not necessarily interested in a divorce unless it has some unique aspect to it.  I’m handing one now that the wife makes double the money than the husband, but yet she is the one that wants the support.  She wants….you know, it should be reversed.  If she was a female and her husband was making that, she would be going after him; but your still going to try… it’s those little unique kinds of things and civil rights things….I used to do a lot of work in Federal court.  So, I think the impact on me is that I just don’t like to see people abused.”                                       \n\n Let’s go back just a little bit, did you work during high school and college and what kind of work did you do; both of you?\n\n“One thing I don’t want to forget; I think that sometimes things fall into place because you are lucky or sometimes they fall into place because it was planned that way.  I don’t want to forget the fact that when we moved to the two flat that my parents bought, there were two guys that lived upstairs.  The family had two boys upstairs and then next door was two boys.  The boys next door were very athletic and the boys upstairs were into the arts; ok.  The boys next door, we used to play on a little median of grass between the houses.  Of course, it looked like it was a football field; but whenever you go back there, it looks like it was a closet.  The youngest son became the star football player, quarterback, for our high school.  His brother has been my best friend for the last 60+years.  The young man upstairs was such a great artist and I painted, but he was an artist; he is still alive today.  His brother; I have a love for guitars and I tell people all the time that I am looking for the magical guitar.  I used to go and pull his guitar out from under the bed and it was a cornet and I would try to strum on it.  I bought one several years ago; I am not a great guitarist and will never be a great guitarist.  I’m not a great artist and will never be a great artist.  I was never a great sports person, but I’ve learned so much living next door to these boys.  As far as work is concerned, I tell people that my parents never pushed me to go to work.  Somewhere in high school, I decided that I wanted a job, ok, and it was probably to my detriment because I was the manager of the basketball team.  When I decided that I was going to get a job, I let that job go and the school went on and won the championship that year and I didn’t get to go.  But, I got my first job working for a grocery store; I was a bagger and I would put on my little red tie and walk about 4-5 blocks to White-Way, which was the grocery store.”\n\n“It was a grocery store.”\n\n“And what I learned there was, now, you can work very hard and some people will not give you a tip; not a 25 cent tip or whatever in those days, and sometimes you work because that is what you are supposed to do.  Then, I got a job at a bank as the bag boy; my counselor, Mr. Hines recommended me for the job.  What did I learn there? Ok, I learned that one, you can work inside in the air conditioning when it was burning up outside, you could work inside with heat when it was freezing outside, and oftentimes, you got paid for doing nothing; you just had to look busy.  So, I decided that I had already decided what I was going to do, but an education kind of provided that type of lifestyle; so to speak.   So, I wanted to work and it wasn’t about the money so much as I conceived that that was what you were supposed to do in life; work.  So, I have been touched by so many people who have been kind, considerate, and just decent human beings that I can’t even name the number of folks.  One of the problems that I have had over the years is maybe being too gullible and believing that everybody is going to treat me the same way I treat them.”      \n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“And I found out that that is not always the case.  So many of  those people who rooted for me when I was in medical school and was going from high school to Northern Illinois University, one of the things that was most difficult for me was my mother would tell me years later that one of \n\n\nmy favorite aunts said to her, which my mother never told me until I was much older, “Jimmy will never be a doctor.” \n\n“Oh wow.”\n\n“It kind of broke my heart that she didn’t have faith; but gain, I can understand why.  You come from a society that you didn’t have opportunities.  One of the things that I look back at my era, we were given an opportunity.  When I came to Northern Illinois University, I had fairly good ACT scores, I probably could have gotten into several colleges, but there was a program at Northern for minorities; called a Chance Program.  There was a guy named; what was Deacon’s last name?”\n\n“Was it Jones?”\n\n“It might have been Deacon Jones; he played on the Globe Trotters, ok.  He was a tall man and played basketball and then there was another guy with him, but they recruited African-Americans to come to Northern. There were 23,000 students and not a whole lot of African-Americans at that point in time.  So, I went….”\n\nThat’s a pretty big school.\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“It was a big school.”\n\n“I went with the program because it kind of sheltered me to some degree; you know.”\n\n“Right.”\n\n“My wife wants me to tell the story of when I came to Hope, Arkansas; I would learn later that my mother called the governor’s office.  The governor at that time was named Bill Clinton.”\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“From Hope, Arkansas.”\n\nAnd she called him from Chicago?\n\n“Chicago; she called him from Maywood.”\n\n“Yeah, that’s right.”\n\n“She called him from Maywood and she said to him, “My son is coming to Hope, Arkansas to practice medicine and I want you to take care of him and watch out for him.”\n\n(Laughing)\n\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“Now, she didn’t tell me at that point in time and he got on the phone; he was campaigning for President at that time, and he got on the phone apparently he had come in from a campaign, and he spoke to her and told her that he would take care of it.  There is a gentleman here who is gone on and his name was George Frazier; he was very involved in Clinton’s life, somewhat of a defacto father of course you know his life.  He was the chairman of the board at the hospital and George never told me that Bill Clinton probably told him, “Watch out for that black guy; he’s coming here.  Be careful and make sure that he is ok.”  But that was….”  \n\nDid your mother know the relationship of Bill Clinton to Hope?\n\n“Yeah, she knew it.”\n\nShe did?\n\n“She knew that.  My mother was the type of person who ran interference for her children.”\n\n“Yeah, she did.”\n\n“The thing here is that, it was almost like a lioness with her cubs; ok.  My brother who wanted to drop out of college, he went to Moore House, he wanted to drop out of college because he thought it was too much of a financial burden on my parents and my mother would not have it.  Of course, he finished at Moore House and my sister went to Clark.  At times, that was the other aspect; you were the first in line and you could not not be successful, because you had people coming behind you.”\n\n“Yeah, that is important to people in our generation; do you know what I mean?  It’s like we set the standard and so, you got to be successful.  You got to do it because your siblings are watching what you do.”\n\n“They figure if you can do it, they can do it too and that is what transpired.  I was the first, my brother went on to college and finished at Moore House and my sister went and finished at Clark.”\n\nWhere is Clark?\n\n“Atlanta.”\n\n“In Atlanta.”                  \n\nIs it a predominantly black school?\n\n“Yes.”\n\n\n“Uh huh.”\n\n“And that is one of the reasons I didn’t go to school in the south.  The way it works is this way; my first cousin, her husband was the office manager of FCLC, Dr. King’s organization.   I went down to visit them and he told me, “Dr. King is coming in and I’m going to introduce you to him.” Well at the last minute, he made a different decision and went somewhere else.  I was too timid; in the back room of the office was Ralph Abernathy, but I was too timid to go and meet him.  The other reason I did not go to school in the south; there is something called a quad in Atlanta.  There is Moore House, there is Meharry Medical School, there is Clark, and a few other colleges; all in one little area.  I used to think that there were pretty women here and there, but then I went down there and I told people that I almost got whip lash from going this way and that.  I said, “There is no way I can concentrate on going to school if I go down here.”  So, I ended up going to Northern and it wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to women there, but it was just the fact that they weren’t so plentiful.   Then, I met one that my mother introduced me to and everything worked out all right.”          \n\nAt what level in college were you when y’all actually met and started socializing?\n\n“Now, we graduated high school the same year; 1970. I actually got a double in grammar school and school has just always been easy for me; you know, if I put my mind into doing something I just do it.  It was the same way with law school; law school was just so enjoyable for me.  It was not problematic, it was….I don’t even want to say it was challenging, but I guess it was.  It was just everyday as I was sitting light bulbs were just going off.  In my mind, everyone should go to law school; it was just an enjoyable experience for me.  But…”\n\n“Well; we met, I guess when I was 21 years old.  So, I was probably a junior in college.”\n\n“Yeah you were; you were actually in your last year of college.”\n\n“In my last year.”\n\n“Yeah, he was in his last year of college and I remember I was finishing up at junior college and I needed to be able to transfer down to another school.  So, now keep in mind that I delayed college for four years right; basically for four years…”\n\n“She was a working woman.”    \n\n\n\n“So, he was finishing up when I was really getting serious about it; even though I had taken some classes at the junior high school.  So when he transferred up that May, I went down that September to Northern.”\n\n“She would come……I think you came and visited”\n\n“Yeah, I did”\n\n“Northern on several occasions; so, she was...”\n\n“Familiar”\n\n“Introduced to Northern and introduced to the Chance Program”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“I don’t think she went through the Chance Program.”\n\n“No.”\n\n“But she met the individuals that ran the Chance Program and she found what she wanted as far as journalism was concerned; so as she made her transition to Northern, I made my transition to the University of Illinois Medical School; Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine on the Westside of Chicago.  So, I often say to individuals, “Well you know, if I had to make a choice between my education and being a physician and my wife, I would have chose my profession.  She would have found somebody else just as handsome as me and I would have found someone….”   I don’t know if I would have found someone as nice as she is, but the fact exists that we didn’t have to make that choice.  Things worked out well in that regard.”\n\nIn either of your cases where we talked about high school, college, medical school, or law school; were there any crises along the way that almost sent you in another direction?  Any health or problems with health play a big role in your childhood or your family? \n\n“No, um, I can’t think of a health issue that you know interfered with anything.  I hear you use the word crises and I do understand the definition of crisis; but I just don’t experience them as crises.  So to me, everything is possible.  I think the only limitation is what limitations God put on you and he doesn’t put limitations on us.  See what I mean?  I think that everything is possible and everything can be overcome; that’s just my personal philosophy.  So even if, you know, you are just right up against this brick wall, it’s just not a brick wall to me.  There is always a way around it, under it, over it and so, that is the challenge.  You know, \n\n\nyou have kids who say, “I can’t go to school because I have no money” never let the lack of money stop you from going to school.  It will happen, you just move forward; take a step forward, always step forward.  Don’t put these blocks in front of your way.  So, I think my limitation is only due to how I limit myself because God has opened up all the possibilities for me and I see that.  I don’t see race as a barrier fact, so I knock that down as well.  I don’t see anything that is a barrier to me.  So, crises don’t exist for me.”\n\n“I have had some crises, ok, and I’ve had some walls thrown up.  At the University of Illinois, I finished my first year, my freshman year and they had what they called the freshman comprehensive, which was like 500 questions over 3 ½ days of multiple choice questions. We had one of the largest classes in the United States; something like 250 medical students.  So, no matter what you did the entire year or how well you did in the subjects, you had to take that freshman comprehensive.  If you didn’t pass that, you didn’t go on to your second year.  Imagine being in some large amphitheater and your taking a test over 3 ½ days.  I took the test, I walked out; I never was really very nervous about tests, but I walked over to the University of Illinois Hospital and picked up a Chicago Sun Times.  I would always look at the horoscopes and they had a guy in there called Omar.  Omar was the king of the horoscopes, or whatever, and I read my horoscope for that day.  It said, “You will suffer a disappointment and it will come in the form of a test.”\n\n“Wow.”\n\n“So, you had to wait all summer because you went home for that letter to arrive.  It arrived and I passed the test; but now, we also had another test called Senior Comprehensive.  If you did not pass that test everything you did, you know you used to have National Boards One, Two, and Three; you could pass National Boards One, Two, and Three.  If you didn’t pass the University of Illinois test, you did not graduate.  I took the test; I didn’t pass it.  I didn’t pass by 6 points.  They gave me another opportunity; I took the test and didn’t pass it by 6 points.  Now at the University of Illinois, they had some way of calculating and said, ‘You will never pass this test because the odds are not there.”  This is where, again you jogged my memory; a group of individuals went to the school and said, “Give him one more time.”  I had taken the test in downtown Chicago twice and I chose to take the test in Rockford, which was a different venue and Claudine went with me up there.  I was about to take this test and my whole life has been devoted towards becoming a physician and I knelt down; I was at the Holiday Inn and I said to God, “If you do not want me to be a physician, then so be it; I leave it up to you.”  I went and took the test and passed by more than 6 points.  I made up a 12 point difference and the thing here is, I believe sometimes God tests us to let you know “I’m still God.”  That has happened on \n\n\nseveral occasion that when I have tried everything that I know; we have study habits, we mark the books up 12 times, reread them 18 times, and things like that and we think that everything, some people I don’t, is under our power.  You know when people talk about getting to where they got to we forget that we don’t get to places by ourselves.  We have people that help us along the way.  I have my patients now, young children who come in to see me, and one of the things I try to do is instruct them in the sense that, “Don’t ever forget that somebody told you; they told you about work.  They told you the fact here is that you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it; but you must work.  It will not be given to you, ok; you have to learn a work ethic.”  That is one of the things I see today that some of our children don’t understand.”\n\n“Too many don’t understand that.”\n\n“If my children, or our children, didn’t accomplish their goals, they can’t say it was because of mother and father.  They saw us work.  The saw us cooperate.  I can remember that my dad would work and my mother would save the money for the down payment of their first home.  I remember that my dad would work, my mother would work, and I remember sitting on their bed in their bedroom because they asked us to come in, “Well, what do you think?  We are going to build a house and what do you think about it?”  They brought us into the process.  I think I am where I am because that’s where I’m supposed to be.  Sometimes when I say to myself, “I’d like to retire” the joke that I make with my patients is this; I asked God in 1956 to be a physician.  I asked him for what I wanted and he gave it to me.  I made one mistake; I didn’t ask him to retire.”  So when I talk to him…….”\n\nHe didn’t say how long?\n\n“When I talk to him now, he says “I’m sorry, that wasn’t part of the contract. You retire when you fall out.”  We have a friend of ours, Dr. Douglas the first African-American pediatrician to practice here who was born here; he lives down the road.”\n\n“Down the road from us.”\n\n“But to show how things just kind of fall into place; years ago, we have friends and you’ve been to the Bahamas, we went to a place called Exhume.  We were talking to a friend of ours who was pregnant at the time and she said, “Well, I’m not going to have my baby here; I’m going to have my baby in North Carolina at Duke.  I have the most wonderful pediatrician.  You have got to meet him” and I said “Well, one day maybe I will met him.”  I’m not enamored by famous people, but you know the thing here is I’m enamored by not who they are, but what they do.  So the years passed on and we came here.  We were having a little problem with our pediatricians; one in particular, and the administrator said, “Well, we are going to have to find another pediatrician.”  I was walking through the steno group, the people who transcribed our histories and physicals when that was the case; they no longer exist as they want us to type everything out ourselves.  I said to the lady there, “You know, we are looking for a pediatrician” and she \n\n\nsaid, “Oh, my brother is a pediatrician.”  I said, “Is he?” and she said, “And he was born here.”  I said, “Why don’t you contact him and see if he has any interest in coming here.”  Now, the individual that they talked about in the Bahamas was her brother.”\n\n“The same guy.”\n\n“And he came here; we recruited him and he has now been here; I been here for 25 years and he has been here for about 23 years.  He is my best friend here; he is portably my only friend here.  We love to go to the movies, ok, and love to drink margaritas.  He loves tequila.  That was set up by somebody; it was cosmic that he would end up here practicing.  I often say that “Emeralds are made for you that you don’t even see.”  In an African-American community and in the Christian community, they talk about the fact that “In your mother’s womb, I already had things for you to do and a life set for you.”                                      \n\nTalk about medical school a little bit; especially that first year. \n\n“Oh, medical school; we walked in…. I joke with my patients all the time because that’s what makes it fun and I tell them that we had 250 students and we all were looking around.  When I came to medical school, my daddy took me down to the University of Illinois. You know, there were different Gondar’s of individuals, ok, and I was kind of into the hippy Gondar.  I had the big afro, I had an Eisenhower jacket, and I had tie-dyed pants when I got there.  Several of my classmates; some of them were muslin, one in particular; Terry X.  Terry X was Terry Mason.  Terry Mason would go on to become the Commissioner of Health for the city of Chicago and then the Commissioner of Health for Cook County.  He dropped the X, but whatever the case; the first year of medical school was somewhat difficult.  You studied all day long, you studied all night long, and there were times when I started studying at 7 in the morning and not pick up my head until 7 in the evening.  We were, I think you did it because of certain paranoia not to fail and yes, individuals were cast off to the side who might have become great physicians, but they didn’t pass the test.  I remember being with one of my classmates and we were kind of disgruntled, or slightly depressed, and we walked out of the University of Illinois library saying, “How are we going to do this; studying all the time, and they want all this information?” and there was this vagrant and as he walked passed us, he said, “You’ve got to get over, before you go under.”  I, what, who……\n\n“It came out of nowhere.”\n\n“It was simply that; “You’ve got to get over, before you go under.”  Find a way to win and that’s it.  You know….”\n\n“Were you guys talking to him?”\n\n“No.”\n\n\n“He just comes up and….”\n\n“No, it just came out of his mouth.”\n\n“Wow.”\n\n“We were watching the super bowl and I’m not that crazy about New England, but I am enamored by skill.  As I was saying to the individuals, 28 to 3 at halftime, the great ones hate to lose.  Don’t give him a chance to get back in this game or the rest is history.  But that didn’t happen by mistake either; he worked to do that.  When they wanted to cut him, he went to the coach and said, “What do I have to do?” and that is what you have to do in life; you have to find a way to win and then hopefully a little grace will shine down upon you.”   \n\nYou decided very early that you wanted to go to medical school; you worked hard, made it through high school and college, got into medical school, and made it through.  Somewhere during college, or medical school, you had to start thinking about what it was that you wanted to do with your life.  Being a doctor is kind of a broad category; when was it you started thinking, “Um, I think this is what I kind of want to do?” \n\n “I did a rotation and I was an obstetrician/gynecologist; that goes back to the renaissance man.  The renaissances man as I saw it was an OB/GYN.  You spent time in surgery, you were in the office; I wanted to be a pediatrician to some point and then I found out I probably wasn’t a mambie-pambie kind of guy.  I like kids, but I couldn’t see my whole day involved with children.  Being am OB/GYN allowed me to participate in the birth of children, allowed me to be a surgeon, allowed me to have an office practice, and I thought that that was, again, the best of all worlds for me.  I tried to like dermatology, I tried to like anesthesiology, but they didn’t involve the one on one with human beings.  I have always wanted to be one on one with human beings.  I wanted to give to human beings. That was part of being a physician; it wasn’t the money or being in a position where you are adored or people think greatly of you, it was helping humanity and that is why I went into the practice of medicine.  Now, a lot of my classmates also went into the practice of medicine for that particular purpose and we understood by the time we get to medical school that our community, as far as African-Americans were concerned, was underserved.  At that time, I don’t think there were more than in the entire United States more than 6,000 African-American physicians for 30 million people so to speak.  What we were supposed to do was we were supposed to get our education, become physicians, and go back to the community, ok, and give our services.  Now, no one has ever been denied by the services whether they were white, black, green, yellow, Jewish, or whatever; but the thing here is that that was one of  the zeal’s and one of  the things that pushed us forward to get an education.  Abraham School of Medicine had a program for African- Americans because we were underrepresented and we probably have one of the largest African-American classes in the school, other than Howard as it is traditionally black, and so, we had some unity there.  But, it \n\n\nwas to come back to the community and to serve the community.  After finishing my residency and opening practice, that was somewhat because we were recruited to do things and be in hospitals, and things like that; but when I came here, the reason I came here was I had one small hospital; I belonged to three hospitals and my most beloved hospital was closing.  It was the Lincoln Park area of Chicago, which was kind up upwardly mobile, and I went to look at a brown stone house.  My parents built a house for $27,000 and I went to look at this brown stone and they wanted 600,000.00 for it.  I can’t spend $30,000 on a car; it just boggles my mind, but whatever the case, Claudine got a call from a recruiter in Hope, Arkansas, which I had never heard of Hope, Arkansas.  I hadn’t heard of Arkansas until I met her, but whatever the case, I said, “We’ll go down, ok; get a free trip and we’ll go visit your brother who lives in Little Rock.”  We never got to visit the brother who lived in Little Rock because they kept us busy the whole time we came down here.”\n\nWhat year was this?\n\n“This was 1991; wasn’t it?’\n\n“Well, you moved here in 1991; late ’91.”\n\n“So, it was a little time before that.”\n\n“Like ’90.”\n\n“Two of the OB/GYNs that worked at the hospital had decided that they were going to separate and go their own ways.”\n\nNow, you talking about the Hope Hospital?\n\n“The Hope Hospital.”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“And so they needed an OB/GYN.  I didn’t understand the significance of the process, so I didn’t understand underlying or the process that was going on behind the scenes.  But whatever the case, I came down the first time and “I don’t think I want to” but, you know they were persistent so, I came down the second time.  Then I came down the third time and I had to ask; again, I had to ask God and talk to him.  I asked, “Is this where you want me to be?” because I was offered a position back in Chicago.”\n\n“Naperville.”\n\n“Napervile, which had everything you could ever want.”\n\nI know of Naperville; I’ve been there.\n\n\n“Every restaurant, every shopping center, anything that you wanted you could have; close to Chicago and close to my parents.  So, when I came down here; Claudine was down here too, and the black community wanted me to come.  But, I had to ask God, “Are you sure about this?”  So, we went to church on that Sunday when I had to make a decision and as I walked into church, my favorite hem “Amazing Grace” they were singing.  My little church that I grew up; they had an alter prayer and there was this song that went with the alter prayer.  This church had an alter prayer and it was the same song.  The minster that baptized me would always start out his sermon with a hymn, which I had never heard anywhere else; on that Sunday was that hem.  So, this was the question I had to ask myself, “If not me, who; and if not now, when?”  There had never been a black on staff at this hospital.  Blacks at one time had to go to the back door in order to be serves.  I would subsequently become Chief of Staff at this hospital and what I wanted was little black girls and boys to see a black physician and they saw me.  They saw me at Wal-Mart, they saw me at the church, they saw me walking down the street or riding my bike down the street, etc, etc, etc…..this is what I wanted them to see; he is not so special, he doesn’t look like he is anybody other than the people that I know.  So, the cultivation of this; we belong to a church here, which I don’t go to church very often, but we belong to the church, and I walked out into the church one Sunday, there was a guy who was the organist for our church who finished high school, Freddy Smith.”\n\n“Freddy Johnson.”\n\n“Freddy Johnson; and when I walked out that Sunday, I said, “Freddy, you finished high school; now, what do you want to do?”  He said, “I want to be like you.”\n\nOh my; now that’s a good one.  I like that.\n\n“Now, Freddy; the thing here is that Freddy finished the University of Arkansas and went into a radiology residency.  The full circle is this; when I went in for my first interviews, I went to a place at Peoria, Illinois; St. Francis Hospital.  I ultimately chose Cook County Hospital to do my residency and we were going up to Illinois when Claudine got a call from Freddy because he wanted her to work on his will and you know his businesses….”\n\n“Estate planning.”\n\n“Estate planning; and where was he doing his residency? At St. Francis in Peoria.  So since then, I have had a number of individuals who have gone on and gone into the medical field and things like that, but that is what I want.  Now, none of my children went into the medical field.”                            \n\n Did you encourage them?\n\n“No.”\n\n“No.”\n\n\n“I didn’t discourage them, ok; but they understand that’s a lot of work, that’s a lot of years.  You know, when I was an obstetrician/gynecologist, unfortunately for my oldest son, I didn’t have a lot of time to spend with him.  I worked 24/7 and I felt guilty when I would take a vacation because, you know, if you developed a relationship with a patient and she is going to have a baby, you want to be there to deliver that child.  I have patients today who say, “Dr. Arrington. I love you, but you weren’t at my delivery.”  And that is the other thing; we wanted all our children to find their own way.”\n\n“Yeah, we just want them to be happy.” \n\nLets come forward in the years a bit; what informed your decision about where you would go to law school and when did you decide to go to law school?  \n\n“Oh wow; that is an interesting story.  You know, I had always kind of gone to white schools.  I certainly started out in a segregated school down here and I pretty much gone to white schools; so, I kind of like as I was approaching 45 felt like I was supposed to go to law school.  You know, I was kind of doing things behind the scenes to help people and try to help improve the situation here, racially and stuff….”\n\nSo this was well after you guys had moved here?\n\n“Oh, absolutely; absolutely.  So, I just felt the pressure that the good Lord wanted me to go to law school.  I am very spiritual and live my life spiritually; on the spiritual plain, not in the natural.  So, it is very peaceful in the spiritual.  So, I; it was like a constant; you’ve heard the phrase “monkey on my back” sort of thing.  So, it was just an overwhelming kind of sense that this is what I’m supposed to do.  So, I just said, “Ok, if you want me to go to law school, I want to go to a black law school.”  I put conditions on it right; thinking that I was going to be putting too many condition and maybe this monkey would get off my back right.  So, I said, “I wanted to go to a black law school. I want to go to a school that is within driving distance as I have a family.”  I said, “I’m comfortable; why do I need to go to law school?  But if you want me to go to law school, I will if I can have these things met.”  One day, I was on the computer and discovering in Houston there was Thurgood Marshall School of Law and it was like six hours away by car.  So, I was like “Ok, I will apply” and so, I applied.  They called me in for an interview, but it was like I knew before I got there that I would be \n\n\nadmitted in and spiritually that was the message I got.  It said, “Before you leave there, you will know that you have been admitted in.”  So, I went on for the interview and James and the kids were downstairs on the lower level.  I went on up to this hard-nose kind of lawyer who was interviewing me and stuff, so it was not going well at all.  In fact, she had to like cut the interview so that she could go mail something.  I said, “Do you want me to have my husband go mail it for you?”  Of course being a lawyer now, I know that it was very important and she was not going to put that in the hands of anyone except for herself and she said, “No, uh; I’ll take care of it if you don’t mind.  I’ll just be back in a minute.”  So, I sat there and thought, “I don’t know…” \n\n“Things are not going too well.” \n\n“Things were not going well right, and so she returned and asked, “Why do you want to go to law school?”  I said, “I know you hear all the time the story because I want to help people; but in my case, it just happens to be true.  My husband and I lost a child and it completely changed my life.  I’m just a new person and I see why we were put here on Earth and that we are here to help people.  So, I am genuinely here to help people.” We started communicating as women, as mothers; we were probably about the same age, and then she started telling me her own story; about her concerns about her son and all of this.  Then she got up and started showing me around her office; this painting and what this was about; you know, she talked a little bit more about her son and then she looked at me and said, “You know Mrs. Arrington, if it weren’t for our position, you and I could be friends.”   She then was completely different than the first half, right, and then she got up, opened the door for me, and said, “I will recommend to the committee that you be admitted in.”  So, what God had said was true; you will know before you leave there that you have been admitted in.  So, still you know I was going down stairs and James was like, “How was it?” and the kids were playing down in the lobby and I was sort of like, “I don’t know; she said that she would recommend to the committee that I be admitted in and I don’t know what that means.”  So, I got the letter a few weeks later and I was admitted.  I began at the age of 45.”\n\n\nWhat year was that?\n\n“That was in ’97 maybe; yeah, around ’97.  I finished in 2 ½ years.  James kept the kids the first year because that was the roughest year and my days were on a schedule; you know, everything was timed, even when I shopped.  Everything was on a schedule; when I washed my cloths and all that stuff because that was the way they put that discipline in us.  They had the schedules and helped us with the schedules.”I did well and really enjoyed school.  James was; I would try to come home on weekends and he’d say, “That’s 12 hours back and forth;  you don’t need to be wasting” and what he would do is bring the kids down every weekend.  I would be able to braid my daughter’s hair and the agreement was the second year, the kids would come down there and they were anxious to come down there and they; you know, it just went well.  I remember when I was getting ready to go to law school, my son who was 7 and Christopher was finishing at Hendrix here…”\n\n“No, he was starting”\n\n“No, he was starting at Hendrix when I was starting law school and so my 7 year0old was like crying in the car because it was time for them to come back this way and I said, “John, now look, if you really don’t want mommy to go to law school, I’ll not go.”   My daughter was fine, she was 4 at the time and so, he was crying and said, “No, because I want my mommy to be a lawyer” and so, I was very patient and I would check on him and stuff like that, “Dad treating you guys ok?”   I kind of knew that everything would be fine because the good Lord said that it would be fine.  I am a big family person and I have to have my kids.  I had to have a family; I am not one of those women who can go without having kids.  It just absolutely was essential for my being.  So anyway, James took very good care of the kids.  He took very good care of everything, but I knew that he would because I had been told that he would and that everything would be fine.  You know, I didn’t need to worry about anything.  Anyway, the kids came down there the second year and they were in private schools there in downtown Houston.  I had everything timed so that I could drop them off in the morning, go to my classes, pick \n\n\nthem up at the end of their day, we would go home, get dinner done, do the schooling, and I would go to the extracurricular activities; everything worked out perfectly because that was supposed to be.  God had said that it would be that way.  I would; I had this……”\n\n“Women are multi-taskers.’\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“They can do these kinds of things.  I couldn’t have done that.  I sit here and I think about our first date; I came home and I wanted to go to the movies.  I usually went to the movies by myself when I was in Northern as I didn’t have a girlfriend.  So, I said, “Well, I’ll ask this young lady that my mother has introduced me to” and I called her up and said, “Do you want to go to the movies?” and she said, “Yes.”  Later I found out the only reason she went to the movies is because she knew my mother and didn’t want to upset her.  But the move was “The Paper Chase” with John Houseman about law school.  When she talked about going to law school, I think that all people should fulfill their destiny; they should be the best that they can be and that goes back to our children deciding what they want to be, not what I wanted them to be.  So, we’ll work it out.”\n\n“James is very supportive.  My mother was very concerned.  She was like, “How is this going to work?  You’re leaving James?”  You know, people just don’t understand the big picture in life; you know what I mean?  We are supposed to try to be the very best and reach our highest heights.  Folks don’t really get that; they look at these natural things and so, you know it was like when James went back for his second residency in Family Practice, that was no thing for me because he was just expanding himself.  He was improving himself and going in a different direction in life and why should I as man/woman limit him when God has made us limitless.”\n\n“She inspired me to go into Family Practice in the sense….”\n\nThat was after law school?\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“After she went to law school.”\n\n“When I returned, he then went down to Pine Bluff.” \n\n“Because I was kind of burned out about medicine.”\n\nHow long had you been in OB?\n\n“Oh Jesus, about 12 years or so, if not more.  I just didn’t necessarily think everybody was kind, and everybody was considered, and everybody was fair.”\n\n“When he said he worked 24/7, literally he did.” \n\n“But then….”\n\nDid you share call with anybody else or were you doing it by yourself?                                                \n\n“Oh, I was doing it pretty much by myself.  It came to a point that I had to admit to myself that this is what you are supposed to be doing.  One of my colleagues here, Dr .Garrett, had transitioned from OB to Family Practice and I said, “Well if he did that, I can do that. What would I…let me get on the computer” and I got on the computer here in my office and I looked at one program; Pine Bluff.  I said, “That sounds reasonable; that’s not too far away” and I’m older, but it goes back to the tenant of hard work.  I tell my patients, the young children, “This ain’t rocket science; the answers are in the book and if you are caring and concerned, many times you will do well.”  So, I put in the application, went to Pine Bluff AHEC….”\n\nWhat year would this have been?\n\n“Oh…”\n\n“2000”\n\n“I finished in 2004 or 2005; I think October 2005, so it would have been about 2001 or 2002.  I did 2 ½ years there.  Dr. Finnely there and Dr. Atwood; the question was and I didn’t know that form of medicine.  I knew obstetrics and gynecology, but I didn’t know diabetic ketoacidosis, I didn’t know the management of hypertension, those kinds of things; but the thing is I knew that I could learn.  The question was, “Could I take supervision from people who were going to be much younger than me?”  Well, the thing here is arrogance.  My father said to me once in the basement of our house, daddy would always talk to me in the basement of the house; I don’t know if he was scared of momma hearing it but the thing here is daddy said to me, “Son, always remain humble.  No matter what you obtain in life, no matter what your position, stay humble.”   I never had a problem with that, ok, and so yeah; “Can you do the grueling physical aspect of being a resident?”  Well, if it was anymore grueling than being at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, it had to be hell on wheels.  I saw grown men cry when we would be in charge of labor and delivery; they didn’t have rooms, they had curtains and the women would be just lined up; the noise, the medical students, the Philippine nurses,  all the bells and tings and you were in charge of all that.  I saw grown men cry when they were in that particular aspect.  So, I said, “Yeah well, I wanted to work and do what I’m supposed to do.  Be where I’m supposed to be and health-wise, knock on wood if I could find any, I haven’t had a lot of health problems.”\n\n\n“We’ve been in pretty decent health.”\n\n“So, I would take call for younger men that would be sick.  So, I finished there; I could have been Chief Resident.  I was Chief Resident when I was at Cook County Hospital; but I said, “Give somebody else the chance to be Chief Resident.”  I wasn’t crazy about it.”           \n\nHow did ya’ll handle the OB segment of the residency program there?  I bet you were probably staff. \n\n“The thing about that is that they asked me, “Do you want to do this section?  Do you want to do the delivery?”  I said, “No, I don’t.”  The thing here is; as much as I liked it, and I had developed a skill set, a lot of things we learn in medicine, we don’t learn from a book.  We learn over time and it just amazed me as a medical student how they know all of this.  Well, they have been doing it for over 30 years.  So, patients would walk in and we would have to make a diagnosis when they would walk in; one of the epiphanies of this observation, I was at Northern Illinois University and I was talking a class, say biology, the professor walked in and one of my classmates from high school who became a dentist, we were sitting across from each other and I said to him, “You know, something doesn’t look right.”  He gave the lecture, he went home, and he died.  You have to observe people, you can watch people, and they can tell you many times what is wrong with them or that there is something wrong with them.   So, I went there to learn and again Dr Finley, Dr Atwood, numerous individuals; great teachers and you can learn if you want to learn.  So now, I apply that every day.  But, for 2 ½ years, I would go to Pine Bluff and hope that I didn’t hit a deer and I would come home.  I would leave here at 3:30 in the morning so that I could make morning report and eventually got an apartment there.  The 2 ½ years passed very quickly.”\n\n“You know, we couldn’t let that knowledge base and all that experience just go to waste; right.  So probably one of the things that you figured out about us now is that our practices are ministries really.  You know, so it’s like in our kids who sort of wonder, “Why are you guys still in Hope?  Why don’t you come back to the big city?”  and we’re like, “No, we kind of enjoy living in the small town.”  We initially; I think one of  the motivating factors to move here was to move to a place where we can raise our kids in safety, comfort, and stuff.  So, now our kids are gone and they are not going to be returning to Hope to live.  So, it’s like, “Why don’t you guys?”  Well, we kind of are engraved in the society.  We like the society here and we like helping people.  This is the group of people that we started helping and we can identify some problem areas and we can; you know you have people come to you with a multitude of \n\n\nalignments because they just neglected their health over the years and so, you know; James said something earlier about “you’re not a minister” or anything,” they actually refer to him as “Reverend Arrington.”   \n\n“In fact someone said this morning”\n\n“Yeah.”                   \n\n“They said, “You can still go into the ministry.”\n\n“Yeah, he’s like the; do you remember that TV show, “Dr. Welloby?” He’s really kind of like that with his patients.”\n\n“They wanted me to stay in Pine Bluff.”\n\n“Yeah, they did.”\n\n“I had conversations with the President of the hospital and they were going to set me up in a practice….”             \n\n“Because the doctors actually went to the president of the hospital and said, “We’d like for him to stay here.”\n\n“But, you know; I said to him……”\n\n “He said this is the first.”\n\n“But, I said to myself that I wanted to come home and this is where my kids were engrained at this point in time and I said, “I need a job.”  I went to the mailbox at AHEC and I pulled out this flyer; the flyer said, “Caben Rural Health Centers.”   Years ago, my accountant wanted me to work with a white physician in Benton and I didn’t want to.  He was a family practitioner, but there had been a problem with his license…”\n\nMarvin Kirk?\n\n“Yes”\n\n“Dr. Kirk; and I didn’t want to.  He kept asking me to and so, I said, “Alright, I will do this.  I will go up there for a short period of time.”  I worked with Kirk for about maybe 10 years; before I even did a residency.”\n\n“Best of friends.”\n\n\n\n“The thing about that; his son had worked for an organization that I had never heard of; Caben Rural Health Centers.  So when it came to the point when I put in applications, I knew several of the physicians and when I did that, I noticed they needed someone to work at Lewisville, Arkansas.  I don’t travel a great deal to tell the truth, I‘m kind of a home body, and I said, “Isn’t that close to Hope?” \n\nYeah.\n\n“I came down and this is where he wanted me to be; Lewisville, Arkansas.”\n\nHe brought you back.\n\n“He brought me back.  I have been there now for more than 10 years and you know, I sometimes question it because of the changes that have gone on in the practice of medicine; electronic medical records, which I never learned to type.  I couldn’t type; I paid people to type, a quarter a page.  But, they have worked with me regarding that aspect.  It still is one on one and I’m still a believer in the personal physician; that is my personal patient.  I don’t go in the hospital anymore, primarily because I did that.”\n\nWhere would you hospitalize people?\n\n“Well, we’re not too far from Texarkana and we are not too far from Magnolia; I leave it up to the patient to where they want to go.  They have hospitalists now, as you know, and so, we can call a hospitalist whether it be Wadely or Christian St. Michaels and tell them what’s going on.  They’d admit our patients, take care of them, and then I’d follow up on that.  Again when I look at the care of medicine in America today, it is still the personal physician; whether it be a nurse practitioner or primary care individual, that develops a relationship with the patient, directs the patient, and sometimes inspires the patient to take care of themselves.  Then, they don’t want to disappoint you and I make it personal as far as their health is concerned.  But, it worked out well that way for me.   I often say; again, I’ve lived in Hope for 25 years and I haven’t had a parking ticket.  I don’t have to worry about snow too often.  It snowed one Christmas.  I was a little despondent; the kids weren’t here and it was Christmas.  My oldest son was born on Christmas Day.  It snowed in Arkansas on Christmas Day; that only happens in the movies, ok, and my kids were like, “Wow, why is daddy so happy about this?”  Because it only happens in the movies and it snowed on Christmas Day in Arkansas.”                   \n\nLet’s go back a little bit and talk about your family.  If you would talk about your children; how old they are; their names, their ages, and what they do.\n\n“Ok; our oldest is James Christopher.  Christopher is 36 or 37 and he went to Hendrix College here; that is an interesting story in enough itself as well.  He graduated as an English/Literature Major.  He is living in \n\n\nIllinois now in a town called Bloomington, which is about 2 ½ hrs south of Chicago and he works for State Farm.  He just got a new position and I’m not exactly sure what it is that he is doing, but he is very happy.  He is about to buy his first home, so we are kind of like advising him about this and that.  He is very happy about that and we are very pleased with him for stepping forward and moving into adulthood; owning his own home and everything.  Then there’s Jonathan.  Jonathan lives in the Hoffman Estates, which is like a Northern suburb kind of in the airport area.   Jonathan is 26 and he’s our music and tennis guy.  He is a tennis pro and he teaches tennis to kids; I suppose, I don’t know who he teaches it to.”\n\n“We tried to teach him to play tennis when he was young; all the kids.  We bought him a tennis racket; he never picked up a racket until he was in high school.  He picked up a tennis racket and was #4 in the state; he could’ve been #1.  He admitted it to me later on, “Dad, you were right; I didn’t work hard enough.” \n\n“Yeah.”           \n\n“So now he understands about that.  I tried to introduce him to the guitar; why, because he was left handed.  My hero was of course Jimmy Hendrix and he was left handed.  He never picked up a guitar and now, he lives for the guitar and he is probably out sailed me as far as a guitar is concerned.  He has focus and I had to work real hard at what I accomplished, but he has focus.  Then, we have our baby girl.”\n\n“The other part of Jonathan’s life is music; he wants to be a music star.  That is what he is working on now.  So all the time that he is not doing tennis; he says tennis is sort of like a vacation for him because he works so hard at his music.  So his is proficient now in guitar, piano, and the voice; he’s hired a team to work with him, so he’s coming out.  He’s produced some music and he is really excited about this EP or LP; I don’t know what they call music now, but he’s about to do that.  He put together a band, so they are going to start performing.  He’s written a song called, “Arkansas” that he wants to debut in Arkansas; we’ll see what happens with that, but he won’t give up.  I remember asking him and this is sort of like philosophy as he has a philosophy like mind, I said, “John” as a mom I was like, “John, what if this music thing doesn’t work?  What is your plan B?” and he says, “Mom, I don’t have a plan B.  There \n\n\nis not plan B.”  I said, “What do you mean there is no plan B?” and by the time I asked the question, I knew the answer; there is only plan A, because plan A is going to work.  You keep at it until it works.”  \n\nI can hear that.\n\n“You see, I have no concerns.  Jon would do well in the form of education; there is no question.  His brother and sister had done well and he would do well.  The thing here is; he is traveling to the beat of a different drum, ok, and he is also traveling to the beat of what I would have liked to have been to some degree.  I would like to have been a tennis player that he is.”\n\n“He is really very good.”\n\n“He is very good; in fact, he recently, they asked him to play with them in some tournament and there were a lot of college players that that was their scholarship; he beat all of them.”\n\n“Yep.”\n\n“At the age of 26.  So, he is very good at that.  We had; all the boys in the house were born in December, ok; so my wife wanted a girl.  I said, “Well, you know, I’m an obstetrician….”\n\n“I’m a late bloomer; I had her at 41.”\n\n“I said, “Let’s try something different.  Let’s have a child in the spring.  Then I asked her, “Who do you want to be your OB/GYN?”  She said, “You.”  I said, “Well, you know, a lot of people are going to be upset, but I don’t care what people think.”  I approached her objectively and the night she went into labor, my nurses were saying, “How can you do so mean to your wife?”  I wasn’t mean, I was being objective.  So, we had our baby girl.”\n\n“So, Jordan is our baby girl.”\n\n“Born in the spring.”\n\n“She graduated college this past May.  She is an interior designer and broadcast journalism major.  Her ultimate goal, last week, was to have her own TV design show like Jeff, you know the guy in Bravo, and so, she has a wonderful job right now; doing what she is trained to do.  She works at EVO, which is a really up-scale kind of design shop.  They design for hospitals, corporations; it’s just a wonderful place and she has wonderful coworkers and boss.”\n\nWhere did she go to school?\n\n\n“She went to UCA.  She started out at Hendrix and then towards the end of the first semester, she was like, “Mom, you know, I like Hendrix and I like the kids there, but that’s not the creativity that I want.”\n\n“Which was traumatic for me because, you know the thing I am, I’m the type of person “you are supposed to plow through; you start here, you finish here.”\n\n“She was like, “Would you and dad mind if I transferred out and started over at UCA next year?” I said, “No, I just really want you to be happy.  Most people try to get into Hendrix and you’re trying to get out.  The only thing I ask is that you know for sure that you want to transfer out and let’s do it now.”  The end of her first semester, she transferred over to UCA and she is extremely happy there.”\n\nNow the family; you guys are really busy people obviously.  You have lead just a very busy life and you’ve not known any limitations; how did your family unit adapt to being this family of a father who is never home because he is practicing medicine and a mom who is a lawyer and busy being a lawyer?\n\n“Now keep in mind that when he was at his busiest, I was available here to the children; I wasn’t a lawyer then.  I wasn’t in law school.  I did help manage his practice, but I always wanted to be available to my children.  That is why I have my own law practice as they were coming through school.  I could be available and I had a wonderful paralegal, who is still my paralegal actually, but we do it electronically now and just still a great friend.  She just stepped in and just filled a void for whatever it was that we needed.  It’s like when Jonathan needed to be in Texarkana for tennis lessons, she would drive him over there before he could drive.  She just filled the void for everything.  So, you know, it was; I think when we got married, we made a kind of deal like you be the bread winner, so to speak, and then I’ll be the one that takes care of the household and the children.  That’s what we did and we were always available for the children.  Then when I went to law school, it kind of switched a little bit and James became available.  Even after I returned, he still got the kids up and taking them to school; that had kind of got important for him, you know.  I guess the kids were relying on that, so then he would take them to school and then, he’d go on to work” and stuff.  So, we have always been available for the children; they’ve had meals, they had their \n\n\nclothes, the milk in the refrigerator; so, they didn’t have to come home to an empty house and that was important to us.”\n\n“I envision that fatherhood is an occupation where as your children have security; dad is there, if he needs me.  Dad does what he does because of me.  You lead by example.  My son when he was at Hendrix was an RA and he called my wife and said that there was a young man there that was not happy with him because of the fact that he had to follow some rules and he said, “Well, I’ll see you at 5:00” threatening my son.  So when he knocked on the door at 5:00, I was sitting on the bed in Conway.  I don’t fight fair; I’m an old man.  So, the thing here is that if you need me, I’ll be there and that was the way I envisioned my role.  Again, your role is whatever is necessary and sometimes we are the head of something and sometimes we are the tail of something and I’m not that crazy about being the head of something.  When we were in residency, you know, if things went ugly we had to ask the attending, “What are we going to do?”  Now when you became the attending and everybody in the room was looking at you, it’s not always the most comfortable position.  So, you know, I don’t really envision what I do as something superior; I envision what I do as because this is what I do.”        \n\n“You know, I’m glad you said that because when I first started practicing here, you know, the good Lord has given me a gift in terms of law in the sense that I could just know what was wrong in a person’s situation.  So what I would do is give them the respect of listening to them for like 5 minutes or so and then, I’d say, “Look, this is what’s going on” and I would play it back to them.  I used to keep tissues on my desk because they would just start crying; someone finally heard them, someone understood it.”\n\n“You were just designed to do what you do.”\n\n“Yeah.”       \n\n“The thing here is, I look at what she did at the age of 45 and I look at the fact that she passed the bar in Arkansas and passed her Bar in Texas.”\n\n“Back to back; I finished in November in Texas and came here in April or July, I don’t remember.”\n\n“And took care of children, planted their hair, got them to school, and did all those things and I don’t think I could have done that.  Because, I’m not a multitasker; I’m a person who has to focus on whatever the task may be at that point in time.    In our practices, of course, you are running from one room to the other room; if you want to call that multitasking.  This patient has \n\n\nhypertension, this one has diabetes, and here you are doing something else and doing those kinds of things because you can’t work from one room and see a multiplicity of patients.  But, she was able to do things that I don’t think I could have done.  It was just a very proud day to see her; we have pictures of her, finishing law school and finding her way in life.  Having met her that first night in a basement and never knowing that this is where she would end up at; it’s just wonderful when you can see that and with your own children.”\n\n“One of the thrills of my professional career was when I was sworn in as an attorney and I was looking for an African-American person judge to swear me in; it was just important to me.  The Vice Mayer said, “You know, there is Wendell Griffin up in Little Rock and he is kind of from around here.”  I forget the town, it was about 22 miles from here heading back towards Little Rock, but anyway he called me one evening and you know as a novas, not really even sworn in yet, to have him call me was just wonderful.  I was like, Are you sure?” and he said, “I’d be honored.” So, I remember James and Christopher were in Illinois and they drove back for the swearing in at his office there.  At the time, they had three African-American judges at the Epaulet Court level, not the Supreme Court level, and of course no African-American attorneys at the Supreme Court level, so I go there and he sat me down.  Of course, James and Christopher were there and he started talking to me and visiting with me; it wasn’t a swearing in and then what he did was call down Molly Neal who was one of the other African-American justices and then he called in the, she is now deceased, but a female who I wish I could remember her name to honor her, but she was from Pine Bluff and her husband was a dentist; I cannot think of her name now.  But anyway, they sat around about a hour and talked to me and just told me what it was like being a lawyer, gave me all kinds of corners and tips, and it was one of the greatest gifts they’d gave me. It was just wonderful being in their presence as just a nobody to be talking to these wonderful people.”          \n\nLet’s move on and talk about one other outlet; has the practice of medicine in family practice and the practice of law turned out to be what you thought it would be?\n\n“Yeah, it has.  It’s turned out in the sense of the relationships that you develop with patients.  I was at hospice today and we were discussing one of the patients, Mr. Ollie Mack, and Mr. Ollie Mack was my personal patient.  He was older and became more frail and I was doing the paperwork revolving around the fact that he is now deceased and has gone on.  I’m sitting there \n\n\nwith this group of people and I had to say, “You know, this is one of my favorite patients.”  This was not just a piece of paper.  This was a man who I have developed a relationship with and we would have great fun together.  To come to Lewisville had a great meaning for me.  I met a physician in Pine Bluff, Horace Johnson who was a surgeon there, the first black on staff, and I had gone away from the hospital to do an externship with Dr. Douglas in pediatrics.  I got back to the hospital and I was walking down the hallway and here is Horace Johnson on a gurney; they were bringing him out of surgery and he was so respected and so kind, everybody called him “Ho Joe” and he never met anybody that he didn’t like.  So, we got on the elevator and I said, “Dr. Johnson, are you ok?” and he said, “Not good homeboy.”  He called people”homeboy.”  “It’s not good homeboy.”  He had metastatic liver cancer; but before he died, people came from all over the country.  He had gone to the University of Chicago medical school and had been so poor that his classmates took up a collection to buy him an overcoat as its cold in Chicago.  The one thing I didn’t know was that he was from a small town in Arkansas; Lewisville, Arkansas.”\n\nOh really?\n\n“So in my office, I have a picture of him, ok.  What we say in our religion, I’m Baptist, and we would like to believe that when we leave here, you look back on your relatives, but the Bible says is that the dead do not know what the living are doing.  But if he did know, I think he would be happy.  Sometimes, it’s not just a coincidence; but the fact here is that as frustrating as the practice of medicine has become with electronic medical records, I’m gratified by the fact that we do have the Affordable Care Act because at one point in time, I couldn’t do anything for anybody.  I had patients who were hard workers who had been involved in motor vehicle accidents and their backs were out and I might could get a CT or MRI if I pleaded with Christian St. Michaels;  but I’m not going to get a neurosurgeon to do their back and the years have progresses and progressed.  Now, I can get things done for people.  What I now do is what I did in my other practice; I developed relationships.  The thing here is, I know when you sit in that room, one of the things my patients sometimes ask is “Why do I have to wait so long?”  Because, we have to carry on a conversation, we have to take care of your particular problem.  Sometimes administrators will say to you, “Just handle one problem” but how do you do that?  The patient is hypertensive, diabetic, peripheral vascular disease; and I am in great fear that I’m missing something, ok.  I don’t want to miss anybody; this is somebody’s mother, somebody’s brother, somebody’s wife and when I was an obstetrician, I made a decision that I would treat every woman like she was my wife, my mother, my sister, or my daughter and if I did that, I had nothing to be concerned about.  Everybody would be treated just like that and I believe in that.  I approach life like that.  I don’t really think that much about what I do because this is what I’m supposed to do.  I don’t remember my daddy ever asking me to thank him for getting up every day and going to work; that’s the job of being a father, the job of being a husband, that’s the job of being a human being.”\n\n\n“You reminded me of what I was going to say when I was telling about how I’ve been given a gift of understanding what my client’s situation is and just almost knowing it; that would be touching to them that I just really understood what it was about them and what I realized and I had to do a little bit of teaching and instructing, which I still do now when I take on clients as many of them have not been to a lawyer before and they don’t know what to expect or how to act; one of the things I recognized is that they gave up their power to me; I’m the lawyer and I have to give them back their power and tell them to never give up their power to anyone. I said, “You are paying for me; you are my boss.  Yes, I have to know the law and utilize the law; you can’t tell me how to use the law and you have to make certain decisions about your situation once I explain the law to you and give you options in your particular situation, but I am just like you.  I just happen to have a law degree.”  Oh man, you can just see them melt, you know what I mean?  So, they believed me and this is nothing unique or nothing special, we just want people to kind of understand that you can do this too if you want.  I’m not a genus or nothing like that; you just have to kind of put in hard work.  When he says that that is his philosophy, that’s my philosophy as well; you know, there is nothing special here.  The only special thing I can say is our true dedication, our true interest in people.  It’s not about the money for me and it’s not about the money for him, it’s really about helping people; that’s just the truth of the matter.  So, you know, a lot of people look at us as being a lawyer and a doctor and they go to the empth of what that is.  They see these people on TV where doctors and lawyers and they just think that’s who we are; no that is not who we are at all.  I’m a girl who picked cotton, you know what I mean?  A girl who went to law school.” \n\n“Picked strawberries for a $1.00 a day.”    \n\n“Picked strawberries for a $1.00 a day; that kind of stuff.  Rode in a big ole truck and walked 3-4 miles to church down a rocky road when I was living with my grandma.  Law turned out to be what I expected it to be.  I enjoy the practice of law, but the problem is is that the law is just not fair.  You know, it’s a situation where if you have money, you can get \n\n\njustice.  If you don’t have money, you have to take being kicked in the head; right, unless someone comes in and helps you, which I have done in situations.  I have come in and the situation had just been so outrageous, but what you realize the older you get is that you have less time left on Earth and you just can’t give it to everybody.  You just can’t give all that time for free, you’ve got to kind of enjoy yourself and enjoy your husband and kids.  Enjoy your life and the rest of the time that you have left on Earth.  There are a lot of outrageous situations that I see, but there is not much I can do about it, you know, unless I just elect to take this particular, and I do pro-bono work, and unless I just elect to take this on.  I’ll give you just one brief example:  I worked with John Walker in Little Rock; I think I told you that; he is my off counsel in fact. John has been very helpful and I’ve learned a lot of things from Walker.  He called me up one day and said, “Claudine, I’m sending a few guys over to your office, interview them for me ok?  They live down in that area.”  So, I said, “Sure no problem.”   I interviewed them and it was a situation where they were just all four been to prison, were drug addicts, and stuff like that but they did these like day jobs where you go into a grocery store and see a listing saying meet me at 7:30.  This particular day job had you do these lines that you see while traveling on the highway, the posts that carry the electrical lines or whatever, so there is a company that makes sure that those poles are safe, sturdy, treated, and stuff and that was the kind of work they did.  They worked for this company and there was this guy from northern Arkansas who was their supervisor.  He was a little short guy who carried a gun in his car and all that with a rifle and he called them “Niggas.” They didn’t have names; it wasn’t Jack, John, or Joe. It was nigga this, nigga this, nigga this, nigga this….” So one day, this guy didn’t know he almost lost his life because you got to remember that you are working with people who have been in prison and has a past; he was bending over a pole and he said, “you dumb, stupid ass nigga; you don’t even know what you’re doing, blah, blah, blah” and so this one guy just had it.  He had one of these sharpened shovels and he was coming out across this field back from the woods and stuff, right. So, he is coming across getting ready to take this guy out and the guy who ultimately came to me and was responsible for getting them \n\n\ntheir jobs telling them about this thing saw what was happening and just interceded and just body hugged him and said, “No, you’ll be in prison for the rest of your life if you kill this guy; blah, blah, blah.”  He said, “I’ll fix this, I’ll fix this” and so, he comes to John and then me and ultimately ended up being my client as John would say, “Mr. Walker wants you to do this; can you do that?” “Sure.”  So finally it dawned on me that these are my clients.  Long story short, they had been told, “You are some dumb, stupid, niggas” and I remember saying this at a seminar one time and all the white lawyers were just jaw dropping and in fact, they all came to me afterwards and said, “I hope it’s not my client; was it such and such?  I hope it’s not my client.”  Well, long story short; these dumb stupid niggas, as he calls them, can’t get a lawyer to take their case because they were too poor, I took their case; right, and we won their case.  The company appealed it; the lawyer didn’t really want to appeal it, but he said, “My clients say we have to appeal this case. They can’t….they got to appeal it.”  So, we went to St. Louis and we won there; the judges there were chastising them and so, we kind of knew we were going to win.  They had a top, top law firm as you can imagine as this is an international corporation.  Some lawyers ran out and said, “You know, these judges don’t like these race discrimination cases in their courtrooms” and I said “Yeah, we know” and they said, “You guys look like you’re going to win this appeal.” So, how do you do that?  They were kind of congratulating us and of course, we ended up winning. There is a lot of that kind of stuff that goes on and I was hearing more and more of it; it gets depressing because people cannot afford to hire an attorney.  As an attorney, I had to pay cost and so, you just can’t do this. It’s a lot of time, a lot of work, and you have to be ready.  That is one the things I always wanted to be is ready.  I was representing women, I was representing African-Americans, and I was representing myself; I have a certain standard that I must meet in order for me to be satisfied, so I put in far more work than 0eople pay me for because I want it to be right.  You know, law is challenging, but it’s depressing because there are so many people who need help and they can’t get help because they can’t afford it. I always say they need to have like a Medicaid for law; do you \n\n\n\nknow what I mean?   So that people can actually have real access to the lawyers and such.”\n\n“That’s one of my concerns; my concern is that I look at the practice of medicine now and its prohibitly high.  It takes so much money to become a physician now that I don’t know if we are going to see the number of primary care physicians, family physicians, country doctors that we saw in the past.  I think that it is a sad state of affairs that if you were to ask the majority of physicians if they would have their children become doctors, they would say, “No.”\n\n“Yeah, that’s right.”\n\n“Um, I think that we have been relegated to being employees and we have given up a lot of our power.”\n\n“Absolutely.”\n\n“As the care takers of human beings. I dare to tell the truth; I think middle management individuals have come on and they control the medicine and we have allowed them to control us.  The other aspect I was saying to someone the other day, you know, I have a wonderful nurse practitioner; wonderful.  Knows her parameters, knows when to consult, studies diligently, is well verse in electronic medical records and today, I was at my hospice and two of our hospice nurses came in and they are in the process of being nurse practitioners.  So you know and I know, 4 years of college and 2 years to become a nurse practitioner as opposed to 12 years to become a physician and many places, they have as much autonomy as a physician.  So the time is coming; you know, if you are going to be a neurosurgeon or going to be maybe some super specialist, you will become a physician, but what will happen to that primary care physician, that pediatrician, that family physician; not so much the obstetrician, because you got to be a surgeon to do that, but the fact here is that I see  the primary care physician as a dying breed.  You know again like we said earlier, when I came here, I wanted my children to be raised in a nuclear family.  The town I grew up in when I came back from being away at college and medical school is not the town that it once was; why wasn’t it?  It was simply the fact of economics.  There were no jobs.  The great employer in Maywood was American Can Company and it had left the area.  So that middle class dream that my parents were able to live; work hard, save your money, buy your first home, work hard, save your money, build your first home, send your kids to college; three kids going to major colleges, retire, and live off a fairly decent life  It’s dying.”\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n\n\n“It’s all but gone.  You can’t take care of a family on a job that is a service in an industry job or McDonalds, Burger King, or things like that; and I’m not against Wal-Mart, but you can’t take care of a family working at Wal-Mart.  Our country, I’m getting into a little politics here…”\n\n“I was going to say this is what our country is just about; you know.” \n\n“Has comes from an industrial society to a retail society.  We gave away our jobs to other countries and so, I don’t see them coming back.  We have machines that can outperform any human being and where I am practicing medicine, Lewisville, Stamps, and people from Waldo; when those kids graduate from high school, I just shudder.  “What are they to do?  How can they make a living?”   \n\nDo any of them stay there?\n\n“None of them stay there; they leave and them some of them come back.  Right now, some of my coworkers are involved in the political aspect of Lewisville.  One of the coworkers, her brother ran for County Judge; he didn’t win, but he ran and he will probably run for mayor of Lewisville here in the near future.  But what I am concerned about is every individual, black, white, whatever; what do these children do? What do they aspire to?  There once was a situation where as you wanted your children to do better and now you have a situation where it is doubtful that your children do as well as you did.  So now, who changes that?  Health care revolves around largely, many times, an educational process; you educate your patient, they conform to the education, and take care of their health.  It is hard to take care of your health when you don’t have the comforts of life, ok.  It is hard to do what upper middle class people do when you don’t have upper middle class income.  Now, I’m not saying you give people away money, but you give them a decent job.  There are certain people and I don’t frown upon them, it is just this is what they can do; they can turn or twist a nut, bolt, or whatever and that is fine; but they have to make a living.  When you see generation upon generation; “I never saw a mother go to work, I never saw father go to work, I never saw them have a job” then how do you expect that child to aspire to that?  I often say to my patients, “There are no father schools, there are no mother schools; the thing here is, how do you learn to be a father?  Do you learn the compassion that has been shown to you?  Do you learn the dedication of getting up every day and going to work to make sure that there is food in the icebox?  We never were rich, but there was never no question about the lights being turned off or food in the icebox and I look back at my grandfather and I can see him coming up the hill in Montgomery, Alabama after a long day of work taking care of his family.  I got to see that.  I got to see uncles and cousins work and take care of their families.  They weren’t doctors, they weren’t lawyers; they were what made America great.  They were the average working guys.”\n\n“Yeah and that is where I get my work ethics; seeing my uncles and my grandfather.”\n\n\n“That’s what made America great.  Again, we were given an opportunity that our forefathers didn’t have and we took advantage of that opportunity.  But that was on the back of individuals that made sacrifices so that we could have that opportunity.  So the thing here is that it is much harder and truly, it was much harder to be black 30, 40, 50 years ago and it is not as hard as it once was, but it is still sometimes not as easy as it should be.  The thing here is that I’m concerned about the total good in America.  Without that, you start to build up enclaves.  When everybody is doing well or reasonably well, you don’t have the animosity among religions and races and things like that.  So, what we have to do is not necessarily isolate ourselves as some people would have us do, the thing here is we have to see what is necessary and go forth and do it.  You and I pay taxes; we pay a large amount of taxes and I would rather see my money utilized to build bridges.  I was telling Claudine the other day, “The road down 30 is so nice now,” a brand new road; let’s put people to work, ok, building America.  Why don’t we have the greatest railroad system in the world?  Why do the Japanese have it?  We are America; we are the greatest country on the face of the Earth and we need to belly up to it.  We sent people to the moon; what other country has done that?  No other country, see?  I think again, it is much a kin to the fact that when you have a pedigree dog, yeah a pedigree dog is wonderful, but they are weak. When you have a mixed mongrel, they are strong.  When we do what our forefathers, and I count George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Hamilton as my forefathers because I don’t think they knew how great this country would be.  They aspired to make a great country and they did.  They may have not initially thought of our forefathers as part of that country, but the fact exists that that is what made America great; the diversity in our country and we need to make decisions now that will put people back to work and give them things to do.  When you don’t have something to do, you are going to end up doing something that isn’t ___________.”         \n\n“My wish and my prayer for these kids out there that don’t have an example to live by and never saw their parents get up to go to work or didn’t have some mentor to help guide them; I just hope that, because remember I said that I had a sense of internal guide right, so I just hope that maybe by watching television, reading the newspaper, or looking at magazines that they can know that there is something different and better out there.  Where they are right now, that is not all there is in life.  I mentored people, a few kids here from Hope, and so sometimes they think that because they grew up poor, how they are living right now, or who their parents are, they don’t have much and they think that they will never get out of it and I have to tell them that there is so much more out there.  You are not where you live.  You just have to have gumption, you have to have desire, know that you can do better and as long as you have the desire and the willingness to go after what it is that you want \n\n\nand put in the time and the effort that is necessary to do what it takes, you will get there.  So, you just have to know that there is something more to do.  There may not be someone who can guide you or lead you; you can’t blame your parents for their failures forever, you know.  Let God deal with them for what they did or did not do for you.  You just have to know that there is something more that you want and you have to be willing to put in the time to do it.”\n\n“As I tell my young people, “Do what successful people do; look around you.”\n\n“Yeah, figure it out.”\n\n“Figure out what they do.”\n\n“I figure things out; just figure it out.”\n\n“Often I just kind of tell them, “It boils down to work.”\n\n“It does.”\n\n“Nobody owes you anything.  Nobody is going to give you anything.”  \n\n“You are reminding me; we have a young man who we kind of took under our wings and he helps us around the place, takes care of our yard, or little odd things for us, and everything.  He is an interesting young man because he really has a nice brain.  I recognized it early on.  So I started kind of like giving him tid bits and trying to give him a little guidance and stuff like that; you know, “Maybe you need to get into school.” and he’d say, “Oh, well…” and my initial impression of him is that he wanted to be there; way over there into that success without putting in the time and the work to get there.  So, it was like, “No, you’ve got to slow it up a little bit and put in the time and the work to get there.”  So, I recognize that he probably did not want to go to a four year college, but you get a skill; you become a mechanic, a truck driver, or an electrician.  You don’t have to do the four year route, but you got to do something.  I said to him, “You’re going to be backed up against a wall real soon and you will have no options.”  Well, he is at that point where he has no options and he has gotten very depressed; I think he is coming \n\n\n\nout of it now, but he said, “Everything you said Mrs. Arrington is true.”  I had my husband talk to him and I’ve had Dr. Douglas talk to him as I see potential there.  I was going to terminate him here because his work ethic was not good; but I said, “You know at least I owe him that.”   Right, now for somebody who I think I have a pretty decent work ethic; I try to do my best always and then I see someone else who I’m paying more than you get on your regular hourly job, as I remember him calling me back one day saying, “Mrs. Arrington, is Kennedy legal to pay you 7.25 an hour?” and I said, “No.”  No, it was not illegal and he was making substantially more than that and I guess that is why he thought it was illegal from us.  So, it’s like; ok, I’m going to have to; I’m just not going to pay somebody for doing less the work and I just told him.  Once I told him and I said, “If you are interested, I will tell you what you are doing wrong” because he recognized he was doing things wrong, not just us, but in life as he was getting nowhere.  He was getting terminated on his jobs and stuff and so, I said, “If you are interested I will be happy to tell you what I see.”  He didn’t bite, but then he subsequently did and so, now we are working well together.  He is saying that we were right and he recognizes that he has to work and he recognizes that nobody owes him anything.  How did you get to be 24 years-old thinking that somebody owed you something?  You know, when you are 18 nobody owes you anything. You see; so, you got to figure it out yourself how to get a roof over your head, food on the table, and stuff like that.  At 24, at least he is recognizing now that nobody owes him anything and he has got to put in the time.   He tells me now that he is going to go back to school and what did I say to him, “I talked to you long enough that you know what to play back to me. I have to see it.”  So, he said, “Ok, I understand.  I’m going to go back and show you.” \n\n“And I’m somewhat crueler sometimes as I say to younger people, “Like a super bowl, who came in first? New England.  Who came in second? Nobody cares, ok.”  The thing here is you find a way to win and you emulate those people that you see who are decent human beings, or that you perceive as decent human beings, and don’t be afraid to ask them “What did you do?  How did you get there?”  The thing here is that you can do it.  Now back to the practice of medicine here, the practice of medicine and I’m sitting here and I’m saying to myself, “Now, if you want to come and practice in a place like Hope, Arkansas, Lewisville, Stamps, or a small town; realize \n\n\nthat one quality of medicine that you practice must be at the same level as if you were in Little Rock and then realize that you will develop relationships with individuals and you will go to Wal-Mart or to Atwood’s and people will stop you and ask you questions and you are obligated to answer those questions within reason.  You are the family physician.  You are the practitioner of medicine and you do not withhold the practice of medicine from individuals because you expect to get paid for everything that you do; no.  The thing here is basically and I don’t necessarily hate it, but the thing here is I tell people,” I believe in God. I don’t wear him on my shoulder, but the fact here is that I will tell you the truth as I see it as you want to hear it or not.”  When you are laid to rest and you’ve done your career, the question will be, “What did you do in my name?  Did you do this to glorify yourself?  There is nothing wrong with making a name, but did you do it just for the money?”  You can’t do what we do, as family physicians, and be concerned that you are going to get paid for everything that you do.   What you really want to do, and I try to do, is try to bring some joy into people’s lives, ok, from day to day.  If you come to my office and you don’t feel good about your encounter, something is wrong; either you are a person who probably doesn’t need to see me or you’re not someone that came to me honestly for healthcare.  You came for some other reason or some other alternative.  But, I think it is still a noble profession and I think that for those who want to make the sacrifice and you will make a sacrifice; we start out young, we finish old, its long hours, a lot of dreadry, paranoia on “did I make the right decision? Did I do the right thing?”  If you’re not paranoid to some degree, you’re not on top of your game; because you don’t want to miss anything on anybody.   Somebody is somebody’s mother, somebody’s father as I said earlier.  I would not discourage individuals from becoming a family practitioner.  I have enjoyed it; it has brought my experiences more broadened as opposed to being an OB/GYN and the didactic aspect of it, I enjoy trying to figure out what is wrong with people and doing the right then and by doing the right thing, sometimes finding the cervical cancer before it spreads somewhere.  In one patient, we found his cancer in his lung, we got him to the cardiologist and he had bypass surgery, we found cancer in his prostate.  He worked at one of the grocery stores and he’s still alive, ok, and he made somewhat of a difference.  I had a little girl the other day, and she travels to the beat of a different drum; she’s black and she comes in with a blonde wig and it was just huge.  I sat and talked with her and I said, “You’re not like everybody else.  You’re special, ok. Van Gogh never sold a painting; he was not like everybody else; but he didn’t know how great he was.  He didn’t get to have that opportunity. You have greatness in you.”  Now whether it is true or not, it is the placebo effect; she might believe that and she might act on that.  It was down the street; Michelangelo lived down the street from you.  You have greatness in you and that seed, if anything, that our parents planted, our grandparents planted, you can do it. “                                                             \n\n        \n\nLast question and this is directed at both of you; 100 years from now, you are going to be a picture on the wall. You’re great, great, grandfather was a doctor and great, great, \n\n\ngrandmother was a lawyer; but we don’t know much about them.  Talking to your great, great, grandchildren and tell them what you would you like for them to know about you and what you would wish for them in their lives.\n\n“Wow; to my great, great, grandkids; know that your grandmother loves you and thinks about you and have thought about you long before you were born.  I hope that you are well.  I want you to know about me that I tried to do my best.  I tried to live up to the potential that God would have me live up to.  I tried to help others and want you to understand that life and success in life is about making good decisions, believing in and being lead by and having faith in God, let him be your leader and ask him for what you want; he will give it to you. Be willing to work hard.  You know, many years from now the internet and all these things on the internet, don’t believe everything that you read as you will read a lot of stuff my name on it and perhaps with your great, great, granddad’s name, so find out things for yourself about us.  Investigate us and try to be like us; try to beat us in what we did.  I have great expectations for you guys; I mean, you are my grandchildren.  Life is limitless; don’t put limits on yourself.  If you listen to this interview, don’t limit yourself, just strive to be the best that God would have you be and know that I love you always.”\n\n“I would have you think that my great grandfather would have you be a decent human being, would have you be the type of person that can be trusted, would have you be the type of person that your word is your bond.  I would have you understand that God is real.  I don’t think this happened by mistake.  God loves you.  I would want you to focus on there is a verse in the Bible; psalms","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250#t=0.0,2245.0"},{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250/transcript/74391/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"I have been young and now your grandfather is now 65 years old and I don’t know how that happened so quickly, is old and I have not seen the righteous forsaken as they say or begging bread.  Do the right thing when you possibly can do it.  You will not be perfect because no one is perfect but God.  You must forgive yourself when you are imperfect, but aspire to be a decent human being.  Whether you choose the practice of medicine, the practice of law, whatever profession you choose, or with everything you do, be a decent human being.  Be the type of person that when people see you and approach you, they don’t cross the street to get away from you.  Know that we loved you and we may never meet again or ever see you, but we love you.  We love the individuals that we see many days, work with everyday, and go to the gym with everyday.  There are some that we don’t like, but that’s not the point; we still treat them well as human beings because every life has meaning.”             \n\n\n\nThank you; that concludes our interview.  I appreciate it very, very, much.   That was really a wonderful interview and I thank you so much for your time.       \n\nOh I forgot to ask you about it and maybe should have; you said you lost a child, when was that?                                                                \n\n“That was in ’87 and it was an accident.  He was two and of course it was a life altering event.”\n\n“The thing I say about that and I sometimes say to my patients, “into every life some rain must fall” and of course, it happened to fall into my life.  You know a lot of times we help people and we don’t; we’re not the beneficiary of help, but the ones who are the stronger ones. We are the ones who help others and the gratifying thing about that was so many people came to help us.”","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/3162/collection_resources/140812/file/260250#t=2245.0,9530.78793"}]}]}]}