2 April 2021
After meeting with the dean of academic affairs and reading the handwriting on the wall, I begin to look around for something new to do. The University of Mississippi Medical Center had a lab technican program. It looked interesting. For some reason, science labs and I always clicked. I decided I needed to check out the program.
For some reason, my phone call about the lab technician program got routed to the microbiology department to a Dr. William Clemm. After clearing up the misunderstanding he asked why I was interested in the program in the first place. I explained my love of everything laboratory. He asked “Why not come get a PhD in microbiolgoy from us?” I was stunned. I told him I didn’t think they would be interested in me. He suggested I fill out the paper work and submit my résumé. I did and I got a call from him later saying to come on down to Jackson. I was given a graduate stipend of $5000 a year and I still had money left on my G.I. Bill. It seemed a win-win situation.
It was reinforced that I needed to leave IJC when Dad got sick and was in the Veterans Administration hospital. I asked for leave from the IJC to go down and see about him. By the time I got there, he was back home. I found out the dean of academic affairs had called to make sure he was really ill. He thought I had lied to him about Dad’s illness. I packed up and headed to Brandon for a talk with my brother. He had a cabin on a piece of property out from Brandon and said I could stay there for graduate school at the medical center.
Previously, good friends from IJC had moved to Jackson and they took me around to the two local gay bars. One was called Emerald City and the other was Jacks and Jills. Emerald City had entertainment in the form of drag queens.
Jacks and Jills was one of the oldest gay establishments in the south. It was located on the west end of Capital Street and been in continuous business since World War I. The bar was divided into two parts – Jacks for guys and Jills for gals. In reality, everyone was welcome on either side. Between the two bars was a massive dance floor.
It was at Jacks and Jills one night with Steve and Bobby (friends I knew from IJC) when I ran into an old high school chum Mike. He and I were in the Boy Scouts together. Small world.
Slowly but surely I was introduced to the gay community of Jackson. I even had a gay doctor. Also, because I was at the Medical Center in Jackson, it was recommended I get the hepatitis B vaccine. It was the gay doctor who administered the shots. Sadly, he was later found murdered in his home in Jackson.
One of the fraternity initiations that local colleges would do would be to drop someone off at the front door of Jacks and have them come in to get a beer to go. The front door at Jacks was so seldom used it always drew attention of the crowd if anyone walked in that route. This college dude would come in, walk up to the bar and it would slowly sink in to him that there were no females anywhere around. One guy was brave enough to ask “Is this a gay bar?” The response was pretty raucous and he ran out pretty quickly.
I knew I would be hanging out there on my free time and I knew Archie got around enough in Jackson and knew enough people he would eventually get wind of me at gay bars. I asked him to meet me at the cabin he’d offered me and we sat outside in the swing and I told him I was gay. He took it pretty well and said no matter what, he loved me. Thus begin a PhD program at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. The drive from a rural area near Brandon to the medical center didn’t take too long. I always parked in the Mississippi Memorial Stadium parking lot across from the medical center. The department was located on, I think, the third floor.
The microbiology department was undergoing a shift to new blood. Dr. Clemm was from the University of Florida and had become chair. He brought two youngish PhD’s with him. To get him, the university had to significantly expand the budget of the department and agree to increase graduate school enrollment. I think at the time, Clemm was getting paid more than the governor of Mississippi. I, along with 4 others were given a while to settle in but we had to pick an advisor pretty quickly. I’ll be honest and say I probably made a bad choice. The guy I chose spoke very softly (too softly) and seemed easy going but I was later to find out he was wound pretty tightly. His interest was fish immunoglobulins. By studying the immune system of fish he hoped to translate that to the immune system of humans. This was in the early 1980’s and there was still a lot of confusion about the human immune system and a lot of the particulars were just being worked out – things like the compliment cascade, killer T-cells, etc.
One of the things we would do would be to travel to the Mississippi Delta and collect live catfish and bleed them through the caudal artery for their blood. Once back at the lab, we would spin it down and try to culture the white blood cells. Once enough were grown, then we would do cell counts through a very expensive cell counter and try to determine the type of white blood cells found in fish.
We also raised catfish in the basement of the medical center. We had huge plastic fish tanks and I would have to periodically climb up on them and net catfish and bleed them and put them back in the tanks. I slipped and fell more than once but it never did knock any sense into me.
All graduate students also had to take a veterinary science course where we had to operate on a cat and a dog – common research animals. The Medical Center had been the center of a controversy on how they did or did not humanely treat their research animals and having all grad students take the course was their way of insuring safe and humane treatment. We had to remove the spleen of one dog. The team I was on had a guy that was a little loose and apparently nicked an artery. The dog almost didn’t make it. The instructor had to go back in operate again. He did make it.
We had to scrub and dress like surgeons with the whole nine yards of gowns, masks, and gloves. It was a great learning experience.
Since we were also taking classes with the med students, we had to participate in their POPS exercises – I forget the acronym but it had something to do with proper diagnoses and treatments. In one of the exercises we had to draw blood from each other. The instructor gave very brief instructions and turned us loose. The guy who did me did well but when I drew blood from him, he pulled away from the needle and I ended up giving him a hematoma. He turned very ashen and was very shaky for a while but recovered OK. By the way, what we wanted to blood sample for was to test for syphilis. Fortunately, I was clear.
Interestingly, in the department was one of Crag Knox’s old girlfriends. She was working on a PhD under the resident virologist. We always had to wear dosimeters in the department as standard gear because we were constantly dealing with radioactive isotopes. Of course, we always went way over the count. She had a way of dealing with the over count. She would simply lock it up in a drawer in her office for a week before it got read. Otherwise, she would have been forced to take a week away from her research.
You would be able to attain the strong and hard erections. viagra canada pharmacy It is also suggested http://amerikabulteni.com/author/cemogabriela/page/371/ buy viagra in canada to stop smoking. Most probably it damage to nerves, arteries, cheap levitra india smooth muscles and fibrous tissues. c. However, there is no need to viagra fast get panicky; a natural cure for erectile dysfunction is here to help you.One day, I had to work with the radioactive isotopes and check my cultured catfish cells for any radioactivity. It was an automated machine much like a wheel. Someone had just used it and I was next in line. I got my readings and left for the day. My advisor comes in the next morning all hot and steaming and screaming at me that I had contaminated the machine. I really don’t think I did but since I was the last logged, I was the first blamed. He was really upset because he thought it reflected poorly on him. He shouted I needed to immediately go decontaminate the machine. I finally looked him in the eye and said very calmly, I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and when you calm down, come see me and let’s go over how you want me to decontaminate it. To this day, I don’t think it was me that contaminated the machine. There was a chemical that supposedly absorbed the radioactive isotope.
As mentioned before, as graduate students we had to take some classes with the medical students. One was biochemistry. I had a biochemistry course at Ole Miss which was a terrible experience. It was a weed course for premed students at Ole Miss and the test questions were all multiple choice. All five answers varied only in one word. In other words, you didn’t need to learn the material, you needed to memorize your notes word for word from the professor’s mouth. It was my worst college course up until I took biochemistry at the Medical Center.
The biochemistry course was team taught. It was divided into five or six sections and a different professor would lecture over their speciality. Fortunately, the grad students had available to us the note taking system of the medical students. For a fee, we were provided printed notes from the lectures. Of course, we all were required to do our time taking notes ourselves.
When it came time for me to take notes, I was given the recorder. I taped the lecture, took notes during the lecture and then played the tape back and corrected my notes and added things I missed. It took me a couple of days. The lecturer was a dietician who was new to the university and it was her first lecture to the medical students. I knew something was wrong when I got a note to go see the her.
She immediately told me that she didn’t say anything like what I had presented for photocopy. I was stunned. It was pretty much verbatim without any editorial comments. She insisted I correct the notes. I refused.
I was then called into the anatomy lab to meet with the note taking coordinator. He happened to be the anatomy lab assistant. He again demanded I correct the notes. I again refused. I asked to have the tape of the notes so I could compare it again to the notes I printed. He said (two days after the day I took the notes) that it had been erased. He explained that I would no longer be able to receive the notes and I was barred from any note taking copies.
My suspicion was she made some errors during her lecture and she realized it or someone pointed it out to her and instead of issuing a correction, she blamed the note taker. In any case, it saved me some money. All my grad student buddies allowed me to photocopy their notes.
I didn’t think anything would turn me off to biochemistry but the one course at Oxford and the team taught course in Jackson almost did. Once I got back into teaching, I rediscovered my love of biochemistry. I finally eked out a B in the course. Other courses I took were medical microbiology, introduction to animal medicine, microbial physiology and, of course, seminars. I only needed one more course to finish my academic coursework.
Very early, we were asked to present a seminar to the department. I had to choose a scientific paper with the approval of my advisor and present the research. I opted to go with his first recommendation. I had it down pat. I was also not adverse to public speaking since I had taught the last five years at IJC. I was just waiting for the knives to come out from department factions and was not disappointed. Fortunately, they were not aimed at me. One of the professors asked me a question and I honestly replied I didn’t know the answer because that was not addressed in the original article. Another professor suggested a solution and another challenged the first professor – and they were off. I only got about 1/2 of the way through my presentation before the place erupted in debate among the professors. Later, all the biggies in the department complimented me on my presentation. What presentation? I was interrupted midway and never got a chance to say anything else!
About midway in my first semester, Archie began to have business problems and marital problems. It got to be real difficult for him and as a consequence, it fed over onto me. I decided the best thing I could do would be to give him some space so he didn’t have to worry about me. I found a room on State Street near Millsaps and the Medical Center. I was close enough I could walk to the Medical Center – and pass Bailey Junior High School every day (just the memories I wanted to re-live. It was a great apartment and it even had a “roof” terrace. Actually, you had to climb through the kitchen window and the terrace was simply the flat roof of the room below me. However, I kept a couple of deck chairs out there and a table.
Some of the graduate students and faculty were very social. I would invite them over to my apartment and we’d play Trivial Pursuit all night long and drink beer. I probably should have signed up with the professor that always showed up at these events, in retrospect.
Speaking of gay bars…. I had the conversation with Crag Knox. It didn’t seem to bother him and he admitted he and his current girl friend used to got to Jacks and Jills to dance. He was surprised he had not seen me in there. It really did have the best dance floor and music. Archie and Tanis used to go and dance the night away and Archie loved playing pool at Jacks.
I spent two semesters at the Medical Center and finished all my coursework except for one course. The rest of my course load would be research hours. It was at that point that I decided I didn’t want a career in research. I learned a tremendous amount and actually utilized a lot of it in my next teaching position but I didn’t want to spend three more years for the PhD and another two or three years getting a postdoc and then a second postdoc. For some reason, a PhD means original thinking. I didn’t categorize myself as an original thinker.
I made it around to the various faculty and notified them of my decision to leave. I think it hit Clemm pretty hard. I was pleased when Clemm and a couple of the other professors told me I would be welcome back into the program anytime. I even had one professor offer to take me as a student to get me away from my advisor. That left me feeling pretty good.
I kept up with most of the graduate students in the program for several years and I’m still in contact with one who eventually finished her PhD in virology.
So what to do next. I stopped my PhD program and had no job. On a phone call to my cousin Jo in San Antonio, she blurted out “Come live with me!” I love San Antonio – having spent some time there while in the Coast Guard. I agreed. I loaded up my truck and headed west.
Stay tuned!
